Education for Interdisciplinary Community Collaboration and Development: The Components of a Core Curriculum by Community Practitioners

Social workers are actively engaging in the practice of interdisciplinary community collaboration (ICC) with the goal of bringing diverse groups together to improve the conditions of communities and enhance the quality of life of population groups. Yet, collaborations are challenging and require great skill and commitment. The pedagogy and the content of curricula have become a more prominent part of teaching to macro practice students and practitioners the art of effectively convening and moving collaborative efforts forward. This article adds to the literature on the content and methods of teaching students and novice practitioners the competencies embedded in ICC. It provides empirical data from six focus groups of experienced community practitioners (social workers and others) in New York City who identified components of a core curriculum for this work. Eight months later, these 33 community practitioners were asked to reprioritize the topics and concepts that they had collectively identified at the earlier time. Skills such as the ability to share power, manage differences, include the constituency and diplomacy are among those discussed. Core curriculum themes, the pedagogy and process, and the attributes and values necessary for training an ICC practitioner are presented.     

Internet and mature industries. Its role in the creation of value in the supply chain. The case of tile ceramic manufacturers and distributors in Spain

For traditional industries it is a real challenge, not only to achieve a clear product differentiation, but also to provide adequate services in order to ensure value and customer fidelity.     

Visualization of the Nordic academic web: Link analysis using social network tools

The aim of this paper is to study the link relationships in the Nordic academic web space – comprised of 23 Finnish, 11 Danish and 28 Swedish academic web domains with the European one. Through social networks analysis we intend to detect sub-networks within the Nordic network, the position and role of the different university web domains and to understand the structural topology of this web space. Co-link analysis, with asymmetrical matrices and cosine measure, is used to identify thematic clusters. Results show that the Nordic network is a cohesive network, set up by three well-defined sub-networks and it rests on the Finnish and Swedish sub-networks. We conclude that the Danish network has less visibility than other Nordic countries. The Swedish one is the principal Nordic sub-network and the Finland network is a slightly isolated from Europe, with the exception of the University of Helsinki.     

Effectiveness of additional representations for the search result presentation on the web

The presentation of search results on the web has been dominated by the textual form of document representation. On the other hand, the document’s visual aspects such as the layout, colour scheme, or presence of images have been studied in a limited context with regard to their effectiveness of search result presentation. This article presents a comparative evaluation of textual and visual forms of document representation as additional components of document surrogates. A total of 24 people were recruited for our task-based user study. The experimental results suggest that an increased level of document representation available in the search results can facilitate users’ interaction with a search interface. The results also suggest that the two forms of additional representations are likely beneficial to users’ information searching process in different contexts.     

Signs and meanings in students' emergent algebraic thinking: A semiotic analysis

The purpose of this article, which is part of a longitudinal classroom research about students' algebraic symbolizations, is twofold: (1) to investigate the way students use signs and endow them with meaning in their very first encounter with the algebraic generalization of patterns and(2) to provide accounts about the students' emergent algebraic thinking. The research draws from Vygotsky's historical-cultural school of psychology, on the one hand, and from Bakhtin and Voloshinov's theory of discourse on the other, and is grounded in a semiotic-cultural theoretical framework in which algebraic thinking is considered as a sign-mediated cognitive praxis. Within this theoretical framework, the students' algebraic activity is investigated in the interaction of the individual's subjectivity and the social means of semiotic objectification. An ethnographic qualitative methodology, supported by historic, epistemological research, ensured the design and interpretation of a set of teaching activities. The paper focuses on the discussion held by a small group of students of which an interpretative, situated discourse analysis is provided. The results shed some light on the students' production of (oral and written) signs and their meanings as they engage in the construction of expressions of mathematical generality and on the social nature of their emergent algebraic thinking. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Fitness,physical activity and academic achievement in overweight/obese children

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to examine the associations of fitness and physical activity with academic achievement in children with overweight/obesity. A total of 106 (10.0 ± 1.1y, 61 boys) children participated. The fitness components were assessed by field and laboratory-based tests. Physical activity was measured via accelerometry. The academic achievement was assessed by a standardised test and school-grades. Field-based cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with language skills (ß-standardised- ranging from 0.281 to 0.365, p < 0.01). The field-based muscular strength was associated with grade point average, natural and social sciences, and foreign language (ß = 0.280–0.326, all p ≤ 0.01). Speed-agility was associated with some language-related skills (ß = 0.325–0.393, all p ≤ 0.01). The laboratory-based muscular strength also showed an association with mathematics skills (ß = 0.251–0.306, all p ≤ 0.01). Physical activity did not show significant association with academic achievement (p > 0.01). Overall, the significant associations observed for muscular strength and speed/agility were attenuated and disappeared in many cases after additional adjustments for body mass index and cardiorespiratory fitness, indicating that these associations are inter-dependent. Our study contributes by indicating that other fitness components apart from cardiorespiratory fitness, such as muscular strength and speed-agility, are positively associated with academic achievement. However, these associations appear to be dependent on body mass index and cardiorespiratory fitness.