Political consciousness and political action of industrial workers in Ghana: a case study of Valco workers at Tema
What is the political consciousness of Ghanaian workers in large-scale foreign and state enterprises and what action have they engaged in? The present study, based on fieldwork in Ghana in 1975, attempts to answer these questions with regard to answer these questions with regard to industrial workers in a multi-national corporation at Tema, Valco (Volta Aluminium Company). Notes, ref., tab.
The Political Potential of African Urban Workers
RESUMELa classe ouvriere a, l'hisioire le demontre, joue un role important lorsqu'il s'est agi d'encourager a la fois les reformes sociales et la revolution dans les pays industrialises. Peut-on s'attendre a ce que les travailleurs urbains jouent un role analogue en Afrique tropicale etant donne les caracteristiques bien differentes du capitalisme peripherique? Les partisans de la theorie de l’ « aristocratie ouvriere » diraient que non. Mais cette theorie n'est pas seulement vague sur le plan abstrait et faible sur le plan pratique en ce qui concerne l'emploi pour l'ensemble des travailleurs en Afrique tropicale, elle est aussi simpliste de par son grossier materialisme. Alors que l’ « economisme » s'avere une tendance generale parmi les mouvements ouvriers des villes, certains segments en sont venus a une conception sinon revolutionnaire, du moins « populiste » qui transcende l'econo- misme. Certains des facteurs de politisation qui favorisent chez les travailleurs une mentalite populiste et partisane d...
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.