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The article describes an activity program for elementary education which aims to teach students about the influence of the height, thickness and diameter of paper on its strength.

The article describes an activity program for elementary education which aims to teach students about the influence of shape on the strength of paper.

The article presents an activity program for secondary education which asks students to determine the effort needed of a single movable pulley to lift a load.

This section suggests several activities in which students can discover ways people use trees. In one activity, students are asked to name products obtained from trees and talk about how some of these products are made. Another activity aims to let students describe foods that come from trees. Another activity involves the participation in a week of tree activities. Another asks students to write picture poems about trees. Trees are terrific subjects for poems. And picture poetry is especially fun for kids to write because the poem's words form a picture of what the poem is about.

Chiefs and headmen, wealthier families and locally employed Christians The most fundamental change in the rural economy of Pondoland between 1910 and 1930 was the increased dependence of a majority of homesteads on wage labour. Yet, as has been argued, proletarianisation was not in the main predicated on rural differentiation; on the accumulation of resources by a minority of families in Pondoland and the expropriation of land and stock from others. Although the level of dependence on wages differed from homestead to homestead, the great majority of families from which workers came retained their rural homesteads, access to land and, to a considerable extent, access to cattle; the predominant form of proletarianisation was migrancy. This pattern of entry into wage labour had deep implications for the nature of differentiation in Pondoland. It has already been argued that the specific process of incorporation into the larger capitalist economy only modified, but did not transform, precolonial forms of political authority. As happened in areas of the Eastern Cape, for example, no significant class of wealthy peasants developed in the colonisation of Pondoland. Pre-colonial forms of rank and authority, which had implications for wealth in terms of income and productive capacity, were to some extent translated into a new context. This is not to suggest that the process of colonisation left social relationships in the countryside intact. The process of differentiation will be explored largely by means of different life histories, which may to some extent be regarded as ‘typical’, of men who were born and brought up in the early decades of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dipping crisis and the new paramountcy Rather than destroy the chiefs in the Transkeian Territories, except for those who had openly rebelled against the Colony, the administration sought to deprive them of many of their independent powers, make them dependent on the state, and use their remaining authority to ease the implementation of colonial rule. Bokleni in Western Pondoland, and especially Dalindyebo in Thembuland, were held up, in contrastto Sigcau, as models of the Colonial chief. After Sigcau's death in 1905, however, the administration attempted to mould his successors to accept their role in the Colonial state. Sigcau's heir, Marelane, was about fifteen years of age when his father died. As he was considered too young to succeed, Mhlanga, son of Mqikela's first wife, was appointed regent by the chiefs and people with the approval of the administration. Sigcau had intended to send Marelane to the United States to further his education; at the turn of the century the paramount had developed some links with Ethiopian churches in the Territories which were organising such educational trips for Transkeian youths. But Colonial officials, intent on making not only an educated and progressive, but also a co-operative, chief out of Marelane, were wary of ‘American’ ideas which they felt were espoused by the separatist church movement. They advised Mhlanga to keep him in South Africa, and in 1907 Marelane went to Lovedale, the leading Eastern Cape mission school. The principal attempted to instil Christian and colonial ideas into him and even hesitated to allow him home for holidays lest he slip back into Mpondo politics and Mpondo values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drought, East Coast fever and the crisis of 1912 By 1911, the year after Union, the economic position of most families in Pondoland was by no means desperate. The herds of cattle had been rebuilt, and the cattle population, at close on 280,000, was probably as high as before rinderpest (Table 5). There were more small stock in the area than ever before (Table 6). If the extension of cultivation had been constrained by lack of markets and rendered less urgent by the recovery of the herds, the homesteads still probably produced as much grain as they had immediately after the turn of the century. ‘Every kraal possesses its plough’, affirmed a magistrate in 1911–the number returned in the census of that year exceeded 14,000–and most could produce sufficient for subsistence in good and average years. Despite an apparent increase in population from under 200,000 to over 230,000 in the first decade of the century, land was not yet as short as in the rest of the Territories (Table 1). Pressure on arable plots began to show in a few locations, but in general the magistrates still thought that their districts were ‘by no means densely occupied’ nor ‘crowded’ and ‘thickly populated’. Immigrants from other Cape districts continued to find space in which to settle. Whereas roughly 9 to 10 per cent of the male population left Pondoland to work in 1911, the average for other Transkeian districts was around 18 per cent (Table 4). Yet the homesteads were now locked into the larger capitalist economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written texts play an important role in the activity systems generating knowledge in professional and educational settings. Empirical studies of the social construction of scientific knowledge in scientific and school settings have identified a range of purposes, uses, and genres of written communication (Kelly & Chen, 1999; Knorr-Cetina, 1999). The persuasive discourse of written argument is one such type of written communication that has played a significant role in the development of scientific knowledge (Bazerman, 1988; Gross, 1990). As noted by Yore et al. (2006), written communication provides a means to articulate evidence, warrants, and claims; reflect on proposed ideas; critique the scientific work of others; and establish proprietorship of intellectual property. An important dimension of science learning is the ability to use, assess, and critique evidence (Hodson, 2003; Yore et al., 2003). This ability includes understanding the relationships among questions, data, and claims, as well as how these relationships can be organized to formulate evidence for a given task and audience (Wallace et al., 2004). While the use of evidence in reasoning is a noted goal of scientific inquiry, little research has focused on the difficulties students may have integrating data with text to formulate coherent arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A preface to the book "Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum," Volume Three, is presented.

