Kentucky Educational Television

This chapter provides an overview of how digital media can be leveraged to support the exploration of developmentally appropriate computational thinking (CT) skills for preschoolers. These skills, named CT Core Ideas in the project team's framework, support children's abilities to tackle problems or goals using systematic, computational strategies. The authors describe a theoretical model that outlines the ways in which CT aligns with preschool math instruction, and how children can apply their CT skills through digital gameplay. This chapter also shares lessons learned from classroom research with teachers and children and describes several game prototypes that children played to practice their CT skills. At the end of the chapter, they provide recommendations for how educators can support young children's CT by integrating hands-on gameplay into classroom instruction.

Arvind Thomas’ challenging and erudite Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages operates at three basic levels: he makes local claims about specific passages of Piers Plowman; he organizes these claims into a much larger argument about Langland's intellectual and poetic growth; and, finally, he uses Piers’ “reinvention” of church law to theorize a new model of legal and literary relations that he describes as “co-production.” “Reinvention” is not, for Thomas, a one-way street but rather a dialectical process which entails both “finding”—from the Latin inventio—and “founding,” as in the modern idea of “invention.” For example, Thomas suggests that Langlandian figures like the B narrator or Repentaunce “reinvent” church law when they “find in the authoritative pronouncements [on usury and restitution] a basis for founding their reformed visions of gift-giving and restitution” (p. 20). While this might just seem like a new term for basic philological practices—the identification of sources and the analysis of how they are used, critiqued, redeployed, etc.—Thomas goes a step further by insisting on a Langlandian reinvention of canon law. Where other accounts of legal and literary relations tend to imagine a hierarchical model of trickle-down influence in which law shapes literature, Thomas aims to “[reconceptualize] the art of poetry as sharing in the craft of law-making and [acknowledge] the poet as a penitential legislator” (pp. 5–6). Resisting the contemporary trend to view literature and law as “discrete or even antagonistic categories,” Thomas contends that “poet and canonist work alike when they interpret patristic and penitential sources not merely to record but also to reinvent normative authority” (p. 10–11).The stakes of these claims are broad. Thomas is keen to demonstrate that “the places in Piers Plowman where we detect the poet's debts to his sources are, at the same time, loci of invention in the sense of the interpretation and transformation of those sources”—or, in Thomas’ terms, finding is founding (p. 22). Thomas also asserts that comparing B and C will show how “the C text, as it is presented in modern editions, exhibits a sharper or more substantial engagement and enrichment of canon law than does B” (p. 20). Looking beyond the horizons of Langland's poem, Thomas argues that his concepts of “co-production” and “reinvention” will “complicate notions of ‘vernacular theology’ and ‘vernacular legality’ by presenting Langland's bilingual poetics as “evidence for the participation of poet and canonist in a shared method of reflecting on and reshaping legal thought,” one which “can help us rethink the official discourse of canon law and recover a history alternative to that told by medieval canonists and medievalist historians alike” (p. 23).Structurally, the book consists of a lengthy but eloquent introduction, five chapters, and a short epilogue. Four of these five chapters (1, 3, 4, 5) trace Langland's reinvention of canonistic doctrines regarding penance. Of these four chapters, the first three focus on specific aspects of the penitential process: contritio cordis (contrition of heart), restitutio (restitution), and satisfactio operis (satisfaction of works). In chapter 5, Thomas draws on these findings to offer a reading of “Christ's penitential ‘patente’” in Passus [B] 14 and “the church's penitential ‘chartre’” in Passus [C] 16: these advance Thomas’ larger claim that “to a greater degree than B, C is generated by canonistic thought and at the same time generative of the limits upon it” (p. 235). Together, these four chapters fundamentally rewrite critical understandings of both Langland's penitential vision and the poet's intellectual development between the versions known as B and C. Chapter 2, “Dreams of Avarice: The Absent Presence of the Usury Prohibition,” both departs from the other four chapters’ fixation on penance and epitomizes Thomas’ local and global arguments about Piers (pp. 63–115). Indeed, given its length, complexity, and coherence, chapter 2 is a monographic essay embedded within a monograph. As such, it presents this reviewer with a unique opportunity: rather than offering a hurried summary of each chapter and a cursory assessment of Thomas’ larger claims, focusing on chapter 2 provides space to engage Thomas’ sophisticated arguments with the depth they merit.At the most basic level, Thomas’ commitment to “co-production” manifests itself in a habitual but dazzling combination of literary and legal scholarship. Thomas treats the canonistic sources with as much sensitivity and respect as he does Piers Plowman. Rather than simply citing the Corpus iuris canonici, Thomas engages with canon law as it was debated in university texts, applied by confessional handbooks, expressed in legislation, and developed over time. Canon law, is, in his hands, as alive and as lively as Piers Plowman. In fact, the author wears his impressive knowledge of canon law so lightly that readers unfamiliar with this subfield might be forgiven for underestimating the erudition of this book. For example, in chapter 2, Thomas draws on a broad range of canonistic sources to provide a virtuoso reading of the Mede episode in Passus 3. Following historians of canon law, Thomas begins by distinguishing between material and formal sources of canon law. Langland, Thomas shows, operated like a canonist (and unlike modern literary critics) in that he preferred to engage with “vehicles through which the law is transmitted” rather than the material sources of those laws, the actual “Biblical passages, papal decrees, conciliar canons and patristic writings” (pp. 66–67). Recovering