E-government and citizen's engagement with local affairs through e-websites: The case of Spanish municipalities

As a mixture of new technologies, processes and services oriented to the citizen, e-government has become one of the most important keywords for the public sector reform with proponents claiming that it guarantees transparency, accountability and better communication between local and national administrations and their public. Few if any studies have investigated the factors that might contribute to the establishment of trusting relationship between city councils and citizens. This paper examines the relative importance and significance of three types of information communication technologies (ICTs) towards the use of e-government and the development of civic engagement. We conduct an empirical investigation of 179 Spanish official town websites (web sites in the municipalities). The research findings suggest that implementing ICT not only involves a step towards an increase in the use of e-government services by people, but also provides numerous opportunities for their civic engagement. The main conclusion of this study is that although ICT can leverage the adoption of e-government, it cannot create alone engagement with traditional activities of the local government. What is missing from this relationship is a mediating variable (adoption of e-government by government officers), which in turn can greatly help to better understand how ICT impacts relationships between governments and their citizens.     

Soft approaches to information access on the Web: An introduction to the special issue

Soft Computing (SC) tools present a great potential in real-life problems related with engineering, industrial applications, medicine, finances, etc. In this special issue we present a set of seven papers that report original research about the use of SC techniques to solve the problems in the field of information access on the Web.     

Are determining factors of municipal E-government common to a worldwide municipal view? An intra-country comparison

The implementation of E-government aims at simplifying and improving the transactions between public administrations and their users or customers. The objective of this study is to analyze whether the factors behind the level of development of E-government among municipalities of a specific country are common to the improvement of digital administration in the largest municipalities from 81 countries worldwide. While previous studies provide evidence that municipalities from the same country, mainly those governed by left-wing parties, focus on differentiating themselves in the content of their Web sites, our findings emphasize that internationally, in the most important municipalities worldwide, all the political parties attempt to promote the development of a dynamic and participatory E-government.     

Differences between web sessions according to the origin of their visits

The aim of this paper is to characterize the distribution of number of hits and spent time by web session. It also expects to find if there are significant differences between the length and the duration of a session with regard to the point of access–search engine, link or root. Web usage mining was used to analyse 17,174 web sessions that were identified from the webometrics.info web site. Results show that both distribution of length and duration follow an exponential decay. Significant differences between the different origins of the visits were also found, being the search engines’ users those who spent most time and did more clicks in their sessions. We conclude that a good SEO policy would be justified, because search engines are the principal intermediaries to this web site.     

Telematics for Teacher Education: issues from a European conference

ABSTRACT

The world Information Superhighway is under discussion in many countries. Within Europe the discussion is also very active as is the promotion of the use of telematics for trans‐European communication and co‐operation in various areas. For education and training, representatives of European teacher trainers, teachers, students, parents, policy and decision makers discussed their needs and views on a trans‐European network at a conference held in May 1994 in Luxembourg. This paper presents a selection of various issues raised at the conference regarding the use of telematics for teacher education and illustrates the discussion and the method of discussion. It also describes and discusses the conference programme model, as it offered innovative on‐line activities to facilitate appreciation of telematics. The case is argued that teacher education can benefit greatly from telematics and some points are put forward for further discussion.     

La formación permanente del profesorado de Lengua y Literatura: Modelos teóricos y actuación del asesor

En este artículo se reflexiona sobre el papel del educador y del asesor de formación, al que se propugna más activo y centrado en la disciplina. Desde esa base se pasa a una segunda reflexión centrada en el papel de las ciencias del lenguaje en la educación en que se trata de establecer un puente entre los requerimientos del saber disciplinar y teórico sobre el lenguaje y los de las situaciones, textos y contextos reales de uso del lenguaje. Se trata una vez más de la vieja necesidad de articular en la ciencia y en la educación el rigor y la relevancia.     

Informatica aplicada a la comprensión textual

Uno de los inconvenientes de los programas didácticos que tratan de desarrollar en el alumno estrategias de comprensión lectora es que, dada la estructura grupal de la clase, deben aplicarse colectivamente cuando su propia naturaleza requeriría la aplicación individual. El ordenador puede conseguir aplicar a toda una clase los mismos modelos de comprensión, pero individualizadamente. En este artículo se expone un modelo experimental.     

Relationships Among Measures as Empirical Evidence of Validity: Incorporating Multiple Indicators of Achievement and School Context

In this article we examine empirical evidence on the criterion, predictive, transfer, and fairness aspects of validity of a large-scale language arts performance assessment, referred to as the Performance Assignment (PA). We use multilevel models to avoid biased inferences that might result from the naturally nested data. Specifically, we examine the relationships of the assessment with the Stanford Achievement Test, 9th Edition and the California High School Exit Examination. The results indicate that the measures are related, that students demonstrate a degree of transfer, and that the language arts PA is relatively more fair than comparison assessments. The results are robust to various model specifications and demonstrate that benefits do not accrue to all students equally.