This section presents activities designed to make students learn about the animals that live in the forest and the importance of dead trees to wildlife. The Treetop Traffic activity is designed to make students describe several ways animals are adapted to living in trees. Step-by-step instructions on how to make a flying dragon made of paper is given in this section. Also provided in this section is how to conduct an activity involving the use of rhyming story to discover how the animals in a forest use trees.

Many projects featuring intelligent virtual agents have emerged in last years, but not many reports on their advances in education. This paper presents the curricula of a university course on Modelling Behaviour of Human and Animal-like Agents, including a seminar in which students develop their own virtual agents using a toolkit we have developed. This course has been also scaled for a workshop with computer science high-school students. An evaluation of the course is presented and main lessons learned overviewed. The paper also explicitly formulates the teaching methodology underpinning the course and outlines several general questions hoping to start a broader discussion on educational issues related to the field of intelligent virtual agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to address the need to consider issues regarding professionalism in computer forensics in order to allow the discipline to develop and to ensure the credibility of the discipline from the differing perspectives of practitioners, the criminal justice system and in the eyes of the public. There is a need to examine and develop professionalism in computer forensics in order to promote the discipline and maintain the credibility of the discipline. The paper explores the hallmarks of a profession using Denning΄s (2001) criteria and applies these hallmarks to computer forensics. The paper attempts to determine the position of the discipline in relation to other forensic science areas and in relation to computer science. The paper seeks to identify professional issues and challenges for computer forensics and links these challenges to legal and ethical considerations. Consideration is also given to issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The issue of certification of practitioners is raised and questions regarding who should certify and what they should be certifying are discussed. The certification issues are of course related to the position of the discipline but are also central to the credibility of the discipline and the ability to ensure robust and due process when computer forensics is applied to the criminal justice system and other disciplinary systems. The role universities have in developing the subject of computer forensics is also considered. A very draft version of a practitioner framework is introduced. This is the subject of current work being developed and seeks to take forward the issues raise in this paper as the basis for future certification and accreditation of computer forensics practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical plant assets are tending to remain in service for beyond their design lifetime. Arguably, a greater professional input is needed into the maintenance and reliability engineering of these assets, yet few universities offer such content in undergraduate engineering degrees. Accordingly, postgraduate programs have been developed. Those offered by off campus learning are more likely to meet the needs of engineers, many of whom work remote from the possibility of regular attendance on a campus. In the now 20 years since their inception, hundreds of engineers and other technical professionals have completed the Monash University programs. These have continued to evolve, and take appropriate advantage of advances in learning technology. This paper describes the development and lessons learnt during the Monash experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, eLearning has been adapted in all educational institutes, starting from kindergartens, primary schools, high schools, to the universities. Teachers are encouraged to use computer and Internet as a teaching medium in addition to the classroom teaching. The result is a blended learning which combines eLearning as a supplementary learning means to classroom learning. The issue becomes what is the best approach for blended learning for the effective and productive teaching methods. This paper suggests to record (log) all teaching activities into a web site for students to self study after classroom learning. The objective is to provide students more flexibility in learning with more facilities of eLearning, classroom learning and/or blended learning. A case study is illustrated in the paper for discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Comparative and International Education Society of Canada/Société canadienne d'éducation comparée et internationale (CIESC/SCECI) was established on 5 June 1967. As an educational society in an officially-bilingual country, the society from the outset has been a bilingual organisation with its Constitution in both English and French. Conference papers may be in either language, and the society's journal also publishes in both English and French. In 1970 the 1st World Congress of Comparative Education Societies was held in Ottawa; and in 1989 the CIESC hosted the 7th World Congress in Montreal. This chapter presents a history of the development of the CIESC, touching on its context and epistemological foundations. The society's characteristics are discussed and its activities are presented. The foci include CIESC members' international leadership, the journal, awards, and academic endeavours. The concluding section comments on challenges and future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a lesson plan for students which teaches concepts about the use of Camouflage by prey species for satisfying the theory of natural selection by scientist Charles Darwin and also presents brief information about camouflage. As mentioned, materials used in the activity includes fabric, paper cups and a set of colored disks. It further informs about various aspects associated with the evolution theory of camouflage including variation, heredity and survival.

