The Looking Glass

MS L. GLYPTI I do not think many of us spend much time thinking about the obvious question of “ what is learning? ”. At least I hadn’t, until I attended the seminars at Oxford University on “learners and learning” during my PGCE and I was fascinated by the view of Barbara MacGilchrist that : “learning is not only an intellectual process, it crucially involves the development of personal, social and emotional skills and its success depends on the feelings, motivation and confidence of the learner” (MacGilchrist, Myers, Reed (2004)The Intelligent School). This complex but encouraging view of learning sparked my interest for further understanding of how learning happens, and this is how I came to know the immensely exciting concept of  self-regulated learning (SRL).    Self-regulated learning evolved over the last two decades from the theories and research on learning - at its heart is a belief that I passionately share, that one is capable of learning and that  ab...

MR G.W ROWE The world of living organisms, shaped over 4.3 billion years by the processes of speciation and natural selection, has produced an almost infinite array of species with fascinating adaptations and ways of life. Yet, many of these species are becoming increasingly threatened by human activity and there is a very real danger of organisms which produce potential cures to debilitating diseases becoming extinct before their formal discovery. Therefore, we as humans, have a huge responsibility on our shoulders to not only marvel at some of the more weird and wonderful forms of life, but to also take action to nurture them and minimize our impact upon the natural environment to ensure their survival. The aye-aye is a Madagascan nocturnal lemur which fills the same niche as a woodpecker in UK food-webs. They have specially adapted fingers to tap on dead wood detecting grubs and insects – in the same way that submarines use sonar – the insects are then extracted using an extended an...

JONATHAN BOTIZ and SAHIR PATEL We had the lucky opportunity to go and see Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats and the MP of Twickenham, at a lecture at the LSE. He has been recognised as an expert on the financial crisis and is an author of ‘The Storm’ and ‘After the Storm’ both books about the 2008 world economic crisis. We wanted to share some of the amazing knowledge Vince Cable shared with us about the Financial Crisis. The financial crisis The 2008 financial crisis has been the worst economic shock since the 1929 Depression, which was caused by deregulation in the financial industry, which led to banks to engage in hedge fund trading. Hedge funds are pools of capital, used by hedge fund traders to help generate profits in financial markets. Also, banks demanded more mortgages to be able to support profitable sales. This created interest-only loans that became affordable to subprime borrowers. This led to a bubble which had formed within the housing market as house pri...