Peripatetic electronic teachers in higher education

This paper explores the idea of information and communications technology providing a medium enabling higher education teachers to act as freelance agents. The notion of a ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teacher’ (PET) is introduced to encapsulate this idea. PETs would exist as multiple telepresences (pedagogical, professional, managerial and commercial) in PET‐worlds; global networked environments which support advanced multimedia features. The central defining rationale of a pedagogical presence is described in detail and some implications for the adoption of the PET‐world paradigm are discussed. The ideas described in this paper were developed by the author during a recently completed Short‐Term British Telecom Research Fellowship, based at the BT Adastral Park

Teaching new media composition studies in a lifelong learning context

Governmental proposals for lifelong learning, and the role of Information and Learning Technologies/Information Communication Technologies (ILT/ICT) in this, idealistically proclaim that ILT/ICT empowers learners. A number of important governmental funding initiatives have recently been extended to the development of ILT in further education, which provides a particularly appropriate environment for lifelong learning. Yet little emphasis is given to more problematic research findings that students may be ‘disarmed’ in the process of learning to use technology. In the current global shift towards new forms of multimedia literacy, it is important to recognize human diversity by carrying out research focusing on the actual problems students face in adapting to Web‐based technology as a new authoring medium. A case study into multimedia creative composition carried out with FE students in 1996–9 found that students tend to experience a problematic but potentially useful period of ‘creative mess’ when authoring in multimedia, and that ‘scaffolding’ strategies can be useful in overcoming this. Such strategies can empower students to derive benefits from multimedia composition if close attention is given to the setting up of the learning environment: a teachers’ model for supporting novice hypermedia authors in further education is proposed, to assist teachers to understand and support the learning processes students may undergo in dynamic composition using new media technology

Explaining High Health Care Spending in the United States: An International Comparison of Supply, Utilization, Prices, and Quality

Compares healthcare spending, supply, utilization, prices, and quality in thirteen industrialized nations and examines the factors behind high U.S. spending, including higher prices and obesity rates, and low spending in Japan, including price regulation

The U.S. Health System in Perspective: A Comparison of Twelve Industrialized Nations

Compares the U.S. health system to those of twelve OECD countries based on measures of spending; physician supply and visits; utilization, supply, and prices of drugs and diagnostic imaging; and performance. Examines the causes of high U.S. spending

From Sensuous to Sexy: The Librarian in Post-Censorship Print Pornography

This chapter argues that the sexy librarian stereotype emerged at the end of the twentieth century from the confluence between sexual liberation, free speech movements and print pornography. It focuses on a series of librarian themed pornographic paperbacks published in the 1970s and 1980s by Greenleaf Classics. These stories, although flimsy plot-wise, tend to be obsessed with the idea of liberating stuffy librarians from the shackles of sexual conservatism, thereby dramatizing some of the social struggles surrounding obscenity cases and the move to deregulate print materials

Outlawry: Ida B. Wells and Lynch Law

This essay demonstrates how Lynch Law suspended normative criminal law and undermined constitutional amendments made after the US Civil War. Focusing on the period between Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, the essay argues that “outlawry” provides the necessary juridical concept for understanding how a tradition of popular sovereignty worked together with evolving concepts of race to create the social conditions of possibility for antiblack mob violence, despite a legal system that could have prevented it. Close analysis of Ida B. Wells’s early antilynching pamphlets clarifies how the problem of democratizing citizenship and civil rights became saturated with the question of how to ensure the more radical right to life