1,720,964 research outputs found
21st century tertiary design education in post-apartheid South Africa : a question of quality
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.The dissertation explores the question of; what drives excellence in tertiary design education in 21st Century post-Apartheid South Africa? Is it what the state does in terms of policy and regulation or is it what the higher educational providers do in terms of curriculum and methodology that creates excellence? In the first part the dissertation traces the development of higher education policy in South Africa following the political changes from Apartheid to Democracy after 1994. It explores the development of a regulatory framework for higher education provision in post-Apartheid South Africa, due to the disparate levels of quality higher education developed under the Apartheid system for different racial groups and also the proliferation of poor quality private higher education during the first decade of democracy. It follow s the view that while the state set the regulatory control for higher education a n d bench marked educational excellence against public institutions, the realisation that market demands for access to quality higher education would require private education provision to form part of the institutional mix was soon reached. In the second part of the dissertation a case study of a newly established private higher education provider is developed. Created within the new regulatory framework for higher education in South Africa, FEDISA (Future Excellence Design Institute of South Africa) of which this author is the academic director, endeavours to show that private providers of higher education can, when pursuing excellence, become viable partners to the stat e in education provision and may even surpass the state institutions, now burdened with massification, in terms of quality education provision. The study goes on to develop an understanding of how changes in the economic markets have created change demand within design. It then considers the four tenets on which FEDISA's programme for achieving excellence is based in order to comply academically with the highest quality of 21st Century design education. This is as much in answer to the requirements of the new regulatory framework as to the institution's own analysis of what the market now wants. These tenets include the concept of what a curriculum is, drawing on Stenhouse and Smith's views of the curriculum as 'a blueprint for action'. Next, the importance of integrating the component elements of the design curriculum by drawing parallels between the 'collection type and integrated curriculum' theory of Bernstein is considered. In the third instance, an analysis of 'Knowing, Acting and Being', after the curriculum theory of Barnett and Coates is developed through the addition of a liberal arts component to the design curriculum. Special focus is afforded the importance of 'Being' development of design students in 21st Century design education. Finally, Brookfield's notion of becoming a critically reflective practitioner and how the concept of critical reflection has found its place in the 21st Century design classroom through the use of the 'tools of critical reflection' is brought into focus. The dissertation concludes that while the shift in the design markets from craft through mass production to an understanding of ethical considerations in new millennium design dictates what kind of design professionals should now be educated and that this awareness may be achieved through the refocusing of inherently simple means inside the design classroom of the 21st Century, excellence in tertiary design education, while primarily based on what happens inside our design institutions, goes hand in hand with compliance to the demands of state regulation in order to ensure the viability of our tertiary institutions
Zimbabwe's Postcolonial Language Policy Formulation Paradigms 1987-1998: Another Recipe for the Marginalisation of Minority Languages
No full textProceedings of the ninth FEL Conference, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 18-20 November 200
!Ui-Taa language shift in Gordonia and Postmasburg Districts, South Africa
No full textIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 338-359).This dissertation presents a case study of the demise of !Ui-Taa languages in South Africa during the 20th century, with particular attention to N|u, the last surviving variety. The geographic focus is on Gordonia and Postmasburg Districts in the Northern Cape province. Drawing on the work of Diamond (1998), the author argues that food producing peoples (agriculturalists / pastoralists / colonialists) typically penetrate the hunter-gatherer territory and break down the ecological setting that sustains the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. The changes in ‘language ecology‘ (Haugen 1972) trigger transformations in social relations and place the languages of hunter-gatherers at risk of rapid language shift. This theory is in contra-distinction to the argument put forward by Brenzinger (1992a, b), Brenzinger et al (1991) and McConveIl (2000) that changes in language attitudes are the primary cause of language death. The second aspect of the dissertation deals with the particulars of the identity of the N|u language and its speakers. The speakers of N|u cail themselves N||n≠e ‘home people‘ or Sasi ‘Bushmen / eland'. Drawing on original research and the oral history, the author argues that Bleek’s (1929. 1956) categorisation of two !Ui-Taa varieties, S2 (||Ng) and 82a (≠Khomani), should be reconsidered, as these are dialects of one another. Reconsidering the distribution of !Ui-Taa languages has implications for understanding hunter-gatherer demographics and social organisation in pre-colonial South Africa
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
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