"A Business Activity Surrounded by a Cultural Environment:" Regional Educational Publishing, 1970-2015
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“A Business Activity Surrounded by a Cultural Environment:”[1] Regional Educational Publishing, 1970-2015 This historical article looks at the fate of K to 12 regional educational publishing in Canada, with a particular focus on Douglas & McIntyre (Educational) a firm that operated in British Columbia. This firm was very successful from 1980 to 1989 with Explorations, its innovative elementary school social studies series of textbooks. However, ultimately this firm and other western firms were purchased by Nelson Canada, a division of Canadian-owned multinational, International Thomson. Few small presses in Ontario have ventured into educational publishing. Quebec publishers have enjoyed the strongest provincial support programs in the nation. Publishers in the Atlantic region have had a strong regional cultural mandate, but the firms still operating have abandoned educational publishing. Regional educational publishing faces obstacles such as market fragmentation due to different curriculum requirements in each province and territory, competition from foreign branch plants and multinationals, high textbook pre-production costs, provincial government policies regarding textbook authorizations, and photocopying of materials in K to 12 schools. The article emphasizes the importance of regional publishing as a way to help inform students about who they are. It highlights the importance of government financial support for regional publishers and the responsibility of educators to recognize the value of regional resources. [1] Robin Farr, “Government Looks All Around,” In Paul Robinson, ed., Publishing for Canadian Classrooms (Halifax: Canadian Learning Materials Centre 1981), 105.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".