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Examples of mobile phones being used with teachers to provide continuing professional development (CPD) in emerging economies at scale are largely absent from the research literature. We outline English in Action's (EIA) model for providing 80,000 teachers with CPD to improve their communicative language teaching in Bangladesh over nine years. EIA's CPD program is delivered face to face and supported through open distance learning (ODL). This innovative model of teacher CPD is supported through peer learning and self-study using a variety of print, audio and video resources. Drawing on the success of EIA's pilot studies, where internal and external evaluation reported significant improvement in teachers' and students' English-language competence after one year, the current phase is using low-cost mobile phones, or the "trainer in your pocket" to deliver CPD to 12,500 teachers through 2015. We believe EIA's teacher CDP model is best suited to assist the project in achieving one of its primary goals: to increase the English-language proficiency of 12 million students, allowing them to access greater social and economic opportunities in the future. We argue EIA's use of mobile phones for the provision of teacher CPD -- at scale -- is timely and replicable in both developed and developing contexts. (Contains 3 figures and 2 notes.)

Developing a model for effective large-scale continuous professional development (CPD) for teachers remains a significant obstacle for many governments worldwide. This article describes the development and evolution of Vital--a CPD program designed to enhance the teaching of information communication technology in state-funded primary and secondary schools in England. The article concludes that the success of the program comes from its innovative bottom-up response and reconceptualization of CPD as being more than just externally designed courses. The program encourages and responds to teachers' reflective practice matching the teaching and learning demands of the twenty-first century. (Contains 2 notes and 1 figure.)

Multiliteracies-related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with Year 8 students in New York City's Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multi-modal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese-American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip-hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students' artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational websites using HTML and Flash. It argues that the redesigned websites are a new set of multi-modal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences.

Many school literacy practices ignore adolescents' new digitally mediated subjectivity as it has been shaped by the new media age. Youth possess often unappreciated repertories of practice which allow them to use their imagination and creativity to combine print, visual and digital modes in combinations that can be applied to new educational, civic, media and workplace contexts. This paper reports on research in two middle years classrooms in New York City's Chinatown, where students' design skills were recognised and validated when they were encouraged to critically re-represent curricular knowledge through multimodal design. The curriculum, rather than privileging print-only representations, recognised the linguistic, social, economic and cultural capital that different students brought to school. The findings suggest schools should harness youths' creativity--that often manifests itself through their capital resources--as they integrate and adapt to the new digital affordances acquired through their out-of-school literacy practices.

Abstract Background Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) consumption has been one of the most common causes of produce-associated salmonellosis in the United States. Contamination may originate from animal waste, insects, soil or water. Current guidelines for fresh tomato production recommend the use of potable water for applications coming in direct contact with the fruit, but due to high demand, water from other sources is frequently used. We sought to describe the overall bacterial diversity on the surface of tomato fruit and the effect of two different water sources (ground and surface water) when used for direct crop applications by generating a 454-pyrosequencing 16S rRNA dataset of these different environments. This study represents the first in depth characterization of bacterial communities in the tomato fruit surface and the water sources commonly used in commercial vegetable production. Results The two water sources tested had a significantly different bacterial composition. Proteobacteria was predominant in groundwater samples, whereas in the significantly more diverse surface water, abundant phyla also included Firmicutes, Actinobacteria and Verrucomicrobia. The fruit surface bacterial communities on tomatoes sprayed with both water sources could not be differentiated using various statistical methods. Both fruit surface environments had a high representation of Gammaproteobacteria, and within this class the genera Pantoea and Enterobacter were the most abundant. Conclusions Despite the major differences observed in the bacterial composition of ground and surface water, the season long use of these very different water sources did not have a significant impact on the bacterial composition of the tomato fruit surface. This study has provided the first next-generation sequencing database describing the bacterial communities living in the fruit surface of a tomato crop under two different spray water regimes, and therefore represents an important step forward towards the development of science-based metrics for Good Agricultural Practices.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the challenges in enacting authentic game-based learning predicated on dialogic pedagogy, student participation with digital tools, and human capacities for learning.

This Special Issue of Digital Culture & Education (DCE) provides innovative programmatic approaches to HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men that have sex with men (MSM) and transgender persons using information and communication technology (ICT) at a time when these same populations are experiencing an alarming upward trend of new HIV infections. During a successful participatory consultation in Washington D.C. in May 2013 hosted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and co-supported by the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), representatives from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Australia and the United States shared innovative uses of communication technology across HIV research, programs, outreach, advocacy and public-private partnerships. Believing it crucial to share their innovations more widely-through open-access channels-led us to working in partnership with these frontline workers, activists, researchers and educators to further document and share their technological innovations in different global contexts. Importantly, we prioritised working with frontline workers and activists by providing cyclical and targeted writing mentoring to assist them in writing about their successful digital interventions. Disseminating this timely work through open-access channels, like Digital Culture & Education (DCE) means that researchers in less resourced institutions, practitioners and activists in the field and the general public can better understand how ICT, particularly mobile technologies, provides unprecedented opportunities to more effectively reach and engage gay men, other MSM and transgender populations across the HIV prevention, testing, treatment and care cascade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]