the formal sources of Langland's citation of the B text's prohibition of usury also enables Thomas to demonstrate the degree to which canonistic concepts structured and informed other parts of Passus 3. For example, reading the discussion in C.3.108–14 of retail practices (regratorie) via Gratian's Decretum illuminates both the verbal resonances between Piers Plowman and the Decretum and the conceptual affinities between Langland and Gratian's theorizations of usury as turpe lucrum (pp. 85–92). At a local level, the combination of literary and legal analysis offers new insight into a familiar passage. More broadly, these two examples of close analysis gesture towards the larger argument regarding the relationship between the B and C texts.While Thomas acknowledges that C.3 “lacks the words that in B name corporeal usury,” he argues that “the concept of usury serves as the unnamed ground for C's innovative vision of spiritual usury in passus 3” (p. 113). Repeatedly, Thomas shows that passages unique to C.3—the example of regratorie as well as the discussion of pre manibus wages (pp. 92–96)—emerge from Langland's deep and continuing engagement with canon law. Although Thomas wisely sidesteps the question of date (pp. 8–9), he makes a strong “case for the poem's continual engagement of, and even embeddedness in, the established church's institutions,” which poses a severe, and one might say insurmountable, obstacle to David Aers’ vision of a protocongregational conclusion to Piers (p. 24).However, to Thomas’ third and final claim, that Piers Plowman's reinvention of canonistic concepts participates in the actual history of canon law, this reader must render a somewhat Scotch verdict: Not proven, but very exciting. Indeed, the conclusion to chapter 2 states the problem with admirable clarity: “[I]n what sense does Conscience's model [of spiritual usury] contribute to the history of canon law, given that we have not yet found (and may indeed never find) any acknowledgement of such a poetic reinvention in any legal records?” (p. 113–14). Thomas answers that “Conscience contributes to the history of probable causes: options that might have been realizable within the institutional system of canon law but, for reasons of historical contingency, never came to be actualized but still remained part of the poem's present meaning” (p. 114). What Thomas seems to mean by this is that “although Conscience's model of spiritual usury was not ratified or incorporated into the official records of canon law . . . contemporary readers would have seen it as intelligible and probable” (p. 114). In support of this hypothesis, Thomas offers up Lorenzo d'Antonio Ridolfi's 1404 concept of insurance that managed risk without resorting to usury. What this suggests is that while Langland did not influence Ridolfi directly, the conceptual similarity of their approaches to the problem of risk demonstrates the authentically co-productive nature of Piers Plowman—that is, that Ridolfi's solution retroactively validates Piers participation in the conceptual if not textual fabric of canonistic discourse. To that end, Thomas closes the chapter with an appeal to historical perspective. Even though we cannot locate an actual “poetic reinvention in any legal records,” Langland's readers would, ca. 1400, have read the model of spiritual usury in C.3 as “one of many alternatives awaiting realization”—that is, they would have recognized it as an authentically legal intervention (p. 115). And here is the problem: does this “history of probable causes” fulfill Thomas’ promises to demonstrate the substantive co-production of legal and literary discourses? Can we actually say that we find here an instance of Langlandian reinvention “within the terms of the official discourse of canon law” (p. 62)? I am not certain we can.While the relationship between Piers Plowman and later medieval church law may indeed be “co-productive” in the sense Thomas means, the nature of these reinventions differs: canon law participates in the reinvention of the poetic fabric of Piers Plowman, whereas Langland's poem can only be shown to have participated in the reinvention of a broadly construed legal culture, the “community of concepts” invoked in the introduction. And yet even there, Thomas’ initial historical-textual example of this community—Walter de Brugge's will in which canonistic texts circulated alongside a copy of Piers Plowman—may actually reinscribe the distance between the two poles of this co-production (pp. 3–5). From this document, we know that at least two generations of canonists owned (and presumably read) Piers alongside William of Pagula's Pars oculi, a penitential handbook rooted in canon law central to Thomas’ arguments in chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5. And yet we have no evidence that Brugge or any other reader applied the text of Piers to the practice of canon law to the same extent or in the same manner that Langland drew on legal documents when composing and revising his poem. Despite the implicit parity of “co-production,” most of the “reinvention” discussed by Thomas occurs within the text of Piers Plowman, which is entirely to be expected in a book about Piers Plowman. Nevertheless, the inability to locate moments in which canonistic sources “reinvent” actual church laws via the poem results in a somewhat uneven vision of co-production in which legal sources apply directly to literary texts, but literature's influence on law remains conceptual or metaphorical. Langland and canonists work in similar ways (p. 17); the characters which populate Piers are “probable” in the same way as the canonist Gratian's “probable cases” (pp. 16–17); the poem “complements and complicates” the history of canon law and the poet participates in an anticipatory legal history of “what might have been” (pp. 114–15); and so forth. And yet, as this review hopefully suggests, the idea of “co-production” energizes Thomas’ project as it pushes him to ask more interesting questions about the relationship between Piers Plowman and canon law. It also drives him to formulate a subtle concept of reinvention which both animates his own study and will surely prove useful in other contexts. That is to say, while this reader may remain skeptical of the degree or type of co-production located here, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law exhibits the core attributes of the best and most durable humanistic scholarship: it provokes as many questions as it answers, questions which are themselves more interesting than most answers.

