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This is a brief report on a yearly festival at a Shintō shrine in northern Japan, during which salt is produced by a traditional technique: sea water is filtered through layers of salt-saturated kelp in order to increase its salinity. The procedure, which lasts three days, is being kept alive as communal memory and for educational purposes. The successive steps are described as witnessed by the author in 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents two sequential case reports of how 60 schools in the London Borough of Camden used action research in three phases of development of their local school system reform, from a traditional council-led, top-down model of centrally based professional development and monitoring of schools, to one that is schools-led and 'bottom-up' in nature, but still in close partnership with its local council and community. The article uses a sociocultural lens through which to view this journey of self-reform, tracking change through three evolutions of the sociocultural model as professional learning becomes situated in classrooms and between schools in Camden, as motivations to develop and change become increasingly intrinsic and less driven by fear of failure or the consequences of failure. Of critical importance is the feedback-rich context created by adoption of enquiry- and coaching-based learning models at classroom, organizational and system levels. This both fuels and is fuelled by the strategic collaboration of head teachers and by system leadership also provided by middle leaders, whose increased cross-school agency builds improvement capacity and collaborative capital. The article does not report on the action research alone: unlike many accounts of action research for change, this account provides a narrative backdrop in which to locate both scientific and system developments. This is provided through three short vignettes that place the changes reported in a societal, political and community context, without whose energetic actors (in the form of local political and community leaders and school governors) the local 'civic governance' so strongly behind these reforms, would not have existed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We will introduce MAGDAS project of Space Environment Research Center (SERC), Kyushu University (KU) for space weather. The new MAGDAS data can be used to monitor global electromagnetic and plasma environment change in geospace, and then to bring about a better understanding of the complex and compound Sun-Earth system. The SERC also conducts daily space weather "now casting", to train and educate KU students, and to globally disseminate space weather information to the scientific community and the general public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to systematically study the information need, seeking, and use behavior of middle school teachers of Taiwan historical resources, and to explore the implications of the findings for digital library system design. This research employs multiple methods, first by qualitative approach followed by quantitative approach. The study investigated elementary and high school teachers, and compared the findings with those of the scholar user group, using literature analysis, deep interview, and questionnaire survey as the methods for data collection, and content analysis, case study, and statistic analysis for data analysis. The results lead to (1) a better understanding of information seeking and use behavior of primary and middle school teachers of Taiwan historical archives; (2) deeper knowledge and empirical data for developing theory on human information behavior of Taiwan local people; (3) identification of important teaching and learning resources on Taiwan and the salient characteristics of those resources; (4) development of information organization guideline for localized digital library and museum systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]