The article presents a lesson plan for primary education which teaches concepts about history of Earth related to mountain building using activity and reading. The activity includes simulation of mountain activity using paper and clay. Geologist James Hutton suggested that rocks with crystal structures are formed within Earth and new rocks are formed by cooling of lava.

This section presents activities for children and students about the ways birds affect people's lives and how people affect the lives of the birds. The activity titled Watch the Birdie describes different kinds of birds and will help the children name three things that can help in identifying birds. The activity titled Bird Bop describes some of the ways different birds move by making the children imitate the ways different birds move by dancing to different kinds of music.

The article presents a science experiment to help elementary and middle school students design and build electromagnetic cranes. They will be asked to pick up as many nails as they can with three lifts of their cane. A list of tools and materials needed is provided, along with demonstration, activities and discussion topics.

Considering the significant increase in the presence of mobile devices in classroom and the opportunity to use these resources to improve and streamline the process of teaching and learning, this paper proposes a pedagogical use of mobile technologies, tablets, in class. The proposal was developed under the Project LabTEAR in its subproject LabsMóveis, and was applied in a graduating class of the Health area. The use of tablets in the university classroom contributed to the expansion of general and specific cognitive abilities stimulating creativity and leadership, enhancing the initiative to solve problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people are convinced there are too many humans on Earth, that food and energy resources are now extremely limited, and that global climatic change–often called global warming–will necessarily have catastrophic consequences. There is also general consensus that productive dialog between civilizations is impossible, that good relationships among people will never happen and that the world's poor will always be crushed by the wealthy. Prophets of doom are numerous in all fields, such as geology, biology, history, demography, economy, and political science. Samuel Huntington is among the most famous of these. Moreover, scientifically uneducated journalists and politicians (Al Gore, for example) spread questionable information through various media. This paper aims to demonstrate that Thomas Malthus was wrong two centuries ago, and is still wrong. Cleverness, imagination and geographic knowledge can create a better environment for more people. Education, social order, and an honest and competent elite can bring about peace. This is the purpose and plan of all traditional world wisdoms and philosophies, secular or religious, at least since those of Confucius and Socrates. The great contrasts in development and optimism observed across the globe may be explained by cultural analysis of societies within their own territories, with respect to their relationships with their environment, social organization, and relations with other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers suggestions and instructions for mathematics teacher on enhancing awareness of counting and graphing and measurement. It is mentioned that apples were used by the students as a part of mathematical activity. Also a recipe for applesauce is presented. Use of tape measure in mathematical activities related apples is also mentioned.

