The schools located in many township and rural areas of South Africa struggle to provide a high standard of education, because many of the inhabitants of these areas are very poor and there is, thus, a lack of the funding required for the necessary educational equipment. The Afri Twin project, started by Jayne Martin, addresses this problem. The…

Multidisciplinary research institutes provide universities with an important vehicle to conduct research across traditional disciplines, and this can be an attractive capability for external funding bodies. However, there can be particular challenges, including managing different reporting lines, the need for effective research coordination, and…

The current internationalisation agenda in UK higher education (HE) is still seen as most relevant to those university departments involved in international student recruitment and support. This approach has been influenced by the dominant "deficit" discourses from earlier decades, which emphasise the need for international students to…

While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologies, the impact of spatial theory on the discussion of such education is less well developed. Drawing upon empirical evidence from the Ensemble research project, this article examines spatially some of the possibilities and constraints that arise in…

TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge) has emerged as a clear and useful construct for researchers working to understand technology integration in learning and teaching. Whereas first generation TPACK work focused upon explaining and interpreting the construct, TPACK has now entered a second generation where the focus is upon using…

This article describes and reflects our experiences as researchers in a design-based research project on a curriculum innovation focused on meaningful, co-operative learning in vocational education in the Netherlands. The project was successful in gaining insights in possible practices for workplace learning but did only partly realize the…

It is not unusual for academics to bemoan the reticence of teachers in adopting innovative tools and pedagogies, never more so than in the area of new technologies and multimodal literacies in classrooms. Typically, educational bureaucracies seek to dictate change in new technologies through a diffusion-adoption model of professional learning…

The realm of Earth science (ES) is increasingly data-intensive. Geoinformatics research attempts to robustly smooth and accelerate the flow of data to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge to decisions and to supply necessary infrastructure and tools for advancing ES. Enabling easy access to and use of large volumes of ES data and…

This paper is a narrative of two dimensions of professional learning: a personal one following the development of the author's own understanding of professional learning and its impact on practice explored through her research into support staff in schools. It draws on three research projects which examined the role and work of teaching assistants…

Drawing on literature in participatory adult education, this article reports the findings from a collaborative research project exploring family literacy participants' experiences in their program's parent advisory council. The findings reveal that involvement in the council enhanced program effectiveness, increased learners' investment in the…

Many instructors teach courses that prepare students to do research individually or in teams. These instructors also supervise their students' research projects. Continuous and systematic use of action research principles can help instructors prepare for problems that may develop when students encounter unfamiliar issues at research sites due to…

Higher education policy and research tend to be dominated by the messaging systems of the North. De Sousa Santos argues that we need to start listening to the South and that we need to develop a sociology of absences. This paper attempts to engage with some of these absences by deconstructing participation in higher education, in quantitative and…

Five years ago, the editor of "Exceptional Parent" Magazine requested the author to provide an account of a day in the life of the National Children's Study, an ambitious study by the federal government that aims to find out how the environment affects child health and development. Planning and implementation of the National Children's Study has…

There has been a significant spike among school librarians in talk about the process of learning since the 2007 release of the "Standards for the 21st-Century Learner" by the American Association of School Librarians. How do children really learn best? The AASL Standards make it clear that 21st-century school librarianship is not just about…

The authors propose a risks evaluation model for research projects. The model is based on fuzzy inference. The knowledge base for fuzzy process is built with a causal and cognitive map of risks. The map was especially developed for research projects, taken into account their typical lifecycle. The model was applied to an e-testing research…