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New educators may feel overwhelmed by the options available for engaging students through classroom participation. However, it may be helpful to recognize that participatory pedagogical systems often have constructivist roots. Adopting a constructivist perspective, our paper considers three meta-practices that encourage student participation: designing activities, leading others, and assessing peers. We explored the consequences of these meta-practices for important student outcomes, including content knowledge, engagement, self-efficacy, sense of community, and self-awareness. We found that different meta-practices were associated with different combinations of outcomes. This discovery demonstrates the benefit of studying meta- practices so as to reveal the nuanced effects that may arise from pedagogical choices. In addition, an understanding of meta-practices can help leadership educators to be more discerning and intentional in their course designs.

HIS holidays over, before the individual and strenuous winter work of his library begins, the wise librarian concentrates for a few weeks on the Annual Meeting of the Library Association. This year the event is of unusual character and of great interest. Fifty years of public service on the part of devoted workers are to be commemorated, and there could be no more fitting place for the commemoration than Edinburgh. It is a special meeting, too, in that for the first time for many years the Library Association gathering will take a really international complexion. If some too exacting critics are forward to say that we have invited a very large number of foreign guests to come to hear themselves talk, we may reply that we want to hear them. There is a higher significance in the occasion than may appear on the surface—for an effort is to be made in the direction of international co‐operation. In spite of the excellent work of the various international schools, we are still insular. Now that the seas are open and a trip to America costs little more than one to (say) Italy, we hope that the way grows clearer to an almost universal co‐working amongst libraries. It is overdue. May our overseas guests find a real atmosphere of welcome, hospitality and friendship amongst us this memorable September!

Professor David Keith‐Lucas, M.A., M.I.Mech.E., F.R.Ae.S., assumed the office of President for the year 1968–9 at the Annual General Meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

After ten years of development, the English government adopted the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) as the prescribed method for assessing housing conditions. Prior to 2006, the assessment was based on the condition of the building and the presence of necessary facilities. Being ‘building focussed’, the basis of the severity of the condition was the extent and cost of any remedial works considered necessary to make the dwelling ‘fit for human habitation’. The HHSRS shifts the focus to the potential threat to health and safety from any defects and deficiencies. The assessment takes account of the likelihood of a hazardous occurrence, and the probable severity of harm that could result from such an occurrence. This approach acknowledges that defects that would be relatively inexpensive to deal with can pose a serious threat to health and/or safety.

Work on the development of the HHSRS included matching data on housing conditions with data on health outcomes. The analyses of the matched database provided information on, among other factors, the range and severity of harm outcomes associated with particular hazards. As the health data used was that available from hospitals and general practitioners, it meant that the health outcomes were those serious enough for the victim to seek medical attention. It has now been realised that it is possible to compare the one-off cost of works to remove or reduce housing hazards with the estimated annual saving to the health service. Using this approach, it has been estimated that poor housing in England is costing the health service around £600 million a year. This cost to the health service is estimated to be around 40% of the total cost of poor housing to society.

In light of contemporary critiques of New Zealand comprehensive schooling published mainly in the popular press, it is timely to re‐examine the origins of and the rationale for the widespread adoption of this model of education. The comprehensive schooling philosophy, it was recently alleged, has produced a situation in which ‘as many as one in five pupils in the system is failing’ and where ‘there is a large group at the bottom who are not succeeding’. This group was estimated to include some 153,000 students out of the total current New Zealand student population of 765,000. In this context, however, Chris Saunders and Mike Williams, principals of Onehunga High School and Aorere College in Auckland respectively, have noted that having underachieving students in secondary schools in particular is not a recent phenomenon. A large ‘tail’ of poor performing high school students has long been a cause of concern, Williams suggests.

In the United Kingdom, partnership is increasingly a requirement of public sector funding. Such partnerships, formed strategically to win government contracts, can prove brittle; collaboration is often superficial. This chapter explores how a consortium of Scottish higher, further and adult education institutions, assembled expediently to respond to a contract arising from a Scottish Government strategy for adult literacies, nevertheless became genuinely collaborative. In the course of a six-year project to develop new professional qualifications for adult literacies tutors, a core group within the consortium developed a resilient affiliation able to lever advantage within individual institutions from its association. Its intentionality and readiness to transgress boundaries in the face of institutional obstacles were grounded in a shared pedagogical perspective. We examine how common understandings and shared objectives were forged in a series of critical incidents. The territorialism that often inhibits genuine collaboration was weakened in the face of the allegiances precipitated by these incidents. The virtual learning environment, as a shared boundary object, facilitated the negotiation of interinstitutional collaboration. We conclude that critical incidents and boundary objects can be planned into partnership working to build trust through exposure to risk and vulnerability.

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative web-based eLearning platform called ICT-FLAG that provides e-assessment tools with general-purpose formative assessment services featuring learning analytics and gamification.

The paper reports on the technical development of the platform driven by the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing software methodology, which guides the platform construction, including the analysis and design steps.

The ICT-FLAG platform is technically tested by integrating it into a real e-assessment tool. Results are positive in terms of functional and non-functional aspects as well as user’s satisfaction on usability, emotional state, thus validating the platform as a valuable educational tool.

Because of the chosen technical paper as article type, validation of the impact of the ICT-FLAG platform in the learning process is not provided. Ongoing research with this platform is to measure the learning outcomes of its use in a real context of eLearning.

The paper shows implications of the main technical issues and challenges encountered during the integration of the ICT-FLAG platform with external eLearning tools, involving relevant aspects of interoperability, security, modularity, scalability, portability and so on.

This platform can fill the gap of many e-assessment systems, which currently do not have built-in analytical and gamification tools for learning, thus providing them with the experience to improve the quality of education and learning.

The purpose of this paper is to report on and describe the use of MediaWiki and Google Docs at undergraduate level as online collaboration tools for co‐constructing knowledge in group project work.

Participants included 22 undergraduate students from the Information Management Programme at the University of Hong Kong. All the students had used MediaWiki for the major project in their knowledge management course and Google Docs for their final year project. Questionnaires and semi‐structured telephone interviews were administered after completion of the course/final year project. All interview conversations were audio‐recorded and transcribed for analysis. Each transcript was e‐mailed to the interviewee for accuracy review. The qualitative data supplemented, enriched and clarified the quantitative responses from the online surveys.

The results indicated that some of the students had positive experiences using the tools for online collaboration in the group projects. Although more students found MediaWiki an effective knowledge management tool than Google Docs, many students highlighted the user‐friendly features of Google Docs.

These platforms (MediaWiki and Google Docs) gave teachers the facility to closely monitor student progress, and to provide feedback to assist in the effective management of the report‐writing process. Moreover,the use of Google Docs in an academic setting remains largely unexplored in the literature, even though the collaborative features of MediaWiki and Google Docs are relatively comparable.

Over the last few decades, the formal school curriculum in many countries has become increasingly prescribed and attainment orientated with an insistent pressure to measure progress in the name of ‘raising standards’. This form of constraint on educational practice has provoked counter trends in a desire to enrich the curriculum. Situating learning activities in the open air have become increasingly popular as a counter to formalised schooling. The UK, for example, has seen legislated outside spaces for early years and a growing interest in Forest Schools. The long tradition of activity centres, outside school visits and field trips—offering a valuable way to augment formal learning—has survived in many school settings. The claims for the benefit of taking learning outside are extensive. They range across claiming value for both individual and societal well-being, improving mental and physical health, as well as a way of sustaining inclusion, social cohesion and democratic practice (Nichol, Higgins, Ross, & Mannion, 2007). This article explores how aesthetics and the body may be seen to feature in outside educational experience. By drawing on the work of Richard Shusterman and his extensive work on somaesthetics, the purpose of the article is to augment or ground claims for the worth of ‘outside’ learning in embodied aesthetic experience and therefore help illuminate what is distinctively educational about moving learning beyond the walls of the school.