This exploratory case study investigated the ways non-Aboriginal teachers of Biology conceive of incorporating Aboriginal perspectives into their delivery of the Biology curriculum in Alberta. The participants in this study were non-Aboriginal Biology teachers teaching in schools with predominantly non-Aboriginal students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of the teacher participants and explored issues and challenges that they face infusing Aboriginal contexts into their teaching. The qualitative data generated were coded using themes developed from a conceptual framework for curriculum implementation. The majority of the teachers saw value in incorporating Aboriginal perspectives but shared concerns due to: unclear definitions of Aboriginal and Aboriginal perspectives; an inadequate knowledge base; and lack of material resources and professional development opportunities. Recommendations to help non-Aboriginal teachers include: better access to and targeted professional development and resources; greater clarification on the definitions of Aboriginal and Aboriginal perspectives; and greater amounts of administrative and governmental support.

Rural renewable electrification programs are increasingly being used as a means of providing the rural poor in developing countries with access to electricity. Those programs have varied significantly in design and implementation, as well as in their degrees of success. The explanations for the lack of success and the non-sustainability of the earliest programs are widely accepted as these tended to be technical demonstration projects that relied totally on funding from donor organisations or governments. These projects ignored or overlooked the vital question of how ongoing operational, maintenance and replacement costs would be met. Many genuine programs, however, also met with limited success and much effort has been invested in attempting to understand the reasons for this lack of success. To increase the rates of success of these programs, best practice guidelines were developed. Despite these efforts, many programs have continued to meet with limited success. These points required better explanations of the reasons for program success and failure, which requires a greater understanding of these programs. This thesis looks more closely at solar PV electrification programs being undertaken in the Asia-Pacific region to understand why some programs continue to be more successful than others. It aims to understand the decisions behind the planning and implementation of the programs and the reasons that are being implemented in the way that they are, the selection of program objectives, the actual benefits of the programs the and causes of any factors that contribute to their apparent success or lack of success. This understanding is obtained by undertaking in-depth comprehensive field surveys to obtain the views of all program stakeholders. The outcomes of these field surveys are then used to develop a comprehensive set of success criteria and a set of indicators that can be used to measure the success of rural renewable electrification programs. A roadmap that could be followed by the program planners and implementers to ensure program success is also provided.

In a period of significant global scientific and technological change tertiary students need to be more adequately prepared to effectively integrate into the competitive working environments of the 21st century. For this reason, these students need to be educated to use a variety of skills such as problem-solving and teamwork to support them in their future working conditions. These skills can be acquired through the use of a range of innovative approaches. A variety of these approaches is being introduced in a range of university courses in different institutions in the western world, including problem-based learning (PBL). The problem-based learning approach is also now being introduced to more traditional learning environments in Asian institutions such as Singapore and Malaysia. My study extends this innovative pedagogical approach, exploring the implementation of a PBL approach across a number of undergraduate classes in two universities in the South of Viet nam. It also reports on the students' perspectives in learning through a PBL approach. This study examines the impact of a PBL approach when it was introduced in a range of Vietnamese undergraduate courses. A group of eleven university teachers in two universities in the South of Vietnam were approached by the investigator and agreed to be involved in the study as individual cases for investigation. The teachers implemented a PBL approach to teaching in one of their undergraduate classes. In addition, 182 students from eleven different classes where a PBL approach was implemented agreed to discuss their perceptions of this shift in their learning approach. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted with both the teachers and their students for the purpose of gathering data related to the impact of the PBL approach on the student and staff experiences. The study shows that Vietnamese teachers and students effectively adopted a PBL approach, and they commented on the worth of PBL for their teaching and learning. Both the teaching staff and students engaged willingly with the PBL approach. Although some assessment approaches were used that reflected the focus of PBL, there was still a heavy reliance on testing as the major form of assessment. The study is expected to contribute to Vietnamese education by providing an evaluation of the PBL implementation processes. The examination of all aspects of PBL implementation has the potential to provide educators with a critical analysis of the processes in order to support their understandings when making the decision to broaden the teaching and learning approaches currently used. Further, the study affirms the implementation of PBL as a significant contribution in preparing learners to negotiate complex demands of the 21st century.

Bluetooth is a low cost and low power wireless technology for connecting portable and / or fixed Bluetooth enabled devices to form short-range wireless ad hoc personal area networks (PANs). As the Bluetooth specification does not specify a protocol to form ad hoc Bluetooth networks, a method for forming an efficient Bluetooth network under a practical networking scenario is still an open research problem. This thesis introduces an approach to implement an indoor ad hoc Bluetooth wireless network, Bluetooth information exchange network (BIEN). This network formation is based on Bluetooth and Java technologies. A set of Bluetooth enabled devices configured with the BIEN software application are able to spontaneously establish a dynamic multi-hop wireless network using Bluetooth technology without the need of formal network infrastructure, centralized administration, fixed routers or access points. In this study, the performance evaluation focuses on the relation between network capacity and topology by testing end-to-end performance in terms of throughput and the latency of communication links with various parameters, including the hop number between nodes and the number of slaves in piconets. The evaluation results show that the throughput reduces with the increased length of a path, and with an increase in the number of slaves in a piconet in the network. The latency also increases with path length, and with the number of slaves in a piconet in the different experimental BIENs, whether if there is traffic or not in the networks. Experimental results have further confirmed the necessity to minimize the number of bridge nodes in the Bluetooth networks due to their traffic bottleneck effect. This work is an attempt at implementation of a distributed multi-hop scatter net with an integrated routing protocol in the practical environments, while most of the literature focuses on covering the modelling of it. It intends to demonstrate how Bluetooth technology with Java technology can be used to design, develop and deploy ad hoc wireless networks with the commercial Bluetooth devices, and examine how well Bluetooth technology supports ad hoc multi-hop wireless network technology.

Zugl.: Halle-Wittenberg, Univ., Diss., 2005

Zugl.: Wismar, Hochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2003

Universiẗat, Diss.--Kassel, 1997.

Zugl.: Erfurt, University, Diss., 2007 u.d.T.: Grobbel, Merle: Factors influencing the implementation of EU directives.

Universiẗat-Gesamthochsch., Diss.--Kassel, 1996.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1993.