Using graph centrality as a global index to assess students’ mental model structure development during summary writing

Educational technology research and development - During reading, students construct mental models of what they read. Summaries can be used to evaluate the latent knowledge structure of these...     

Politics of refugee education: educational administration of the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey

The main contention of this paper is that the interrelationship between ideology and policy shapes both the overall organisation of refugee education and the operational practices and procedures of staff working to provide education for refugees. Accordingly, this paper tries to answer how the education dimension of the Syrian refugee crisis is managed by the central education authorities in Turkey by assessing the political dynamics and milieu regarding the education of refugees. Building on a document analysis and interviews, this article traces educational administration of Syrian children with a focus on the political dynamics at play affecting the status quo in national education agenda in Turkey. While the impact of the refugee crisis on the greater national education agenda is revealed, the trade-offs involved in adopting certain governance strategies including decentralisation and recentralization is explored.     

Selling home: Corporate stadium names and the destruction of commemoration

A city's primary benefits from professional sports franchises are civic pride and identification with its teams. The stadium or arena, as the physical “memory place”; for teams, has historically been named to commemorate the relationship among the team, the city, and the fans. This paper chronicles the rise in corporate naming and argues that sacrificing the commemorative name of a sports venue for a paid corporate name alters the identity statements of memory places, abbreviates the narrative about a city and its teams, and threatens the idyllic illusions about sports that fans have long chosen to maintain. As corporate naming spreads beyond sports, the substitution of commercialization for commemoration presents a growing threat to public memory places of many kinds.     

Analysis of library associated information needs of staff in a specialist palliative and gerontological care centre in Mid-West Ireland

Background: Milford Care Centre is a major centre for specialist palliative and gerontological care in the Mid‐West of Ireland. In August 2008, a Librarian was employed to support the information, research, teaching and professional development needs of staff and students. In planning associated with this role, it was necessary to undertake an analysis of the information needs of staff. Objectives: (1) To understand the information needs of staff with regard to the new Library and Information Service. (2) To identify current access to and levels of skill in information literacy and ICT. (3) To ascertain the need for training in those skills. Methods: A web‐based questionnaire was disseminated in November by email and printed copies were left at other locations. Results: Assistance with obtaining journal articles was rated most highly by respondents as being an important service. Eighty‐three per cent indicated that they did not have access to online health databases. Small group classes were considered the preferred method of providing training. Afternoons were also considered more convenient for visiting the library. Conclusion: The results will be used to plan the development of the library with a better insight of users needs and assist us to utilise resources more effectively.     

The involvement of the European Union in career guidance policy: a brief history

The history of the involvement of the European Union in the development of policy related to career guidance is analysed in terms of three broad periods. In the first two of these, interventions were confined to pilot projects, exchanges and placements, study visits and studies/surveys, with particular attention to young people; whereas the period since 2000 has seen greater attention being paid to lifelong activities that support the implementation of EU policy priorities and their mainstreaming at national level. These trends reflect both the EU’s “creeping competence” and the emerging concept of “lifelong guidance.”     

Conditions influencing rural and town women's participation in the labor force : Some important considerations

This paper suggests that changes in the basic conditions of subsistence of Bangladeshi families, particularly increasing destitution and landlessness, are prime factors in forcing increasing numbers of rural and urban women into the wage sector of the economy. It has been found that as an initial step towards women's control over their own lives, participation in the labor force may be considered an advance for women in comparison to previous forms of labor. It is suggested, however, that the patterning of wage labor in less developed capitalist countries, to the extent that it follows Western trends, has every possibility of duplicating in Bangladesh the structures of women's exploitation and differential income earning opportunities hindering women's development in other countries, It is also suggested that traditional forms of social control legitimating and governing the subordination of women in Bangladesh are being undermined by worsening socio-economic conditions. It has been found that the traditional system controlling women's subordination, which is known as purdah, may be losing saliency for increasing numbers of rural families. This leads one to conclude that the development and extension of a wage economy brings new forms of social control involving contradictory results, exploitation, and dependence on the one hand, and changing conditions of independence and control on the other.     

Creating greeting cards to understand and to evaluate Knapp’s Staircase Model of relationships

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Relational Communication

Objective: This article teaches students to explain and evaluate Knapp’s Relational Staircase Model through the creation of personalized greeting cards for each relational stage. The in-class activity encourages students to be creative and succinct in capturing the essence of an assigned relational stage in their respective greeting cards. The activity also provides students with an opportunity to apply the model to their lives and to test the validity and usefulness of the model in the hook-up culture prevalent among many college students today.