Search results

The purpose of this study is to examine how students with workplace learning experience the process of the assessment of prior experiential learning (APEL) in higher education.

This is an inductive and exploratory study drawing on methodology from the field of academic literacies. It addresses two questions: “How do different tutors and students approach the APEL process?” and “How do students with workplace learning experience the APEL process?”. Interviews were undertaken with students and tutors around the students' assessment documents. The data werre analysed according to Lillis' and Ivanič's concept of “addressivity”. This type of analysis indicates how students and tutors are positioning one another, and facilitates the drawing out of similarities and differences in these positionings between the different participants.

The paper finds that, although all students had been successful in their APEL claims, their narratives were quite polarised. Using a heuristic developed by Lillis the data clearly demonstrate the impact on the student experience of two different tutor approaches, that of monologic teaching and dialogic mediation.

This is a small scale, single institution study. Replicating the study in different contexts may further explain the differences between APEL processes that learners find empowering and those which they do not.

The original perspective afforded by the theoretical lens of academic literacies suggests a valuable re‐conceptualisation of the traditional assessor‐candidate relationship with implications for assessment practice. The paper also provides a student perspective on the process that is largely absent in the research literature.

Work‐place learning takes place in many settings and in different ways, resulting in knowledge and skills of different kinds. The recognition process in the work place is however often implicit and seldom discussed in terms of recognition of prior learning (RPL). The aim of this paper is to give examples of how the knowledge/skills of employees get recognition in the workplace and to discuss what the consequences of such recognition processes might be.

This paper is based on a study in two companies and two municipalities, where 21 interviews were conducted with human resource managers, team leaders and union representatives. The research questions concerned the ways skills were recognised among employees and how the logics of these actions could be understood.

The findings show that both companies and municipalities have their own ways of assessing knowledge/skills, mostly out of a production logic of what is needed at the workplace. However, certain skills are also made “unvisualised” for the employee. This employer‐controlled recognition logic is important to understand when RPL models are brought to the work place in order to obtain win‐win situations for both employers and employees.

It seems important to identify an already existing system for assessment of knowledge/skills at the workplace when bringing RPL processes to the workplace.

The approach to understand assessment processes in these companies and municipalities from an RPL perspective has not been widely covered before.

The purpose of this study is to explore faculty definitions of college‐level learning in order to develop a universal definition to assist employers, career counselors, and academic institutions in assessing college‐level workplace learning.

Faculty were administered an electronic survey to gather definitions of below college‐level, undergraduate level and graduate level learning at a USA university.

A total of 20 per cent of the faculty completed the survey, representing an even distribution across disciplines offered at the university. Data were analysed using qualitative methods to determine themes arising from the faculty definitions; member checking occurred through a representative faculty group. The resulting framework had commonalities to other current college‐level learning schemas (e.g. American Association of Colleges and Universities). Terminology used by the faculty indicated students must understand and utilise different relationships across knowledge.

The framework shifts the perspective from assessing skills and competencies to assessing the ways in which individuals relate knowledge to different ideas, perspectives and global issues. Future research is needed to verify these themes across multiple institutions.

This framework could assist employers, career counselors, students and educators in determining if an individual's workplace knowledge can be assessed at a college‐level. This could be advantageous to know prior to investing in higher education.

The results imply that simply assessing workplace skills is insufficient to determine college‐level learning. Rather, the ways in which individuals relate their knowledge to different issues and solve problems is critical.

The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the issues related to enabling the accreditation of prior experiential learning (APEL) in doctoral level awards, and illustrate the effects for candidates, others involved in the process and higher education (HE).

The paper is a mainly qualitative evaluation study of those involved with 12 graduates from a professional doctorate that uses an in‐depth reflective and critical analysis of prior high level work based learning as its main product for assessment. In‐depth semi‐structured telephone interviews, focus group and questionnaires were used to gather data from candidates, their advisers and consultants, internal and external examiners, and chairs of their presentation.

Findings included the development of understanding about work‐based epistemologies by all the participants and changes in the candidates' understanding of their professional identity. The recognition of scholarliness and the evaluation and accreditation of professional knowledge was a key issue for external examiners.

As a small‐scale evaluation case study the results are indicative and presented alongside experience of facilitating and assessing prior learning in this UK‐based professional doctorate, in order to stimulate further discussion.

