Defining rules and roles in instructional contexts: A preliminary assessment of student perceptions

The classroom across the academy suffers from a most unbalanced approach to instructional research. The vast majority of instructional research is grounded squarely in an instructor's point of view. The student perspective is often neglected or ignored. Adding a more robust student perspective to scholarly discourse on the rules and roles, the various procedural and behavioral patterns that emerge over time, appropriate to our understanding of the classroom would move us toward a more balanced understanding of the phenomena. This study employs a triangulated method to examine the views of rules and roles in the classroom held by 155 student participants. Results suggest that students view their own demands for rule‐following and role behavior as far less rigorous than those they perceive for instructors. The findings suggest that an overall re‐orientation of instruction to better facilitate classroom communication may well be in order.     

Customer Experience in Public Libraries

ABSTRACT

Public libraries today are gingerly stepping into the emerging philosophy among successful businesses around the world: customer experience. Libraries are hiring staff with “customer experience” in their title, others are curious and want to learn more. Most of the resources currently available to libraries hoping to get started take a corporate approach particularly as it impacts financial success. The bottom line is that all of us are in the customer experience business, whether we know it or not. It goes to the heart of everything we do – how staff interact with the public and each other, the value libraries provide to a community, even the cleanliness of the restrooms. Additionally, many of those companies that library users experience in their daily lives – health care, insurance, retail – have already jumped on the customer experience bandwagon, overall raising the public’s expectation of what they should experience in libraries. How and where to start? How does a library build a road map to develop a customer experience philosophy and culture, which staff will embrace and support? When building a new library how do you design that building using a customer experience lens? Columbus Metropolitan Library has spent the last 5 years mapping out a customer experience practice, which includes staff training, journey mapping, customer insights, customer engagement training, and library design.     

Examining government cross-platform engagement in social media: Instagram vs Twitter and the big lift project

As governments are increasingly turning to social media as a means of engaging the public, questions remain as to how they are actually using various social media platforms. Do specific platforms engender specific types of messages? If so, what are they, and how do they affect civic engagement, co-participation, and address citizen concerns? In this paper, we compare the use of Instagram and Twitter by ‘The Big Lift’, a bridge re-decking project completed by Halifax Harbour Bridges. Based on a content analysis of Instagram (n = 248) and Twitter (n = 1278) public posts, we found that Instagram was used as a more ‘informal’ narrative platform that promoted a clicktivist type of responses from the audience, whereas Twitter was a more ‘formal’ news platform that supported greater two-way communication between the organization and the audience. We conclude that by building and maintaining their active presence and following base on social media, and especially on Twitter, organizations can develop a capacity to address social concerns during disruptive events or infrastructure projects like ‘The Big Lift’.     

Opinions and experiences of university faculty regarding library research instruction: Results of a web-based survey at the University of Southern Colorado

In March 2000, all 188 University of Southern Colorado (USC) nonlibrary faculty members were surveyed to determine their needs and opinions regarding library research instruction. Forty-four (23.40%) of the faculty responded to questions concerning their past experiences with library research instruction, the frequency with which they use various library and Internet resources, the types of library research instruction they currently use with their students, and their level of support for proposed new programs. Results showed an overwhelming interest on the part of respondents for an online library research skills tutorial. The survey also revealed the need for professional development opportunities for faculty. A higher proportion of respondents with 10 years or less of teaching experience than those with more than 10 years of experience indicated they had received formal library instruction from a librarian. However, no direct correlation could be shown between years of teaching experience and respondents' perceived value of library research instruction. Nor did a correlation exist to show that respondents with fewer years of teaching experience were more likely to ask a librarian to provide formal library instruction to their students. In fact, respondents with more than 20 years of teaching experience provided most types of library instruction more often than less experienced respondents. Overall, USC faculty rated their students' abilities to conduct library research very low. However, they had slightly more confidence in their students' abilities to find, evaluate, and use information they found on the Internet over information from traditional print sources.     

