From conditioning to learning communities: Implications of fifty years of research in e‐learning interaction design

This paper will consider e‐learning in terms of the underlying learning processes and interactions that are stimulated, supported or favoured by new media and the contexts or communities in which it is used. We will review and critique a selection of research and development from the past fifty years that has linked pedagogical and learning theory to the design of innovative e‐learning systems and activities, and discuss their implications. It will include approaches that are, essentially, behaviourist (Skinner and Gagné), cognitivist (Pask, Piaget and Papert), situated (Lave, Wenger and Seely‐Brown), socio‐constructivist (Vygotsky), socio‐cultural (Nardi and Engestrom) and community‐based (Wenger and Preece). Emerging from this review is the argument that effective e‐learning usually requires, or involves, high‐quality educational discourse, that leads to, at the least, improved knowledge, and at the best, conceptual development and improved understanding. To achieve this I argue that we need to adopt a more holistic approach to design that synthesizes features of the included approaches, leading to a framework that emphasizes the relationships between cognitive changes, dialogue processes and the communities, or contexts for e‐learning

Agricultural tenancy reform: the end of law; or a new popular culture?

This paper applies a reading of the postmodernisation of law to the incremental reform of agricultural holdings legislation over the last century. In charting the shifting legal basis of agricultural tenancies, from ‘black letter’ positivism to the cultural contextuality of sumptuary law, the paper theorises that the underlying political imperative has been allied to the changing significance of property ownership and use. Rather than reflecting the long-term official desire to maintain the let sector in British agriculture, however, the paper argues that this process has had other aims. In particular, it has been about an annexation of law to legitimise the retention of landowner power while presenting a rhetorical ‘democratisation’ of farming, away from its plutocratic associations and towards a new narrative of ‘depersonalised’ business

L-configuration re-attachment of distal biceps tendon rupture

In distal biceps tendon ruptures, re-attachment to the radial tuberosity should ensure adequate tendon to bone contact for optimal healing

Understanding Cheating: From the University Classroom to the Workplace

Cheating is defined as taking information, credit, or reward that one neither deserves nor did the work to achieve. Cheating behavior is often seen as a driver behind many of our current economic problems and the temptation to cheat has been associated with our downward slide in business practice for the past two decades. For example, the current housing crisis has been explained in part as banks cheating in terms of qualifying people for loans. Additionally, current headlines focus on legislators and Wall Street analysts who cheat investors by unfairly taking advantage of inside information not publicly available to others in the market. Cheating defeats fairness of competition and undermines the basis of business integrity. Writers in the business press are expressing concern over the widespread levels of ‘cheating’ among business executives. Enron, HealthSouth, and Tyco, all cheated shareholders in order to pad the pockets of their corporate executives. Some of the smartest and best business minds have fallen subject to the temptation to cheat and the result has been some of the most wideranging financial regulation in our history. The Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts were enacted in reaction to the perceived prevalence of cheating by business managers. The controversial new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is yet another attempt to address this problem. Classroom teachers are also experiencing a growing concern over what seems to be ever increasing levels of cheating among students. Students cheat for a variety of reasons including a felt pressure to maintain good grades and because they perceive many opportunities to cheat but few real penalties for getting caught. Instructor behavior may unwittingly exacerbate the problem by giving unclear or arbitrary assignments that create a climate for cheating when students view the benefits of figuring out and completing the assignment honestly to be minimal at best. The problem of classroom cheating is that students are likely to carry the behaviors they learn in the classroom into the workplace. It is this prospect that leads us to examine the nature of classroom cheating as a precursor to what might happen in actual business settings. It is likely that many of us have cheated at something or in some way, however unimportant, in our lives. We may have taken advantage of unsuspecting others in sports or play and the amount of harm done is probably very little and accepted as part of the interaction. But when the stakes get higher and include academic or business integrity and the validity of a grade or financial statement are at stake, then cheating has significant potential consequences, and needs to be both understood and managed

