Perspectives on peer-review: eight years of Aropä

Drawing on eight years of observation and correspondence from the Aropä project, we report on the issues important to academics who conduct on-line student peer-review activities, and the features they request to support their own instructional designs. The Aropä project is unusually broad, having so far supported over 100 instructors at 20 institutions across nine countries, almost one thousand activities, and more than 36,000 individual students. As the designers, developers, maintainers and advisors of an evolving and widely used tool, we use our unique position to report on the perspectives and priorities of instructors and students in this important and developing field.     

Fateful aspects of aspiration among graduates in New York and Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

This article presents ethnographic research on the aspirations of graduates from a private university in New York City, some of whom move to Los Angeles. Findings depict financial and family pressures exerting a governing force upon the graduates’ futures, often beyond their control. Focusing on the narratives of four individuals, we introduce the language of fate as a means of conceptualising the potential repercussions of aspiration and Higher Education. The premise of both is an increased determinacy over one’s future, yet in the high-stakes U.S. context here examined, this financial investment and articulation of family hope may generate fated (seemingly inescapable) and/or fateful (ominous) outcomes. The dynamic of ‘cruel optimism’ illustrates some of the paradoxical consequences of Higher Education, whereby people may be punished by their aspirations. We discuss what factors affect differing outlooks on the future and imply alternative dimensions to adversity beyond the remit of ‘inequality’.     

Automated Scoring of Constructed‐Response Science Items: Prospects and Obstacles

Content‐based automated scoring has been applied in a variety of science domains. However, many prior applications involved simplified scoring rubrics without considering rubrics representing multiple levels of understanding. This study tested a concept‐based scoring tool for content‐based scoring, c‐rater?, for four science items with rubrics aiming to differentiate among multiple levels of understanding. The items showed moderate to good agreement with human scores. The findings suggest that automated scoring has the potential to score constructed‐response items with complex scoring rubrics, but in its current design cannot replace human raters. This article discusses sources of disagreement and factors that could potentially improve the accuracy of concept‐based automated scoring.     

汶川重建中的国际合作

2008年5月12日发生在中国的汶川毁灭性地震,造成整个四川省超过6万人遇难,500万人无家可归,而灾后的重建工作将需要很长时间。虽然当前救援组织和当地政府已经紧急修建了临时住房并提供饮用水,但同样重要的是我们应该开始考虑在救援人员离开后,国际社会应该如何有效在而合适地发挥长久的作用。     

Expression and Reception: An Analytic Method for Assessing Message Production and Consumption in CMC

This article presents an innovative methodology to study computer-mediated communication (CMC), which allows analysis of the multi-layered effects of online expression and reception. The methodology is demonstrated by combining the following three data sets collected from a widely tested eHealth system, the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS): (1) a flexible and precise computer-aided content analysis; (2) a record of individual message posting and reading; and (3) longitudinal survey data. Further, this article discusses how the resulting data can be applied to online social network analysis and demonstrates how to construct two distinct types of online social networks—open and targeted communication networks—for different types of content embedded in social networks.     

Travel Journalists and Professional Identity

Online resources are increasingly facilitating research for those traveling for business or leisure. Professionally produced articles and guides are now consulted alongside TripAdvisor, blogs, wikis, and other non-professional sources. This research seeks to understand the role of travel journalists, to explore their occupational ideology and how they distinguish themselves from other content creators. Through content analysis and interviews with English-speaking journalist and bloggers who focus on Paris as a destination, researchers were able to identify an ideology specific to professional travel journalists. Ultimately they do not do anything that amateur writers cannot, and often rely on their branded publication to give them credibility. Travel journalists do, however, adopt some practices inherent to bloggers interviewed, including moving towards more personal writing and lowering reporting standards, while resisting social media. While in a moment of identity crises, travel journalists still differentiate themselves from bloggers, further research will reveal if this phenomenon is unique to a highly mediatized destination like Paris.