Relationships, trust and learning: experiences of emerging professionals working in collecting institutions

When emerging professionals start working in archival institutions, libraries and museums (also referred to as collecting institutions), they bring knowledge and skills gained through internships, formal study, volunteer activities and previous work experience. They learn new processes quickly, are passionate about working with holdings or collections and are keen to build their knowledge. They gain exposure to the different disciplines that are reflected in the roles of archival institutions, libraries and museums as they build their professional identity and consider future career directions. What else do they need? A research study about the experiences of a group of individuals embarking on first or subsequent careers and starting new positions in collecting institutions found that relationships were an essential component in developing their skills and knowledge and planning their future directions. The article would be of interest to students looking ahead to working in an archives, library or museum and exploring career paths; supervisors and mentors who work with emerging professionals; professional associations and communities of practice; and educators who have a role in developing curriculum in educational or workplace contexts.     

Co-ownership of Private Information in the Miscarriage Context

Pregnancy loss due to miscarriage is a pervasive health issue. Although talking about the miscarriage experience with friends and family members has been linked to better adjustment, revealing this loss can be difficult because discussing a miscarriage often makes people uncomfortable. Moreover, couples often manage this information jointly as they decide whether to share the miscarriage with people outside the dyad. We conducted in-depth interviews with couples to explore the nature of co-ownership in the miscarriage context and to identify the privacy rules that couples develop to manage this information. We found that couples frame miscarriage as a shared but distinct experience and that both members exert rights of ownership over the information. Couples' privacy rules centered on issues of social support and others' need to know about the loss. Even though couples described their privacy rules as implicitly understood, they also recalled having explicit conversations to develop rules. We discuss how the management of co-owned information can improve communication and maintain relationships.     

Public interest programming: Taxation by regulation

This study examined the relationships among viewers’ family communication patterns, sex and pregnancy experience, music video viewing motivations, and viewers’ cognitive processing of a music video about teenage pregnancy. Respondents were high school students, who watched a music video and filled out questionnaires on two occasions. Results of a path analysis demonstrated different paths for girls and boys: For girls, family communication patterns and sexual/pregnancy experience were directly related to the activity with which they processed the video; for boys, family communication patterns had a direct path to activity, but also had a path through observational goals. Results suggest that family communication patterns may operate as enduring general cognitive structures that predict viewer activity.     

From Knowing to Not Knowing: Moving Beyond “Outcomes”

The ways that museums measure the success of their exhibitions reveal their attitudes and values. Are they striving to control visitors so that people will experience what the museum wants? Or are they working to support visitors, who seek to find their own path? The type of approach known as “outcome‐based evaluation” weighs in on the side of control. These outcomes are sometimes codified and limited to some half‐dozen or so “learning objectives” or “impact categories.” In essence, those who follow this approach are committed to creating exhibitions that will tell visitors what they must experience. Yet people come to museums to construct something new and personally meaningful (and perhaps unexpected or unpredictable) for themselves. They come for their own reasons, see the world through their own frameworks, and may resist (and even resent) attempts to shape their experience. How can museums design and evaluate exhibitions that seek to support visitors rather than control them? How can museum professionals cultivate “not knowing” as a motivation for improving what they do?     

Communication and Voluntary Downward Career Changes

Downward career changes are challenging in societies which place a premium on the accumulation of material wealth and discourage risk-taking, such as Singapore. To better understand how individuals manage their identities during such changes, 30 individuals who had completed a voluntary downward career change were interviewed. Results suggest three phases of communication during this process: (1) Decision making, in which individuals communicate to gather information about the change and seek support for it; (2) Announcement, in which they strategically time, frame, and deliver the message to maximize acceptance of the change; and (3) New career, in which they reframe, refocus, and recalibrate to increase their social identity. The findings suggest strategies individuals may use to effectively manage their social identities as they change careers and suggest strategies organizations may use for recruiting individuals into socially less-prestigious occupations.     