The article describes an activity program for elementary education which asks students to use squared paper place value tables in counting.

The article describes several science activity programs for elementary and secondary education which ask students to design a travel brochure about one of the planets in the solar system, design a method to clean up dirty water, and write a play about parts of a cell and life process of a cell.

The article presents a lesson plan for primary education which teaches concepts about solving equations with a missing variable and solving addition and subtraction problems.

In Japan, there has been some argument that many academic programs today are often inadequate from the viewpoint of practical education. However, it is difficult for universities to secure enough human resources to satisfy their students΄ needs with sufficient service. TUFS, or Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, also faces the same problem as other universities do in Japan. One proposed idea to help solve this problem is to exploit the collective intelligence of alumni who have considerable expertise and experience in the real world. This paper introduces TUFS΄s new development of a SNS application on academic education for the purpose of improving its services. A framework of the knowledge management of participants΄ collective intelligence is also suggested here. This attempt proposes a general framework of SNS application on practical education of universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some observations on the educational possibilities offered by the multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), Second Life (SL) and is based on the author΄s interactions and experiences as a Second Life resident, educator and mentor. Beginning as an individual exploration of a new technology, primarily for pleasure but always with an opportunistic eye for education, the author has spent hundreds of hours in Second Life over the past 18 months and reports on the special nature of this environment and the challenges that it presents for educators. These observations are based primarily on her experiences, supported by reference to the small but growing literature base and are therefore necessarily subjective and intended to be thought provoking rather than definitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benchmarking for educational purposes in the context of computer science can be hindered by the low number and the homogeneity of machines to be assessed, and the inaccuracy of the benchmarks to represent specific workloads. Thus, this paper proposes a benchmarking tool developed within a service-oriented grid in order to allow students to benchmark multiple workloads in machines that may belong to several educational institutions. This tool has been validated in a real educational scenario within a course on Computer Architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the global problems of environmental change and human health are analyzed and their interrelated nature and root causes are identified. The inconsistency of the present mode of extensive economic development, intensified by quick population and affluence growth, with the Earth carrying capacity and human health is considered as a major risk of sustainable human development. A new vision of sustainable (harmonious) human development oriented on the integrated psychological, physical, intellectual, social and ethical human development instead of dominating consumerism is proposed. Proportion of healthy population and its average life interval are proposed as the indicators of sustainable human development. The specific institutional (green accounting and auditing) and economic (eco-taxation) policy tools are suggested as the necessary conditions to achieve sustainable development, while the internal human sustainability (mentality) based on the eco-centric rationales (socio-ecological well-being, health) is considered as its sufficient condition that can be achieved through the appropriate social and educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The timetabling problem consists in fixing a sequence of meetings between teachers and students in a given period of time, satisfying a set of different constraints. This paper shows the implementation of a Bee Algorithm (BA) to solve the Scholar Timetabling Problem. In the implemented BA, scout bees find feasible solutions while collector bees search in their neighborhood to find better solutions. While other algorithms evaluate every plausible assignment, the implemented algorithm only evaluates feasible solutions. This approach seems to be helpful to manage constrained problems. We propose a new measurement for replacing population that considers the evolutionary history of the bees as well as their fitness. Experimental results are presented for two real schools, where the algorithm shows promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptivity in technology enhanced learning has proven to be an effective and efficient approach in education. While simulations are include in the top end of eLearning there has been few if any real attempts to develop adaptive educational simulations. The key problem with their incorporation is their expense, cost and the effort involved in developing them. This ground breaking paper is the first publication to show a unique way for non-technical domain experts to compose and generate adaptive eLearning simulations. In particular it presents ACTSim, an innovative and unique composition tool used to author adaptive soft skill simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the findings of several studies on the economic and psychological impact of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, and identifies common themes and important similarities (as well as key differences) from this research literature that inform our understanding of national resilience. The paper then examines some of the ways in which the U.S. has responded to 9/11 in terms of preparing our communities for future terrorist attacks. While federal, state and local authorities have held numerous preparatory exercises, this analysis argues that it is a mistake to rely solely on the government to deal with the immediate impact of terrorist attacks. Community education and empowerment must play a prominent role in any comprehensive homeland security strategy. Community Emergency Response Training (CERT) initiatives have been developed throughout the United States to do just that, and provide an important model for other countries who seek to build resilience in their communities. Further, in our efforts to do so, there is much the U.S. can learn from the experiences of other nations who have faced terrorist attacks for many years, including Colombia, Ireland, Israel, Spain, Sri Lanka, Russia, and Turkey. Finally, this analysis concludes that leadership, preparation, communication, education, and the development of social capital are vital elements of any strategy for building community resilience in an age of terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on our participatory action research findings and interventions, such as advocacy and professional education, as applied during and after a large project focusing on Aboriginal mental health and safe medication management. The project was conducted by our research team and partners, community-controlled Aboriginal health services, and community leaders. The paper provides a discussion of major Aboriginal mental health issues gleaned from the literature, along with a discussion, and a conceptual model for conducting ethical Aboriginal health research, that has both evolved and guided us. It is hoped that this paper will assist nurses and other professional colleagues to work more effectively with Aboriginal peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern engineering asset manager is required to develop, operate and maintain engineering assets economically and in a socially responsible and sustainable manner. Key issues confronting the asset manager of today include taking a strategic life cycle approach to asset management, meeting user requirements and minimising risks. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand asset life cycle issues including economic analysis and sustainability, be aware of social impacts, understand technological risks and work at the cutting edge of technology. While undergraduate engineering programs can meet this need to some extent, postgraduate education is often the best approach for learning the principles of strategic life cycle asset management. This paper discusses one such example of postgraduate engineering education, the Master of Technology Management, offered by the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying at the University of Southern Queensland. Topics discussed include the rationale for this type of study program, how it addresses the needs of life cycle asset management including risk and innovation management, its approach to learning, and its role in developing strategic technological leaders. The future role of programs of this type in developing leading asset management professionals is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes an activity program for early childhood education that aims to teach children about shapes.

