Institute of Education

What is ‘higher education’ and what does it do for persons, organisations, communities, cities, nations and the world? What difference does it make? How do we know? While these questions and others related to the contributions or effects of higher or tertiary education are discussed across the world, there is no agreement on what are those contributions. The higher education sector is connected to most other parts of society, and it is often difficult or impossible to isolate its discrete causal effects. In some quarters a disabling thinking prevails. Higher education is modelled as if all that this vast sector produces is measurable earnings benefits for individual graduates and new research-based products for globally competitive industry. Yet graduate earnings are partly shaped outside education, by family background and economic fluctuations; and higher education not only augments careers, it immerses students in knowledge, and it helps to shape them as people, and has many other individual and collective-social outcomes, as Assessing the contributions of higher education will show. Still, the fact that radical simplifications dominate this debate is not surprising. It is difficult to grasp the full range of what the sector does. There is no universal template and no comprehensive account. Perceptions of what higher education is vary according to beliefs about government and society, and the disciplinary or purposive lens used to view the sector, not to mention the interests at stake. Is both a common and comprehensive understanding possible, and if so, how? That question repeatedly returns during this book.

This article responds to calls to better understand the digital literacy practices of second and foreign-language writers. Researchers followed two Arab undergraduates as they completed a research writing task in a first-year writing course, tracing how these students used common digital resources, particularly digital 1) research tools, 2) writing tools and 3) course materials. Via screen-capture and regular interview sessions the participants’ research and writing activity was observed over a period of five weeks. To understand the resulting data, Vygotskian notions of mediation were combined with writing as extended mind, a recently introduced theoretical program that emphasizes the distributed nature of cognition. Study participants were found to deploy a wide range of digital resources, often in complex and creative ways. We identify two distinct mediation profiles that we argue mark two distinct approaches to research writing: a relatively brain-bound approach, which uses external resources primarily to structure internal cognitive function, and a more extended approach, which offloads a higher degree of cognitive function to the writer’s environment. These findings offer unique insight into the digital literacy practices of an understudied student population. They also raise important questions about how best to teach writing in a digital age.

This chapter examines 20 years of public sector reforms in Russia and their impacts on the structure, functions, and outcomes of policies, programs, and institutions in the areas of social support, health care, and education. Understanding the social system that has emerged over that period requires knowledge of sector-specific changes at multiple levels of government (federal, regional, and municipal) as well as nation-wide changes in administrative and civil service regulations and practices.