Preamble ix introduction xiii The plannersA wartime meeting 3 The idea of a national research university 4 Education manoeuvres 10 The idea takes shape 14The maestros 'Pick the men and the rest will look after itself' 20

The hypothesis that seekers of high stimulation would prefer the color red and seekers of low stimulation would prefer the color blue was investigated with 170 adolescents. High to low stimulation-seeking was assessed with the Sensation Seeking Scale, red and blue stimulus colors were presented to the subjects and a preference response elicited. Both boys and girls who scored high on the Sensation Seeking Scale preferred the color red and those who scored low preferred the color blue. This provides further construct validity for the Sensation Seeking Scale and supports current theoretical underpinnings in the area of control and stimulation-seeking.

A small preliminary PhD research project used OpenEssayist, a web based automated writing evaluation (AWE) system designed to provide immediate formative feedback to students, to gain insights into how students use such systems. One of the themes which emerged from the data analysis was that most of the students on the module did not make use of OpenEssayist, which raised the question of why? Are there barriers to student use of immediate AWE feedback? The low uptake of use of OpenEssayist reflects the findings of (Attali, 2004), whose research on the Criterion AWE system found that 71% of students did not make use of the redrafting facilities of Criterion and were excluded from his data. All thirty (n = 30) students on the module subject of the preliminary research had the opportunity to use OpenEssayist, regardless of whether they participated in the research, only four students chose to do so. Two students who did not use OpenEssayist were interviewed. The first did not use OpenEssayist for technical reasons, the second did not have enough time to learn about the software. It is not known why the other students did not make use of OpenEssayist. This short paper reports on the preliminary findings of non-use of AWE and outlines how that has led to a research question for a PhD project, which is a work-in-progress. The question is: Are there barriers to student use of immediate AWE feedback?

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