Contextual gaps: privacy issues on Facebook

Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebooks’s more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaum’s treatment of privacy as “contextual integrity.” Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the sites’ privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users’, but a user’s friends’ information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of “friendship” online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users.     

e-Trust and reputation

Trust online can be a hazardous affair; many are trustworthy, but some people use the anonymity of the web to behave very badly indeed. So how can we improve the quality of evidence for trustworthiness provided online? I focus on one of the devices we use to secure others’ trustworthiness: tracking past conduct through online reputation systems. Yet existing reputation systems face problems. I analyse these, and in the light of this develop some principles for system design, towards overcoming these challenges. In providing better evidence for trustworthiness online, so we can also encourage people actually to be trustworthy more often, which is an ethically welcome outcome.     

Relationship satisfaction among Turkish and British adults

We tested three theories (adult attachment, autonomy/relatedness, and gender roles) to understand relationship satisfaction among 150 British and 170 Turkish adults, all involved in romantic relationships. Avoidance, relatedness, autonomy–relatedness, and masculinity mediated the relationship between culture and romantic relationship satisfaction. Additionally, as anticipated, Turkish participants scored lower on relationship satisfaction and autonomy whereas British participants scored lower on avoidance and relatedness. Contrary to expectation, gender role differences (differences between masculinity and femininity) in the United Kingdom were not significantly smaller than in Turkey. It is concluded that adult attachment provides a useful framework for understanding country-level differences.     

Rethinking the World Bank Agenda for Chinese Higher Education Reform

This article explores the way in which the World Bank has worked effectively with China in higher education. It investigates whether or not the cooperation between the two has changed in line with their changing relationship. More specifically, it discusses whether the World Bank’s China agenda reflects the reform package of socio-institutional neoliberalism which the World Bank has tended to promote worldwide in the era of the Post-Washington Consensus, and how China’s higher education reform has been influenced by the agenda. The article argues that as China is transferring its role from that of a recipient country to that of a donor country, it is increasingly important to position itself as a global player. Other than mastering the game rules of the international community, China should also expand its influence within and through these major international organizations.     

Decentralising the patent system

Modern patent systems are slow, inefficient, expensive, and may result in outcomes that actively harm technological progress. This paper proposes a substantive re-think of these systems and lays a foundation upon which practical solutions can be built. Many solutions proposed in the past, such as prior-art bounties, outsourced examination, and dynamic fee setting, have gone unheeded due to the cost of administering them and the rigidity of the patent system. We explore how distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) enable these major changes by altering the way stakeholders are able to interact with the patent records system. We find that transitioning to a DLT-based patent records system can enable many previously suggested improvements to current patent systems in a flexible, scalable, and transparent manner. The case for such a transition is strengthened when jointly considering the complex but common roots of problems facing modern patent systems, rather than a balkanised set of technical solutions to address each issue independently. Noting that a DLT-based system is not a panacea, we also provide comment on the political, legal, and organisational challenges that must be overcome for such changes to be implemented at scale.     

Engaging Students with Integrated STEM Education: a Happy Marriage or a Failed Engagement?

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - The “leaky pipeline” with regard to students’ engagement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)...     

Research results of two personal learning environments experiments in a higher education institution

This paper focuses on institutionally powered personal learning environments (iPLEs). The concept of the iPLE can be seen as a way universities can incorporate learner-centred approach into the architecture of their technology-enhanced learning environments. The aim of this paper is to pose that there are other ways to learn complementary to virtual learning environments, such as using distributed Web 2.0 tools from personal learning environments (PLEs). With that aim in mind, this paper presents an exploratory study with two different iPLE configurations, analyses how they modify the learning–teaching process, and reports their perceived usefulness from the students' point of view. These two case studies were carried out by a research group of educational technology from a Spanish university in graduate and postgraduate courses. As reported by other case studies, the results revealed that students use the environment basically in the academic context and this usage is conceived as another time and effort requiring task. This fact can be observed in the low level iPLEs customization. The overall conclusions we can extract are, on the one hand, that the new environment to integrate informal and formal learning should be flexible and adaptable to the student's needs and preferences and, on the other hand, that academic tools might someday become personal tools.     

Collaborative filtering for expansion of learner’s background knowledge in online language learning: does “top-down” processing improve vocabulary proficiency?

In recent years, collaborative filtering, a recommendation algorithm that incorporates a user’s data such as interest, has received worldwide attention as an advanced learning support system. However, accurate recommendations along with a user’s interest cannot be ideal as an effective learning environment. This study aims to develop and evaluate an online English vocabulary learning system using collaborative filtering that allows learners to learn English vocabulary while expanding their interests. The online learning environment recommends English news articles using information obtained from other users with similar interests. The learner then studies these recommended articles as a method of learning English. The results of a two-month experiment that compared this system to an earlier collaborative filtering system called “GroupLens” reveal that learners who used the collaborative filtering system developed in this study read various news articles and had significantly higher scores on topic-specific vocabulary tests than did those who used the previous system.