Today's news — tomorrow's context: A dynamic model of news processing

We are proposing a feedback model of news processing, assuming that news reception is guided by media input as well as by existing cognitive structures. However, these structures are in turn shaped by former media coverage. In our study we examine viewers’ processing of TV news, comparing objective news content (content analysis) to subjective meaning of news stories (viewer interviews). Results show that viewers interpret information about new events in the context of past events, themselves mainly a reflection of former media coverage.     

‘Héloïse’: towards a co‐ordinated ecosystem approach for the archiving of scientific publications?

With the continued development of open access policies, it is important to promote consensus‐building projects with the various stakeholders. This article gives an account of how such collaboration has facilitated the construction of the project Héloïse. This project is a French information service dedicated to describing the policies of French publishers on the self‐archiving of scientific publications. Héloïse represents a real tool of mediation whose development involved much debate between publishers and research stakeholders. This article seeks to demonstrate that the development of trust between the actors involved in the project was a major component of its success.     

The Fixed Image in the Teaching of Modern Languages

In so-called ‘integrated’ audio-visual language courses, still pictures (ie slides, film stills, flannel board figures, drawings photographs, etc) have two possible functions: firstly, they simu- late the enunciative aspects of communication n i a foreign language, and secondly, they serve as equivalents to the foreign linguistic signs used i n this communication. The first of these functions consists of an artificial reproduction at a classroom level of the non-linguistic environments in which these foreign forms can be used. The second function is a kind of transcoding system, which works in a visual manner on the meanings of these linguistic forms. These two functions, each in accordance with their own particular characteristics, have the effect of providing an interpretation to the foreign expressions and thereby precluding the necessity of any direct translation into a level of language known to the class.     

Learning and Collective Knowledge Construction With Social Media: A Process-Oriented Perspective

Social media are increasingly being used for educational purposes. The first part of this article briefly reviews literature that reports on educational applications of social media tools. The second part discusses theories that may provide a basis for analyzing the processes that are relevant for individual learning and collective knowledge construction. We argue that a systems-theoretical constructivist approach is appropriate to examine the processes of educational social media use, namely, self-organization, the internalization of information, the externalization of knowledge, and the interplay of externalization and internalization providing the basis of a co-evolution of cognitive and social systems. In the third part we present research findings that illustrate and support this systems-theoretical framework. Concluding, we discuss the implications for educational design and for future research on learning and collective knowledge construction with social media.     

Participation Patterns in Higher Education: a comparative welfare and production régime perspective

This article considers the counter-intuitive observation that some of the wealthiest nations can feature low tertiary graduation rates (e.g. Austria, Germany, and Switzerland). It also considers the observation that many countries with high tertiary graduation rates show low levels of social equity, while many countries with low tertiary graduation rates show high levels of social equity. These observations are considered through the lenses of institutional perspectives, and specifically welfare and production régime theories. The analysis elaborates on educational attainment, patterns and key aspects of economic functioning and development, and educational attainment patterns and their relationship to social inequality.     

Knowledge transfer by sharing task templates: two approaches and their psychological requirements

This paper considers two paradigms of process-aware information systems (PAIS) that are used to share knowledge about planning and executing tasks. The case-based task management (CBTM) system is based on the transduction of execution protocols, so-called cases; and the pattern-based task management (PBTM) system is based on task patterns that are derived from cases but yield more abstract information. As user motivation to contribute to a collaborative task management system is a crucial factor for its success, we consider the different motivational requirements of CBTM and PBTM from a psychological point of view. Based on experimental findings about different factors that have been shown to enhance people's motivation to contribute their knowledge to a shared pool, we compare the two approaches and assess which one is more appropriate with respect to motivation.     

Legitimacy Seeking among New Private Institutions of Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe

The quest for legitimacy is particularly acute for organizations that are in the initial stages of their lifecycles. Without recognition and acknowledgment of the ‘right to exist’, new institutions may falter or fail because of lack of acceptance. Surmounting the barriers that block the road to legitimacy can be very difficult, but there are steps that can be taken to overcome such obstacles. This article examines the paths that new institutions of private higher education in Central and Eastern Europe have taken to assume a level of legitimacy that allows for their continued operations and future success. Its focus is to dissect the forces and factors that affect the movement of such new institutions along a described legitimacy continuum. Examination of key legitimacy factors as identified by private sector rectors in both Poland and Hungary reveals that there are country‐specific means that enable new institutions to transit the given legitimacy continuum expeditiously.     

Giving the invisible hand a helping hand: How ‘Grants Offices’ work to nourish neoliberal researchers

Neoliberalism has become a highly dominating and taken-for-granted way of organising the university sector around the world. In the critical educational literature, this market-based rationality has been scrutinised in detail over the past decades. However, rather scant attention has been directed to how university managers and administrators, apart from setting up quasi-markets, may intervene more directly to give the invisible hand of the market a helping hand. Aiming to address this lacuna, the purpose of the current article is to develop an empirically grounded taxonomy of different types of such interventions, and to theorise them in terms of the different facets of the neoliberal milieu that they reproduce and the various forms of subjectivising work among academics that they seek to engender. We do so by means of a qualitative study of so-called ‘Grants Offices’ at three Swedish universities. The findings arguably add to and problematise our understanding of how neoliberal markets work in academia in three different ways. First, while extant research has noted that university managers and administrators may intervene beyond the setting up of neoliberal markets per se, our study is to our knowledge the first one that identifies and systematises a broad array of such interventions. Second, it problematises the view of neoliberal markets as a form of monolithic entity that produces a uniform competitive pressure on academics. Third, and related, it furthers our understanding of the type of subjectivity that competitive milieus are assumed to bring about.