Stigma in the line of face: Self‐disclosure of patients' HIV status to health care providers

Patients who are HIV+ are often faced with the choice of whether or not they should tell their health care providers that they are HIV+. Although appropriate health care and safety require the communication of such information, the stigmatization associated with HIV puts at risk the patients’ pride, dignity, and ultimately the quality of their health. Using Goffman's (1963, 1967) notions of face and stigma, the present study described the major influential factors prompting the act of disclosure of HIV, the act itself, and the effect that act appears to have had on the patient/provider relationship. Phase I of the study gathered pilot data through in‐depth interviews, leading to a quantitative questionnaire used in Phase II. A sample was obtained through AIDS organizations around the U.S. and via electronic mail addresses for AIDS/HIV electronic discussion groups. The interviews and surveys asked respondents to recall a time when they had to make the decision to disclose or not disclose their HIV+ status to a care provider. The results indicated that patients typically did disclose their HIV+ status despite their strong feelings of stigmatization. Three key factors were related to their decisions: 1) perceived necessity of disclosure; 2) subjective feelings of comfort about the disclosure; and 3) perceptions of stigmatization. Patient satisfaction levels were also related to these factors. Implications for face maintenance and health care management as well as the determinants of subjective comfort are discussed.     

Charles Grandison Finney: Herald of modern revivalism

By the year 2000, up to 40 million workers are expected to be surveilled electronically in American workplaces. Management often views surveillance as an attempt to achieve certain organizational goals better by more fully utilizing time and other resources. This article adopts the alternative perspective, that of employees/members, from which surveillance can be understood as an attempt to create new power relationships based on an electronic version of Bentham's panopticon. The study postulated four elements of such panoptic relationships and tested the first and most important of these, perception of being surveilled, in a state‐wide survey of information workers (n = 465). Results supported the hypotheses that the more surveilled workers perceive themselves to be the less a) privacy, b) certainty about their role in the work place, c) self‐esteem, and d) workplace communication they experience.     

The Volunteer Experience in Temporary Organizations: Volunteer Role Negotiation and Identification in a Pop-Culture Convention

The present study explores the role negotiations and identity of volunteers at a large Southwestern pop-culture convention. A sensemaking perspective was used to understand how volunteers retrospectively interpret their experiences as volunteers in this temporary organization. Data collection included participant observation and interviews of 26 volunteers. Data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis. Three role negotiation categories were identified: learning roles, negotiating roles, and making sense of roles. Ineffective communication during role learning and negotiation created ambiguity and uncertainty for volunteers. Volunteers identified with the convention primarily through communicative interactions with patrons but also through communicating with staff or by wearing artifacts (e.g., clothing). Results suggest modifying sensemaking theory to recognize individual as well as collective sensemaking.     

The Interpersonal Competence Development Project: The Intersection of Theory and Practice

Objective: The goal for this project is for students to develop their interpersonal communication competence. Students identify an interpersonal competency (skill) that they wish to develop (or eliminate) to become a more effective communicator.

Courses: This assignment is designed for use in a skills-focused undergraduate interpersonal communication course.     

Reconceptualizing interorganizational collaborations as tensile structures: Implications of conveners’ proactive tension management

Conveners, as the main organizers of complex inter-organizational collaborations (IOCs), experience tensions as they make decisions based on collaborators’ competing interests and ideas. This paper theorizes conveners’ tension management as their proactive efforts to shape the IOC processes – as opposed to reactive responses to emergent tensions – and examines how they are related to IOCs’ collaborative capacity. A comparative case analysis of two IOCs in regional planning reveals that conveners’ organizing practices that actively promoted tensions contributed to creating a more dynamic and tension-resistant collaborative environment, compared to those of conveners who tried to prevent tensions. Using tensile structure as a metaphor, the author theorizes about when and how proactively promoting tensions can enhance collaborative capacity.     

Research productivity in communication: An analysis, 1996‐2001

The study provides an analysis of those scholars who produced a substantial number of articles in 24 communication journals during the period, 1996‐2001. The purpose of the study was to update the information provided in previous studies. Using data similar to that previously found in the Index to Journals in Communication Studies, the authors found that during the period a number of new names has appeared. As a result, the authors develop a list of the top one percent (50) of those researchers, as well as providing data on the institutions which these scholars represent. The minimum number of articles necessary during the period to be included was nine.     

