Michelle Everson

Social media and the introductory statistics course

Abstract The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube begs the question of how such sites might be used for educational purposes within classroom settings. This paper presents a review of some of the educational uses of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube within college classrooms. Because of the lack of published reports on the use of social media within statistics classrooms, the authors share their own examples of how social media can be used within the introductory statistics classroom, and they outline recommendations and considerations for other instructors who might want to explore the use of social media in their own courses.

Preparing Teachers of Statistics: A Graduate Course for Future Teachers

This paper describes a unique graduate-level course that prepares teachers of introductory statistics at the college and high school levels. The course was developed as part of a graduate degree program in statistics education. Although originally taught in a face-to-face setting, the class has been converted to an online course to be accessible to more students. The course serves students who are pursuing graduate degrees in a variety of disciplines but who want to teach statistics as part of their careers. It also serves current teachers in high school who are teaching the Advanced Placement Statistics course as well as teachers at two-year and four-year colleges. The curriculum for the course is based on the theory that good teachers of statistics need to be developed, as opposed to being trained. Building on recent teacher preparation theory, we describe a course that models and builds specific knowledge about teaching and learning statistics. In addition, this course is organized around the six recommendations of the ASA-endorsed Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE).

A technology of expertise: EU financial services agencies

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 ushered in a financial crisis whose ramifications are still being felt. Within the EU, collapse not only led to a change in regulatory rhetoric, emphasising the need to secure the stability of EU money markets, but also to a significant widening and deepening of technocratic supervisory structures for European financial services. This paper accordingly investigates the newly established European System for Financial Supervision and, in particular, semi-autonomous EU agencies for banking, insurance and securities, for its ability to provide robust regulation and supervision within Europe. However, it analyses this increase in technocratic governance at supranational level in light of the worrying question of whether it has undermined capacity for political action within Europe. At a time when readily-apparent failings in established technocratic governance in Europe (monetary union) have led only to more technocratisation (proposed fiscal union), perhaps to the point of systemic collapse, the general European trend to expert-led and evidence-based supervision must be doubted; not simply because it has failed on its own terms, but also because it has established a technology of expertise, or dominant rationality, which further encourages abdication of political responsibility for economic crisis.

Beyond the Bundesverfassungsgericht: On the Necessary Cunning of Constitutional Reasoning

It has frequently been remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Re-conceptualising Europeanisation as a Public Law of Collisions: Comitology, Agencies and an Interactive Public Adjudication

Book synopsis: This book is a unique contribution to the understanding of the reality of government and governance in the European Union (EU).

Consumer Citizenship in Postnational Constellations

It is perhaps a truism to note that ‘the consumer’ is but a role that is played by human subjects. This insight leaves us, as lawyers, with one vital question: how can or does the legal system meaningfully rationalise its encounters with the consumer? Can it, and if so to what way, shape the act of consumption? Can it even ensure that the ‘fact’ of consumption translates into ‘good’ normative institutions. In a summarizing account of legal encounters with the consumer since the era of laissez-faire liberalism we seek to show that this potential does exist within the constitutional state. However, as markets, political systems and consumers have broken free from national communities we need to ask: will the achievements of constitutional democracies survive Europeanisation and Gliobalisation? In our assessment of current trends in the EU we diagnose a seemingly paradoxical alliance between a new orthodoxy of neo-liberalism within market relations and a de-legalisation of regulatory policies. At international level, our analysis is restricted to a single case (namely, the recent report of a WTO Panel on the controversy over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). It has become increasingly clear that the notion of a international consumer interest has been reduced to one of health and safety that is identified and secured with simple recourse to ‘scientific expertise’. ‘Sound science’ has become transnationally binding yardstick that both orients and limits consumer policy. The vision of a ‘consumer citizen’, who would actively participate in the transformation of consumption into a normative ‘good’, has become a matter of utopian history.

Agencies: The ‘Dark Hour’ of the Executive?

