IntroductionThis paper focuses on the professional and academic development of teacher educators in relation to research. It draws on findings from a small-scale, comparative study of teacher educators in two higher education institutions in the south of England. There is a growing need for teacher educators in the UK to develop research skills (Harrison & McKeon 2008), because of the emphasis on research assessment in higher education (HE) and increasing expectations on all university lecturers to have an active research profile. In addition, most postgraduate initial teacher education is now accredited at master's level and often involves some small scale research, therefore teacher educators need to ensure that they possess the appropriate research as well as teaching skills.Within this context, the growing need for teacher educators to develop research identities is discussed in relation to mentoring and support in two universities (one new, the other well established). Key contextual features of each university are highlighted and the perspectives of the teacher educators and research mentors are analysed within a situated learning framework (Lave & Wenger 1991). Positive aspects of individual and collective mentoring practices and other forms of research support are identified, as well as barriers to research activity arising from teacher educators' professional and academic roles. Teacher educators: transition from school to universityA growing body of research on the development of teacher educators has highlighted the difficulties and tensions experienced by teacher educators who make the transition from school teaching into academic life, especially in the area of research, and the need for effective induction procedures into higher education . For example, Dinkelman et al. (2008), also in the UK, argue that teacher educators face numerous challenges in making the complex transition into new academic roles; they can therefore lack confidence and often still see themselves as teachers. Similarly, Murray (2008) stresses that teacher educators are characterised by a strong sense of commitment to students, with teaching as their 'anchor of professional identity ' (2008:119), low self confidence in relation to academic roles and varying attitudes to research. Murray (2008) found that induction into research was particularly weak, with few opportunities to work alongside experienced researchers in a 'collaborative learning environment ' (2008:126). developing a professional identity and the value of role models as a key factor. Like the UK studies, these have stressed the value of within-team development and support practices, rather than outside mentoring and support, although these projects are generally focusing on teacher educators improving their professional or subject pedagogy, rather 3 than on developing research identities. On a wider scale, the importance of personal and professional biographies in the shaping of academic identities is also emphasised by some researchers (Keltchtermans 2003, Skerr...

Link to record in KARThe purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of audio-visual synchrony in podcasting and its possible pedagogical benefits. 'Synchrony' in this study refers to the simultaneous playback of audio and video data streams, so that the transitions between presentation slides occur at ''lecturer chosen" points in the audio commentary. Manufacturers of lecture recording software (e.g. ProfCast) would have us believe that the synchrony of image and audio should improve the learning experience.We have yet to see in the literature any empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. In our study, 90 participants in two groups undertook two electronic lectures (e-lectures) on two separate topics, the subject matter of neither was familiar to them beforehand. Each group experienced one ''synchronous" presentation (electure) of one of the topics, and one ''separate" presentation (i.e. PowerPoint and audio files separately presented) of the other topic. Each group therefore experienced both ''synchronous" and ''separate" delivery and they were then given an MCQ test that assessed five levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Results show no differences in innate ability between the two groups but the evidence supported our primary hypothesis in that statistically significantly higher test scores were seen when participants viewed a synchronous electure; these scores were accounted for by subjects' performance at three of the five levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Qualitative 'attitude' survey results also displayed participant preference towards the synchronous over the asynchronous mode of delivery, and in spite of general acceptance of the proposed benefits of electronic proceedings, a majority preference towards traditional rather than electronic lectures. Despite this conservatism, this paper explores in more detail the potential benefits of podcasting via synchronous PowerPoint and voice.

Erlang processes run independently of each other, each using separate memory and communicating with each other by message passing. These processes, while executing different code, do so following a number of common patterns. By examining different examples of Erlang-style concurrency in client/server architectures, we identify the generic and specific parts of the code and extract the generic code to form a process skeleton. In Erlang, the most commonly used patterns have been implemented in library modules, commonly referred to as OTP behaviours. They contain the generic code framework for concurrency and error handling, simplifying the complexity of concurrent programming and protecting the developer from many common pitfalls.

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As the number of cores grows in commodity architectures so does the likelihood of failures. A distributed actor model potentially facilitates the development of reliable and scalable software on these architectures. Key components include lightweight processes which 'share nothing' and hence can fail independently. Erlang is not only increasingly widely used, but the underlying actor model has been a beacon for programming language design, influencing for example Scala, Clojure and Cloud Haskell.While the Erlang distributed actor model is inherently scalable, we demonstrate that it is limited by some pragmatic factors. We address two network scalability issues here: globally registered process names must be updated on every node (virtual machine) in the system, and any Erlang nodes that communicate maintain an active connection. That is, there is a fully connected O(n 2 ) network of n nodes.We present the design, implementation, and initial evaluation of a conservative extension of Erlang -Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang. SD Erlang partitions the global namespace and connection network using s groups. An s group is a set of nodes with its own process namespace and with a fully connected network within the s group, but only individual connections outside it. As a node may belong to more than one s group it is possible to construct arbitrary connection topologies like trees or rings.We present an operational semantics for the s group functions, and outline the validation of conformance between the implementation and the semantics using the QuickCheck automatic testing tool. Our preliminary evaluation in comparison with distributed Erlang shows that SD Erlang dramatically improves network scalability even if the number of global operations is tiny (0.01%). Moreover, even in the absence of global operations the reduced connection maintenance overheads mean that SD Erlang scales better beyond 80 nodes (1920 cores).