This section suggests several activities designed to teach students about trees. Leaf It to Us! is a game in which students are supposed to answer questions about trees. Two activities involve teaching students about the parts of a tree. Another involves making a model of a leaf cross section with gelatin and fruit, aimed to describe the structure of a leaf. Experiments about tree parts and processes, such as leaf pigments and transpiration, are also presented in this article. Information on cross-dating is also provided.

To observers of contemporary China, few Chinese policies are as controversial as its population control policy. Critics term the policy practice “Orwellian” and “Gestapo-like” and focus on its toll on human rights (Mosher, 1983; Aird, 1990; and Carter, 1998). In contrast, those impressed by China's success in taming its fertility trends – mostly academic researchers – stress the need to make allowances for China's overwhelming demographic challenges in evaluating the population control policy. However, even sympathetic observers view the policy as a necessary evil and would distance themselves from some of the practices that have occurred under the rubric of population control. Indeed, in a cruel historical twist, whereas the post-Mao economic reforms have expanded the freedom of production in China, the implementation of a stringent birth control policy has severely limited the freedom of reproduction that the Chinese people had enjoyed for centuries. Thus, greater economic freedom has gone hand in hand with less personal freedom to control one's own body. In this paper we use both qualitative and quantitative data to examine how the post-Mao Chinese state has maintained the draconian birth control policy in an era of economic liberalization. First, we provide a narrative of the birth control policy's evolution. Then we discuss the issue of state capacity in implementing birth control' with emphasis on the government's efforts at institutional building and mobilization. Next we offer an analysis of the patterns of state coercion in population control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese party-state shares with other large, hierarchical organizations significant agency problems; local agents of the state tend to be have opportunistically, contrary to the interests of their principals. Such agency problems stem from conflicts of interest between principals and agents and from information asymmetries that typically characterize principal–agent relations. State officials in China employ a formal evaluation system (kaohe zhidu) to control the behavior of their subordinates. Drawing on principal–agent theory, this paper contends that the nature of the evaluation system helps to explain dysfunctional aspects of policy implementation at the grass roots and that problems with policy implementation, in turn, help to explain subsequent changes in the evaluation system itself. This characterization is consistent with adaptive learning on the part of principals. In the final section, the chapter argues that, paradoxically, even as the evaluation system has exacerbated problems in policy implementation, it has simultaneously contributed to the durability of rule by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Indeed, the relative stability of CCP rule, in contrast to the loss of power by communist parties in other former socialist states and contrary to claims of pervasive political decay in China, demands explanation. The chapter begins by providing some background on the development of the cadre evaluation system since the initiation of reform in 1978, arguing that changes in cadre evaluation represent an early and important element of political reform in China – albeit not democratic political reform. The next section analyzes the characteristics of the system in terms of principal–agent theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an activity for children by which they can compare the dimensions of elephant body parts to those of a human. There should by some miniature patterns of elephant. Draw each of the miniature patterns on a separate index card and include all dimensions. Then divide the kids into teams of two or three. Each team will be responsible for drawing and cutting out one of the elephant pattern pieces. Provide plenty of butcher paper or newspaper for the kids to work with. They'll also need lots of tape to make the larger pattern pieces.

