1,721,104 research outputs found
Formality and Informality in College-based Learning
No full textWorkplaces and educational institutions merely represent different instances of social practices in which learning occurs through participation. Learning in both kinds of social practice can be understood through a consideration of their respective participatory practices. Therefore, to distinguish between the two … [so that] one is formalised and the other informal … is not helpful (Billett, 2002, p57).
The Presence of Informal as well as Formal Learning in Educational Institutions
Despite Billett’s view, it has become commonplace in Western, industrialised societies to think of formal and informal learning as inherently different from each other. Thus, formal learning is planned, teacher-dominated, assessed and takes place in educational institutions, where learning is the prime official objective of activity. Informal learning, on the other hand, is unplanned, incidental, unassessed and uncontrolled by a teacher, and takes place in everyday life, where learning is not the primary purpose of the activities that we engage in. Thus, the argument has gone, we learn informally through participating in everyday life – in the family, the local community, in the workplace and at leisure. On occasions, we learn formally, if and when we attend courses at schools, colleges or university.
The origins of this division are not only theoretical: particular meanings of formal and informal learning have historically been associated with the interests and practices of different social and political groupings (Colley et al, 2003). Most recently, political attention has been focused on this debate by European lifelong learning strategies (European Commission, 2001). These have introduced a third category of ‘non-formal’ learning (a term intended to convey a combination of formal and informal characteristics), associated mainly with the workplace. A key policy goal is that non-formal learning should be clearly identified to allow formal assessment and accreditation, supposedly in the interests of both individual workers and economic competitiveness. This strategy has created controversy not only about its feasibility but also about whose interests it is likely to benefit most. At the same time, it reinforces the notion that there are separate types of learning, and that a prime task for research is to delineate clear boundaries between them
Building from Marx: Race, Gender, and Learning
No full textThis symposium will examine the development of a Marxist-Feminist framework for adult education through the discussion of several ongoing research projects and is intended to contribute to the critical and feminist theorizing of adult learning and education. The authors gathered for this symposium have been collaborating on a theoretical research project in the development of a Marxist theory of education extended through feminist notions of difference, identity, consciousness, social relations, and learning. This work includes both original empirical studies and theoretical analysis to examine the sites, theories, and practices of adult education from a Marxist-Feminist perspective
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Learning to Labour with Feeling: class, gender and emotion in childcare education and training
Full text linkThere is debate among early years experts about the appropriate degree of emotional engagement between nursery nurses and the children in their care. Through research into the learning cultures of further education (in the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme), the author considers how prospective nursery nurses first learn to deploy emotion in their work. Few researchers have investigated the learning of feelings for caring occupations, and this article presents a detailed case study, based on both quantitative and qualitative data, of a group of childcare students throughout their two-year course. In analysing its official, unwritten, and hidden curricula, and the social practices of learning it entails, the author draws on feminist readings of Marx and Bourdieu to reveal how gendered and class-fractional positionings combine with vocational education and training to construct imperatives about ‘correct’ emotions in childcare. The author compares theorisations of emotional capital and emotional labour, and suggests we need social rather than individualised understandings of how feelings are put to work. The author concludes that emotional labour carries costs for the nursery nurse, not because children consume her emotional resources, but because her emotional labour power is controlled and exploited for profit by employers
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