Carrow Elicited Language Inventory Margo E. Wilson, Margo E. Wilson Lexington, KentuckySearch for more papers by this authorRoseann Bisighini, Roseann Bisighini The Salk InstituteSearch for more papers by this author Margo E. Wilson, Margo E. Wilson Lexington, KentuckySearch for more papers by this authorRoseann Bisighini, Roseann Bisighini The Salk InstituteSearch for more papers by this author First published: 15 July 2008 https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470373699.speced0372 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Encyclopedia of Special EducationBrowse other articles of this reference work:BROWSE A-Z RelatedInformation

Slovenian distribution system operator, Elektro Primorska from Nova Gorica, started distribution grid automation back in 1997. by installation of remote control disconnector switches. Main goal of remote control disconnector switches is to insure in time protection and disconnection of power line feeders in case of a failure and quick power restoration in the distribution grid. Up today Elektro Primorska has installed over 80 Remote Controlled Disconnector Switches (RCDS) in its 20 kV distribution grid. Old UKV radio communication infrastructure that was used to integrate the RCDS into the SCADA/DMS system could not meet the modern SCADA system requirements and demands like real time data collection. Looking into a way to improve the data collection a new project was launched by the end of the 2010. The new project is based on using the existing GPRS/EDGE mobile communication network to integrate the existing RCDS into the SCADA/DMS. The paper describes the technical architecture and the functionality of the data acquisition system and characteristics of the communication protocols used. Based on the experience of such a system clear benefits to the DSO will be discussed. (4 pages)

There is a growing need for installation of equipment along the depth of power distribution network in order to quickly detect failures and to obtain information about the state of the network itself. This paper describes the technical implementation of the GPRS communication solution for connecting Faulted Circuit Indicators (FCI), which are installed in MV network, to the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system at Elektra Zagreb (HEP DSO). FCI devices are used in electric power distribution networks as a means of automatically detecting and identifying faults to reduce outage time.