Social and Technological Motivations for Online Photo Sharing

The popularity of social media sites for posting pictures has given rise to a new form of mediated communication: online photo sharing. This article explores motivations for sharing photos online, using the 2-step procedure common in Uses and Gratifications research. Focus groups revealed 42 motivations which were rated in importance by survey respondents (N = 460). Factor analysis revealed 4 classes of gratifications: seeking and showcasing experiences, technological affordances, social connection, and reaching out. These results suggest that photo sharing is driven by social needs and facilitated by interface features, with important implications for theories of technology and user psychology.     

Combating low completion rates in Nordic welfare states: policy design in Norway and Sweden

ABSTRACT

Low completion rate in upper secondary education is seen as a big problem in the Nordic countries. School failure has shown to dramatically increase the risks for unemployment and labour market exclusion with severe consequences for both society and the young person. This paper analyses national policy measures to combat low upper secondary education completion rates in Norway and Sweden, often regarded as representing a social democratic welfare model and a universalistic transition regime. The analysis demonstrates that although this issue has received extensive political attention, the two countries display somewhat different policy designs. The Norwegian approach is proactive and targeted while the Swedish policy is more general and directed towards reforming organisational structures in upper-secondary education. In sum, our analysis demonstrates that national governance structures shape and influence policy design in the context of an increasingly diversified Nordic social democratic welfare state regime.     

NAEYC Accreditation and High Quality Preschool Curriculum

In 1999, the Governing Board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) appointed a commission to review NAEYC accreditation. Among the commission's recommendations is the goal of making NAEYC accreditation the standard-bearer of program excellence. While NAEYC accreditation is often used to support a claim that a program provides high-quality early care and education, this is not always the case. Under current accreditation criteria, a program can obtain NAEYC accreditation yet fall short of meeting the NAEYC guidelines concerning developmentally appropriate curriculum. This article analyzes current accreditation guidelines concerning the curriculum and reports results of a recent evaluation of 116 NAEYC-accredited preschool classrooms. While the mean total ECERS-R score was 5.77, classrooms exhibited a wide range of scores from inadequate to excellent on 11 curriculum-related items. Thirty-four classrooms scored in the inadequate or minimal range (1-3) on at least one of the curriculum-related items, and 18 scored in this range on 4 or more of these items. Results are used to support the position that currently, NAEYC accreditation criteria do not adequately address the quality of the curriculum. Finally, the paper evaluates the draft accreditation criteria and makes recommendations concerning the future of NAEYC accreditation.     

Questions people ask about the role of phonological processes in learning to read

A growing reliance on research to guidedecisions about reading instruction hasresulted in a swing toward approaches thatemphasize phoneme awareness and the relationsbetween speech and alphabetic writing. Becausethis is a time of innovation andexperimentation in the schools, and because thenew emphasis has not won universal acceptance,there is a need to address recurring questionsabout the role of phonology in readingacquisition. These questions concern: (1) therelevance of phoneme awareness instructionto reading; (2) the consequences of thecomplexity of English spelling for decisionsabout explicit instruction in the alphabeticcode; and (3) the causes and symptoms of readingdifficulties and implications for remediation. In this paper, we offer our answers to suchquestions and discuss the research bases forthem.     

Perfect presence: What does this mean for the design of virtual learning environments?

One of the advantages of building a virtual reality system is that it allows students to enter new worlds which in these instances include trips to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a field visit to an Oak Wood and a close encounter in a 3D maze. In all these environments the factors affecting a sense of being there or presence was investigated. Enhanced audio feedback increased a subjective sense of presence but did not increase students' conceptual learning scores. We have also found that a sense of social presence enhanced the notion of being there together with measures of collaboration. However being there can take its toll on students and our findings suggest it imposes a cognitive overload. Where students have a choice, they try and reduce this overload by asking for conceptual tools to assist them in their learning tasks. The studies reported in this paper provide some benchmark data about these issues which deserve further investigation if we are to design effective virtual environments for conceptual learning.     

Can we avoid digital structural violence in future learning systems?

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the concept of digital structural violence and examines the negative role it could have in future learning systems. To address it, we propose a new interdisciplinary research agenda at the intersection of three current but disparate lines of work that:

1. Use the concept of epistemic privilege to theorise the inclusion of marginalised learners in the design of learning systems, and utilise participatory action research and emancipatory methodologies to pragmatically ensure this happens;

2. Support young learners and teachers to understand and build their own artificial intelligence algorithms;

3. Develop sustainable interdisciplinary links with computer science to address digital structural violence at the algorithmic level and to make its societal implications and underlying processes more widely understood, especially by teachers.

Taken together, these provide for a material form of resistance to digital structural violence and a theoretically and methodologically coherent future research agenda for building just learning systems.     

Errors of inference in structural equation modeling

Although structural equation modeling (SEM) is one of the most comprehensive and flexible approaches to data analysis currently available, it is nonetheless prone to researcher misuse and misconceptions. This article offers a brief overview of the unique capabilities of SEM and discusses common sources of user error in drawing conclusions from these analyses. We make recommendations to guide proper analytical practices and appropriate inferences and provide references for more advanced study. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 44: 461–470, 2007.