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Thomas Starkey returned to England sometime before 13 December 1534 in order to make good his once abortive plan of entering royal service. By coincidence Starkey's career may almost serve as a barometer of the desperate struggle between Thomas Cromwell and the court conservatives. His relative prominence means a new embarrassment of evidence, or at least wildly disproportionate coverage of about two years of Starkey's life. When Starkey returned home he hoped to inspire a broadly based reform movement, just as he had in the Dialogue, and probably cared little who executed his policies. He also did not worry a great deal about what role fell to him, although his principal goal would appear to have been preaching. It seems that he looked to both Cromwell (probably because of the minister's well-known interest in intellectuals) and the conservatives, and both would disappoint him. Starkey approached Cromwell almost immediately, but only after he returned home, in contrast to Richard Morison who inundated the Secretary with requests for assistance from Italy. Starkey may already have been trying to distance himself from the nobility, probably largely because of his disappointment in Pole. In any case, he did not turn to Pole's friends for patronage, even while living in the Countess of Salisbury's London town house in Dowgate. Starkey's credentials impressed Cromwell, who quickly recruited him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The content and presentation of Starkey's Dialogue reveal that he had profited from Bembo's and Sadoleto's examples and acquired skills vital to any courtier, especially the ability to write and speak ambiguously. Since Starkey's major work lacks a title, we must assume with its nineteenth-century editor that Starkey meant it to be a dialogue. This, of course, means little given the vast sprawl of that form in the early sixteenth century, so that it is not surprising that commentators disagree over how well Starkey followed the example of his fifteenth-century predecessors. Joel Altman praises Starkey's ‘remarkable work’ because it ‘suggests how constructively the spirit of debate, exercising its ethical neutrality, may be applied to public business’. Altman would probably accept for Starkey Dennis Gilkey's characterization of the dialogues of More or Erasmus, which showed the reader ‘in an open-minded, open-ended way [how] to enter into and continue a dialogue of ideas, cultures, and customs’. Alistair Fox says much the same thing. It would then appear that the same sort of ‘polyphonic’ structure which Artur Blaim detects in Utopia also characterized the Dialogue. In both, independent points of view clashed constantly, and thereby shaped the form of the work. John King does not agree, contending that Starkey's work clearly led ‘Pole’ along, even if it was not as one-sided as More's polemical dialogues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first twenty or twenty-five years of his life, Thomas Starkey parlayed social standing and moderate wealth in his native Cheshire into one of the best humanist educations available in England. Perhaps the underpinnings of his civic humanism had been laid even before he reached Magdalen College, Oxford. While there he made contact with the most exalted circles of English society and European learning. He probably counted both the speakers in his Dialogue, Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, as his friends. Through Lupset if not directly Starkey encountered the writings of John Colet, Erasmus and, perhaps, Thomas More. The first and the last made a much greater impact on Starkey, who embraced Colet's notion of church reform and probably also pieces of his theology, even if Starkey picked and chose the parts which interested him and even they did not root for a while. Neither Erasmus's aloofness nor More's pessimism spoke to Starkey, but he did adopt much of More's analysis of English social problems. In addition to this copia of ideas, Starkey also gained a grounding in how to arrange it in the proper dispositio necessary to make an impact on his hearers. For the moment, Starkey's chief interests may have lain in the largely contemplative science of nature, but he left Oxford with many of the elements which would convert