The manifest image : the nature and status of folk psychology

This thesis is concerned with the nature and status of folk psychology. At the outset a distinction is made between the theory theory (internal) and the theory theory (external). The former posits a largely tacit, internally represented, theory of human psychology which facilitates the prediction and explanation of behaviour. The latter claims that our everyday talk about mental states implicitly constitutes a theory of the mind. Both the largely tacit, internally represented, theory of human psychology and the theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states have been labeled 'folk psychology'. To avoid confusion, I have called the theory posited by the theory theory (internal), folk psychology (internal), and the theory posited by the theory theory (external),folk psychology (external). The theory theory (internal) is not the only existent theory of our capacity to predict behaviour. So-called off-line simulation theory also seeks to account for that capacity. In Chapter 2 I sketch off-line simulation theory and defend the theory theory (internal) against it. In Chapters 3-5 the focus shifts to the nature and status of folk psychology (external). I defend a commonsense functionalist analysis of the states posited by folk psychology (external), and argue that Fodor's asymmetric dependency theory of content provides the correct account of the semantic properties of (external) folk psychological beliefs and desires. A variety of objections to functionalism exist in the literature. Chapter 5 is devoted to drawing the fangs of some common objections to functionalism, including the qualia problem and the difficulties raised by Ned Block and John Searle. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the eliminativism issue. Arguments on both sides of the debate are examined and largely found wanting. Most pro- and anti-eliminativist arguments have focussed on the posits of folk psychology (external). I briefly consider some of the issues surrounding eliminativism and folk psychology (internal). Chapter 7 is devoted to eliminativist concerns about intentional non-naturalism. Finally, in Chapter 8 I consider whether folk psychology (external) might form the basis of a scientific investigation of the mind. Arguments to the effect that it will not are rejected, and an extended example of scientific research which rest heavily on folk psychology (external) is described

Triumphal Transposals

Recent developments in logology compel me to come out of retirement, setting the record straight. Articles and/or Colloquy items in the February 1976, May 1976, and February 1981 issues of Word Ways have presented numerous transposals of 15 or more letters. Most of these transposals have been of the trivial variety, involving interchanges of individual letters or of blocks of letters. Such transposals have the same standing in the realm of transposals that tautonymic 10x10 word squares have in the domain of geometric forms

Growing intimate privatepublics: Everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women’s allotment

The Young Women’s Group in Manchester is a ‘young women’s peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women’, which runs an allotment as one of its activities. At a time when interest in allotments and gardening appears to be on the increase, the existence of yet another community allotment may seem unremarkable. Yet we suggest that this queer allotment poses challenges for conventional theorisations of allotments, as well as for understandings of public and private. In this article we explore how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in ‘growing intimate publics’, or what we term ‘privatepublics’. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes. Here we focus on the work involved in materialising the allotment, which we understand as a queer privatepublic ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2008) which appears as an ‘everyday utopia’ (Cooper, 2014)

PRIVATE SECTOR AGRICULTURAL TENANCY ARRANGEMENTS IN EUROPE: THEMES AND DIMENSIONS; A CRITICAL REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE

Although there is widespread support for the "ideal model" of agricultural production being based around the owner-occupier farmer, it is recognized that, for a variety of reasons, this ideal is neither always attainable nor desirable. There is also a need to ensure that farming becomes competitive when exposed fully to world markets. This means that farmers are likely to require the flexibility to expand their businesses in circumstances where they may not have the capital to purchase the additional assets. The need to find suitable systems for agricultural tenancy reform remains paramount as a means both for sustaining rural communities generally and for establishing mechanisms suitable for matching the demand for and supply of private land for rent. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently commissioned a study of agricultural land tenure systems in order to identify elements of good practice in existing arrangements for the leasing of private sector agricultural land. This report is confined to a consideration of and commentary on the existing literature on tenure and tenancy arrangements as a basis for identifying examples of good practice. For the purposes of establishing good practice, this report concentrates on the market economies of northern and western Europe, predominantly the fifteen current member states of the European Union, while being aware of the principal dimensions of land reform in central and eastern European and former Soviet Union countries.Farm tenancy--Europe, Farm tenancy--Europe--Bibliography, Farm tenancy--Government policy--Europe, Land tenure--Europe, Land Economics/Use,