APEL is a valuable and valued, student‐centred learning and teaching method for experienced professionals that could provide a useful entrée to other pedagogies that develop a personal understanding of professional knowledge production and ability to reflect on practice.

The paper provides some evidence for claims in the current literature that there is an important place for work‐based knowledge in contemporary HE. The pedagogic processes described in this paper appear to work effectively with doctoral level candidates.

The use of e‐portfolios in recognition of prior learning (RPL) processes in workplace and professional practice contexts has attracted little attention in the literature due to its emergent nature. This study seeks to explore the growing incidence of e‐portfolio‐based RPL (e‐RPL) and professional recognition (e‐PR) processes in Australia and the implications this has for recognising workplace learning.

The paper utilises an exploratory study and involves a content analysis of a selected sample of data sources. The sample includes the abstracts and papers presented at the 2009 VET E‐portfolios Showcase and the 2010 ePortfolios Australia conference and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (AFLF) funded E‐portfolio implementation trials 2009 and 2010.

The paper finds an array of e‐RPL and e‐PR operationalised across multiple fields/disciplines and contexts. The incidence of e‐PR is more dominant than that of e‐RPL. The findings result in the development of a framework that provides the conceptual scaffolding for recognition systems in the workplace.

The study is limited to Australian based data sources. Further analysis could be expanded to international contexts to increase the data and evidence on e‐RPL and e‐PR processes and the implications these have for recognising workplace. The framework developed from the study provides a conceptual launch pad into future lines of inquiry which can critically explore the underlying pedagogies and knowledge paradigms which have dominated in formal learning systems.

The paper includes implications for the correct matching of practices and tasks to appropriate types of e‐portfolio based RPL and PR along a continuum of formal to informal learning and varying degrees of learner control.

This paper presents an analytical framework for exploring e‐RPL and e‐PR as distinct processes of recognition through a synthesis of RPL and e‐portfolio research and theoretical constructs. The framework includes a typology of e‐RPL and e‐PR based on Smith and Tillema's typology of portfolios and Cameron's models of RPL. The framework will assist in analysing recognition processes undertaken in workplace contexts.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Personal information management (PIM) is an activity in which an individual stores personal information items in order to retrieve them later on. As PIM research moves from an infant stage of exploratory studies to more rigorous quantitative ones, there is a need to identify and map variables that characterize and account for the variety of PIM behaviour. This is the aim of the current research.

In an exploratory study, 20 semi-structured 90-minute interviews were recorded and transcribed. Variables were found by comparing the behaviors of participants who represent the two extreme poles of each variable's axis (i.e. when two participants showed a high and low degree of document redundancy, the redundancy variable was identified). In a later analysis, the variables were grouped into categories.

The paper identifies 15 variables grouped in five categories: organization related variables (order, redundancy and name meaning), structure variables (collection size, folder depth, folder breadth and folder size), work process variables (attendance time and modality), memory related variables (memory reliance, dominant memory) and retrieval variables (retrieval type, retrieval success, retrieval time and ubiquity).

Future research could make use of these variables in order to: measure their distribution, find relations between them, test how they are affected by variables external to PIM (e.g. systems design) and find how they affect other dependent variables (e.g. productivity).

This is the first research that systematically explores PIM variables.

Over the past decade, criminology in Australia, Canada and other settler colonies has increasingly engaged with activist challenges to the penal system. These anti-carceral engagements have been levelled at its laws, institutions and agents. Following a long history of criminology explicating and buttressing penal institutions, the criminological gaze slowly transitioned in the 1970s to a more critical lens, shifting focus from the people who are criminalised to the harms of the apparatus that criminalises. However, the focus remained steadfastly on institutions and dominant players – until much more recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the strength of activist organisations and grassroots movements in affecting change and shaping debates in relation to the penal system. This chapter will explore the role of activism in informing criminological scholarship during the pandemic period and how criminologists, in turn, have increasingly recognised the need to build alliances and collaborations with grassroots activists and engage in their own activism. The chapter focuses primarily on Australian and Canadian criminology and its growing imbrication with the prison abolition movement, especially in the shadow of ongoing colonial violence. It considers how activist scholars, including ourselves, attempt to build movements for structural change in the criminal system and beyond.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories: