Suchergebnisse

This article reports on a one year, mixed methods study of 13 teacher educators at work in English and Scottish higher education institutions. Framed by cultural-historical activity theory, itself a development of a Marxian analysis of political economy, the research shows how, under conditions of academic capitalism, these teacher educators were denied opportunities to accumulate capital (e.g. research publications, grants) and were proletarianised. The reasons for this stratification were complex but two factors were significant: first, the importance of maintaining relationships with schools in the name of 'partnership' teacher education; and, second, the historical cultures of teacher education in HE.

Sandy beaches are highly dynamic systems which provide natural protection from the impact of waves to coastal communities. With coastal erosion hazards predicted to increase globally, data to inform decision making on erosion mitigation and adaptation strategies is becoming critical. However, multi-temporal topographic data over wide geographical areas is expensive and time consuming and often requires highly trained professionals. In this study we demonstrate a novel approach combining citizen science with low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles that reliably produces survey-grade morphological data able to model sediment dynamics from event to annual scales. The high-energy wave-dominated coast of south-eastern Australia, in Victoria, is used as a field laboratory to test the reliability of our protocol and develop a set of indices to study multi-scale erosional dynamics. We found that citizen scientists provide unbiased data as accurate as professional researchers. We then observed that open-ocean beaches mobilise three times as much sediment as embayed beaches and distinguished between slowed and accelerated erosional modes. The data was also able to assess the efficiency of sand nourishment for shore protection. Our citizen science protocol provides high quality monitoring capabilities, which although subject to important legislative preconditions, it is applicable in other parts of the world and transferable to other landscape systems where the understanding of sediment dynamics is critical for management of natural or anthropogenic processes.

In wildlife research, our ability to GPS track sufficient numbers of individuals is always limited by cost, which restricts inference of species–habitat relationships. Here, we describe the modification and use of a relatively new and inexpensive off-the-shelf GPS device, to provide detailed and accurate information on the movement patterns of individuals (mountain brushtail possums, Trichosurus cunninghami), including how movement varies through time, and how individuals interact with each other. Our results demonstrated that this technology has enormous potential to contribute to an improved understanding of the movement patterns and habitat preferences of wildlife at a fraction of the cost of traditional GPS technology.