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Work at Northumbria University has focussed on activity that extends opportunities for students to engage directly with the skills development necessary for sound academic practice. This has included highly visual campaigns on the "Plagiarism trap", providing access to Turnitin plagiarism detection software, guides and sessions to highlight use of associated referencing tools. Sessions on a variety of topics, such as supporting study skills and reading originality reports, have been provided for students on taught, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. This provision has included students working on collaborative partners' sites and also those on research programmes. Alongside the activities with students, "designing out" approaches have been embedded in staff development within the educator community at Northumbria. Formative use of Turnitin is integrated throughout programmes and academic practice development is formally recognised within the University Learning and Teaching Strategy's focus on information literacy. This article outlines and reviews these activities in a critical institutional context and evaluates responses from a variety of students and educators to determine how effective these measures have been.

Explores the ways gender influences the pattern of recruitment into information technology (IT) and design courses using data from a study involving 26 design and 27 IT students. Instrumental reasons for course selection are balanced by intrinsic satisfaction, with satisfaction more evident in design-course selection, but both design and IT are seen to be gendered discourses. (SLD)

There is continuing evidence of gender bias in the use of computers in schools. Boys' greater access and confidence is multidetermined; however, one factor is the nature of the packages themselves and the imagery they deploy. Unlike the computer games sector where images remain crudely sexist, educational software providers have developed software which use 'androgynous' humanoid figures where gender-stereotypical features are absent. There is, however, no social or cultural warrant for human representations which are non-gendered. We hypothesised that children would have no notion of genderless persons and would assign gender to the figures, reverting to male as norm, but that girls would be more likely than boys to identify androgynous computer characters as female. In our study we asked primary school children to talk about the images, making up names and describing them. Content analysis of the data was used and a gender constancy test was included as a check for validity. A small pilot study supported our hypothesis and the results from a larger scale study confirm that children identify neutral characters as male, but that girls are more willing to see them as female. We conclude that more research should be undertaken into the ways teachers can influence the child's perception of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]