Book synopsis: The move towards a system of integrated administration in the EU poses considerable legal challenges. This book explores ways in which accountability, legality, legitimacy and efficiency can be ensured in the multiple forms of co-operation of European and national administrations in the delivery of EU and EC policies. Examining the procedures and structures of European administrative integration, this innovative book will be a stimulating read for academics, researchers and both undergraduate and postgraduate students in European law.

10 Things I've Learned About Teaching Online

Michelle Everson has been teaching online for five years. Here, she shares the top 10 best practices she has learned about online teaching.

Control of Executive acts: The Procedural Solution. ‘Proportionality, State of the Art Decision-Making and Relevant Interests’

Book synopsis: On 29 October 2004, the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed by the leaders of the 25 Member States of the European Union. This event marked the end of the discussion rounds to amend the treaties on which the European Union is founded. Yet, the debate on the Constitution was far from over when on 29 May and 1 June 2005 the French and the Dutch voters rejected the Treaty. Politicians and lawyers are now confronted with the question of how to proceed and how to go forward. In October 2004, the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague, The Netherlands, organized the 34th Session of its Asser Institute Colloquium on European Law, which was entitled ‘The EU Constitution: The best way forward?’. During the Conference some 50 experts from the 25 Member States, from candidate, potential candidate and neighbouring countries, as well as from the US and Russia focused on key topics like: the process and impact of EU constitution-making, the democratic life of the EU, improving the efficiency and quality of legislation in the EU, the expansion of executive, judicial and legislative powers, and the access to justice. In anticipation of the developments after the signing of the Treaty, three eminent speakers – Prof. Joseph Weiler (New York University), Professor Bruno de Witte (European Institute in Florence) and Professor Jo Shaw (University of Manchester), elaborated on many answers in case of a ratification crisis. This book contains the proceedings of the three-day Conference and includes, next to the papers of the speakers and commentators, reports of the discussions on each topic and the texts of two keynote speeches. A keyword Index and a List of Articles (of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty Establishing the European Community) greatly enhance the accessibility of the rich materials. The book will be of great help and interest to political leaders, members of parliament, international lawyers and European citizens in formulating answers to the questions that have risen after the rejection of the Treaty by the French and Dutch voters and give powerful impulses to the continuing debate and efforts to arrive at a generally accepted Constitution for Europe.

Social pluralism and the European court of justice: A court between a rock and a hard place

In today’s interdisciplinary academic age, past study of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) appears polarised. On the one hand, a traditional formalist account of the development of European law expressed admiring amazement at the silent juridification of the European Communities, but at the same time equated the ECJ’s doctrinal pursuit of ‘direct effect’ and ‘supremacy’ with a de facto higher legal legitimacy for the European legal order as a whole: ‘Tucked away in the fairytale Duchy of Luxembourg and blessed, until recently, with benign neglect by the powers that be and the mass media, the Court of Justice of the European Communities has fashioned a constitutional framework for a federal type Europe.’ By contrast, politically informed appraisals of the work of the ECJ were not prepared simply to accept that a sui generis European law could elevate notions of supremacy to a self-referential Grundnorm, endow the European Treaties with a constitutional character and claim for itself a pre-political normative legitimacy. The Court’s formalist adjudication was, as per Burley and Mattli, instead a conflict-ameliorating veil to be drawn aside to reveal the dominant political agendas that animated an inherently controversial integration process: ‘law functions both as a mask and as a shield. It hides and protects the promotion of one particular set of objectives against contending objectives in the purely political sphere’. European law was thus host to two dominant dichotomies: (1) law as simple authoritative given versus law as politicised chimera and; (2) law and its courts as a force independent from and governing over all social and political movements versus law as servitor and protector of an individual political agenda. Equally, the two characterisations seemed to represent two irreducible and irreconcilable disciplinary understandings of the nature of law and its place within social and political organisation. For lawyers, the law possessed its own hermeneutic rationale and telos: quietly, disregarded by and disregarding of social and political powers, the Luxembourg Court