Identifying ECIP Partner Needs: Survey Results on ECIP Set-Up

Abstract

The Electronic Cataloging in Publication (ECIP) Cataloging Partnership Program began in 2004. It is a collaboration between the Library of Congress (LC) Cataloging in Publication (CIP) Program, publishers, and libraries across the United States. System set-up for the program proved challenging for library partners. A survey was conducted during February 8–March 6, 2018 to learn about ECIP partners’ ECIP set-up experience. The findings show that communication and training documentation are two key elements for the program to be effective and successful. The survey results helped the LC CIP program develop a new and improved ECIP system.     

Library support for emergency management during the time of natural disasters: Through the lens of public library Twitter data

The public libraries in the Carolinas engaged with their communities using Twitter throughout the phases of Hurricane Florence in 2018. A total of 161 libraries in Carolinas were examined. The framework of crisis informatics, content analysis, and network analysis were applied to 738 Twitter posts from 17 libraries, which had Twitter presence, to understand interaction details between the libraries and communities that they serve. Findings include that the libraries shared a mixture of both disaster- and non-disaster-related information via their Twitter pages. The disaster-related tweets were mostly shared in the During (291 out of 349) and After (56 out of 349) phases. The number of general library-related tweets in the During phase dropped drastically compared to those in the Before or After phases. The libraries were also retweeting disaster-related tweets from various governmental agencies and NGOs to the community members in their social network. These findings indicate that the libraries switched their roles from a general services institution to an emergency information hub as the threat from the hurricane began affecting the communities. The knowledge gained from our study could be used to improve community resilience by further illuminating the role of public libraries as public infrastructures that host and facilitate the development of social capital during and after disaster events by becoming information and communication hubs.     

Communication Skills,Social Support,and Burnout among Advocates in a Domestic Violence Agency

Intimate partner violence affects millions of lives annually. Domestic violence advocates work to alleviate this problem; yet the nature of the work leaves them vulnerable to negative outcomes such as burnout. This study examined the relationships between communication anxiety, communication competence, perceived social support, and feelings of burnout among domestic violence advocates. Results from a survey of 69 individuals recruited from a US domestic violence agency show the combination of communication anxiety, communication competence, perceived emotional support, and perceived informational support accounted for approximately 13% of the variance in advocates' emotional exhaustion and 21% of the variance in advocates' experiences of reduced personal accomplishment. Responses also differ with the advocate's position in the agency. The following recommendations are offered: develop scenario-based communication skills training programs to reduce communication anxiety and increase communication competence, hold regular debriefing meetings to help advocates process their experiences and to receive peer support, and develop formalized mentoring programs that can provide social support for new workers.     

Exploring the Recursive Nature of Food and Family Communication

Objective: Students experience the numerous ways in which a relationship exists between the food families eat and the patterns of communication families enact; this activity illustrates how family metaphors, stories, rules, roles, rituals, and other relevant course concepts are conveyed through food

Courses: Family communication, intercultural communication, interpersonal communication, and gender communication     

Improving health communicationSupporting the practice of health communication

Background: Health authorities, hospitals, commercial enterprises, and mass media all deliver health and medical communication in different forms. With such a vast amount of biomedical and clinical information available, any action to ensure the spread of clinically relevant news items is welcome. Objectives: This paper tries to define a new role for health science librarians in improving medical communication and reporting. Methods: Literature relating to the health and medical reporting is analysed to identify major difficulties encountered by health communicators. Results: There are two areas where health science librarians can develop new roles in health communication: (i) supporting journalists and health communicators in selecting sources and understanding scientific papers, and (ii) directly translating scientific information into news items, supplying a list of products in this direction (i.e. targeted newsletters, media releases, news items). New skills and competencies needed to cope with the new roles are described in detail in a suggested academic curriculum for health communicators. Conclusions: A better understanding of the mass media's needs can provide much needed support in the field of health communication.