Educational policy for citizenship in the early years in Australia

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to ‘be a good citizen’. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education.     

Making the development of technological innovations more efficient: An exploratory analysis in the biotechnology sector

The current study analyzes the processes involved in obtaining technological innovations. Conclusive results are lacking in the literature, so this work defines and empirically tests a model of the relations between the firm's innovative capacity and the different ways of accumulating knowledge and the decision whether or not to codify it. Also, the model takes into account whether the innovations obtained are radical or incremental.The empirical study uses a sample of Spanish biotechnology firms, and the results show that accumulating knowledge using internal sources and not codifying it significantly improves the firm's capacity to develop radical innovations. The results also show that knowledge codification speeds up the development of incremental innovations. The relation between incremental innovations and the sources of knowledge is not so clear, although the results suggest the possible existence of a nonlinear relation between the two variables.     

Student Motivation to Learn via Computer Conferencing

This study investigates why some university students appear motivated to learn via computer conferencing (CC) whereas others do not, exploring the correlations of three key aspects of student motivation—reasons for engaging in academic learning (goal orientation), beliefs that they can acquire the ability to use CC (self-efficacy), and beliefs that learning to use CC will help them learn the course material (outcome expectations)—with satisfaction and with the frequency of CC contributions. Participants (n = 79) came from 4 graduate-level face-to-face courses and 1 undergraduate DE course. The results suggest that students who believe that CC will help them learn the course material are more likely to express satisfaction and to be active online, that students who believe that they are capable of learning how to use CC are more likely to be active online, and that students who are concerned about their relative performance compared to others tend to send fewer messages to conferences where online activity is not graded. Practical implications for instructors and suggestions for future research are described.     

Mentoring and sponsorship in higher education institutions: men’s invisible advantage in STEM?

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with the source of men’s invisible advantage in the male-dominated disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It is suggested that this advantage has been obscured by combining sponsorship and mentoring. The research asks: Are men or women most likely to be mentored? Is it possible to distinguish between mentoring and sponsorship? Is there gender variation in either or both of these depending on the source – whether from the academic supervisor, line manager or other senior academics? This qualitative study draws on interview data from 106 respondents (57 men and 48 women) at high, mid and early levels, in four universities: one each in Bulgaria, Denmark, Ireland, and Turkey. It shows that both men and women received mentoring from their PhD supervisor, albeit with slightly different reported nuances. Men were more likely than women to receive sponsorship in that relationship. Both men and women received sponsorship from the Head of Department, whose wider responsibilities may have reduced homophily. Men were more likely than women to receive sponsorship and mentoring from senior men, with most women indicating a lack of access to such senior academics. By distinguishing between mentoring and sponsorship, this article contributes to our understanding of the way male dominance in STEM is perpetuated and suggests the source of men’s invisible advantage in STEM.     

Semiotic mediation in guiding interactions with young children: The role of context and communication handicap on distanciation in adult discourse

This paper pays attention to two factors often neglected in the studies of instructional or guidance interaction: the specifity of the child as interlocutor and the constraints exerted by the properties of the tasks on the semiotic means used to guide the child. Following Sigel’s ‘distanciation hypothesis’ we have studied the ‘distancing’ characteristics of the adult’s discourse adressed to the child in two groups of dyads, one with deaf (N=5), the other with hearing children (N=7) aged around 24 months, in two tasks: Symbolic Play and Picture — Book reading. The main results indicate a strong effect of the tasks, SP allowing more distanciation than PB for both categories. D-dyads show few differences in SP task but less ability to share references in Picture-Book reading. It appears also that with such young children, the distancing potential might be conveyed by the forms and pragmatic functions and not only by the semantic components of adult’s utterances.     

Becoming Hogwarts: Collaborating with external partners for a large-scale event series

Academic libraries regularly collaborate with faculty at their institutions for information literacy and reference support, but large-scale event series often require different kinds of partnerships. At the Scholes and Herrick Libraries of Alfred University in the fall of 2015, we hosted a traveling exhibit from the National Library of Medicine called “Harry Potter's World” and built an extensive outreach program around it. By collaborating more widely—with student groups, other campus departments, and institutions within the surrounding community—we were able to dramatically increase the reach of our program. This article explores lessons learned in that process and some best practices for external collaboration.     

Conceptualization of the writing system and knowing how to use a children’s book at preschool age as predictors of reading and writing acquisition in the first year of primary school: A comparative study between France and Germany

The aim of this study is to validate (in a socio-constructivist perspective) the relevance of preschool internal predictors regarding reading and writing acquisition in the first year of primary school. This longitudinal study is also a comparative study between the educational systems in France and Germany. Information for the study was collected among 170 children of preschool age. 110 of these children were interviewed a second time in their first year at primary school. Half of these children were French and the other half German. The two groups were matched according to social background, sex and the teaching method used in primary school. The children in both age groups were interviewed individually to assess their reading and writing abilities. The results show a definite interindividual heterogeneity in reading and writing skills as from preschool age. The difference in levels is even more marked in the first year of primary school. This development in a child’s knowledge of reading and writing is closely related to the educational context in which he or she grows up.     

Insights into user engagement on social media. Case study of a higher education institution

ABSTRACT

The interactions of users in social networks have been analyzed in the literature as sources of information on their ability to generate engagement among stakeholders in higher education institutes, which make more tactical than strategic use of social networks. This study helps identify which variables generate greater participation in Instagram users, providing strategic proposals for digital marketing. From the codification of all the publications published by a university in a social network site during the period of one year, a comparative analysis was carried out through a multivariate model. The results provide important and timely implications for both universities and higher education professionals. Our findings suggest that higher education marketing specialists should develop stronger and more consistent communication strategies to establish more valuable relationships with stakeholders. The administrators of the social networks of higher education institutions can find patterns in those publications that generate a greater participation in this study.