him to the vita activa and prepare him to pursue it successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This period, which begins before the Reformation and ends with the dawning of the Enlightenment, laid down the foundations of the thought and writing of the modern age and determined the future course of the German-speaking world. Germany in the modern sense did not yet exist, so the territory under discussion is the Holy Roman Empire. We must also remember that in this period most writers moved at will between Latin and German. Not until 1681 do the catalogues for the German book fairs show that more books were being published in German than in Latin. Books and writers before the Reformation Around 1445 in Mainz, Johann Gensfleisch (c. 1400–68), better known as Gutenberg, succeeded in printing with movable metal type. He also used paper, invented in the twelfth century, but only readily available in Germany in the fifteenth. Manuscript and print survived side by side and the boundaries between them remained blurred for a long time. Scriptoria producing multiple copies of manuscripts for sale already existed in the fifteenth century, anticipating the mass-production of the printing press, while books in the early decades were so costly as to constitute luxury items on a par with manuscripts. Books were printed on parchment and manuscripts written on paper. Many early printed books were designed to look like manuscripts, while the manuscript itself survived as a prestige tailormade item for rich, usually courtly patrons. But the book as commodity had come into being and it is no accident that the early centres of printing and publishing were important commercial towns on international trade routes: Mainz, Strasbourg, Basle, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Cologne and Leipzig. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a science experiment to help elementary and middle school students learn about the basics of direct current (DC) electrical circuits and see demonstrations of static electricity. They will also learn that some materials conduct electricity well and that others do not. A list of tools and materials needed is provided, along with demonstration, activities and discussion topics.

This paper describes how to use and to collect the common sense knowledge and how to process such information to create semantic network and to available it for applications. In this context, it is also presented an educational application which uses this knowledge to create a contextualized stories, because this game allows educators being co-authors on creating the story context taking into account their goals, pedagogical approach and the student΄s cultural reality. Then, teachers can adopt values, metaphors, cause and consequence relations or even a common vocabulary before and during the narrative game and, consequently, enabling students to feel identified in that story context being considered and get interested and engaged in collaborating with the teacher and other students to develop the story. In order to observe the use of this game in an educational environment and collect the target group opinion, a study case was performed at school with teachers and children, and is described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to deal with new requirements imposed by emerging learning environments following social computing paradigm, we address the problem of assessment of individual student skills, contributions, and activities. Rather then clicking links to launch tools or to view content, such learning environments encourage more of a monitoring mode of operation that is very difficult to sense and record by the software alone. In this paper we propose adoption of peer-assessment approach in order to overcome the obstacle as well as to make the overall solution scalable. We propose a novel method for students΄ peer-assessment based on trust concept. The overall approach is presented and practical experiments are conducted using developed web service. The grade scores determined by the learning peers/students are statistically proven as highly correlated with those marked by the teachers, indicating that approach proposed in this paper may be adopted as a legitimate assessment method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]