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This article extends our understanding of inland waterways by theorising the temporary absences of water in canals and rivers as possibilities for action, that is, affordances. The interplay of temporary absence and presence of water in the inland waterways provides a range of potentialities for various activities and practices. Affordance theory can help us to further theorise material absences and position them as important elements of performing, practicing and interpreting place. We show how temporary absence of water can create spatial, historical and communicative affordances, affording the movement of boats, revealing and recreating the past and raising environmental awareness. The paper is based on semi-ethnographic research on the rivers and canals in the United Kingdom and Italy, featuring document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with various waterway users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent policy initiatives in England have focused on promoting ‘interactive’ teaching in schools, with a clear expectation that this will lead to improvements in learning. This expectation is based on the perceived success of such approaches in other parts of the world. At the same time, there has been a large investment in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources, and particularly in interactive whiteboard technology. This paper explores the idea of interactive teaching in relation to the interactive technology which might be used to support it. It explains the development of a framework for the detailed analysis of teaching and learning in activity settings which is designed to represent the features and relationships involved in interactivity. When applied to a case study of interactive teaching during a lesson involving a variety of technology-based activities, the framework reveals a confusion of purpose in students' use of an ICT resource that limits the potential for learning when students are working independently. Discussion of relationships between technical and pedagogical interactivity points a way forward concerning greater focus on learning goals during activity in order to enable learners to be more autonomous in exploiting ICT's affordances, and the conclusion identifies the variables and issues which need to be considered in future research which will illuminate this path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's experiences of outdoor environments have been studied now for more than 40 years yet no research has specifically focussed on children's experiences of water play in constructed spaces of city centres. This article discusses the development of an observational mapping tool, called TOWEC, to record the interaction of children with water. It then reports findings and analysis from observations over a year-long period of 3,399 children interacting with water in the award winning public open space of the Peace Gardens in the centre of the City of Sheffield, UK. The findings reveal that children undertake both active and passive activities associated with the constructed water features and that these activities are influenced by gender, age and temperature, but not ethnicity. The water features were not designed for children to play in but the children realise the potential affordance that the water features provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst concerns over skills shortages, both the current British government and its coalition predecessors have, against the grain of wider austerity measures, invested heavily in the apprenticeship system. The majority of apprentices are, and have historically been, employed within small businesses. However, research suggests that, in the main, small firms tend to approach management issues – including workplace employee development – in a less formal way than their larger counterparts. What implications this has for apprentices and their workplace learning remains unclear. The article aims to address this gap, and it does so through a qualitative study of apprentices in three English engineering firms of different sizes. The findings broadly support the established picture of informal working and learning processes in the small firm. However, it is argued that this does notinevitablyrestrict apprentices’ on-the-job learning. Rather, the ways in which apprentices learn, and what they learn, are conditioned by the interaction – or ‘co-participation’ – between the opportunities afforded by the workplace, and the apprentice’s subjective agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Open education emerged when the state had an active role in shaping and financing post-secondary education. In the twenty-first century, two pressures influence the way openness is conceived. The first is the compounding of neo-liberal economics with austerity following the financial crash of 2008. The second is the consolidation of networked and digital technologies at an institutional and infrastructural level, illustrated by massive open online courses (MOOCs). This article examines the place of open education in this emerging climate of economic constraint and technological possibilities. The article argues that openness is not a property or feature of a technology but that such properties can result in affordances. This understanding informs a review of openness in The Open University (UK), in relation to MOOCs and in the open educational resources movement. A relational view of affordance suggests that openness depends in significant ways on the character of broad social processes and that if they change then the affordances of technologies for openness change with them. The current marketisation of higher education, the reduction in public finances and continuing economic uncertainty lead to contradictory and conflicting pressures. Arguing in favour of education as a public good, the article criticises calls for a ‘business model’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]