Public libraries: A meeting place for immigrant women?

The potential role of the public library in the lives of immigrant women is elicited by in-depth interviews with nine female immigrants to Norway from Iran, Afghanistan, and Kurdistan. The research utilizes social capital theory, the concepts of communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation, as well as the concepts of high intensive versus low intensive meeting places. The results indicate that the library plays different roles in the different stages in the respondents' experiences as immigrants. It allows for legitimate peripheral participation when the immigrants move from observing at a distance to more active participation. The library functions as a high intensive as well as a low intensive meeting place and seems to contribute to building social capital in a variety of ways.     

Using emotion recognition technology to assess the effects of different multimedia materials on learning emotion and performance

With the gradual adoption of multimedia technologies in curriculum designs, the need has increased for in-depth studies that explore how different presentation techniques for multimedia materials affect learner emotions and learner performance. This study employed the emWave system, a stress detector for emotional states that was developed by the Institute of HeartMath for measuring changes in learner emotional states when presented with different multimedia materials with the same learning content. By analyzing the collected emotional data and assessment of learning performance, this study explores how different multimedia learning materials affect learning emotions, and ultimately, learning performance. Preliminary results show that the video-based multimedia material generates the best learning performance and most positive emotion among three types of multimedia materials assessed in the study. Moreover, a partial correlation exists between negative learning emotion and learning performance. This study confirms that simultaneously considering pretest score and negative emotion can predict learning performance of learners who use video-based multimedia material for learning. It also finds significant gender difference in learner emotional states while using different multimedia materials for learning: female learners in this study are more easily affected by different multimedia material than male learners.     

A goal-driven management framework for electronic government transformation projects implementation

As the implementation of e-Government projects is becoming increasingly important in both public and private organizations, the need to successfully tackle project management emerges. Without a project management framework, those who commission an e-government project, those who manage it and also those who work on it will not have the necessary tools to plan, organize, monitor and re-schedule tasks, responsibilities and milestones. The present paper outlines a goal-driven and knowledge-based framework to plan and manage the critical aspects of e-government projects. A specifically designed tool supports the framework application and a lighthouse project of the Greek public sector is presented to illustrate the application context, leading to reusable conclusions on achievements and problems faced.     

Providing a clearer view: An examination of transparency on local government websites

This study examines the role of content professionalism and public outreach, along with partisanship in the availability of online local public information. Comparing county and school board websites in Florida, the author suggests that online public records serve as a proxy for the entity's overall level of transparency. A content analysis of 134 local government websites reveals that school boards had a higher level of transparency than counties in Florida, while websites with a more professional look and those located in communities with a high Republican proportion had greater transparency than others. Finally, implications for scholars and government leaders are discussed.     

e-Government legislation: Implementation issues for programs for low-income people

This paper introduces a research agenda to explore the intersection of e-government implementation and the key federal programs – Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps), (SSI), and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, a.k.a. welfare) – that provide assistance to low-income citizens in the United States. To lay the groundwork for on-going research, this paper focuses on the implementing statutes that require different levels of automation for delivering these programs to the public. It discusses the programs in terms of their breadth, impacts to recipients, and the effects of automation as implemented for each. It identifies some of the consequences of automation, such as potentially faster service delivery, different approaches to information access, and issues of privacy. It then suggests some points to consider for policymakers and for future research to more deeply understand this unique and little-studied aspect of e-government implementation. By understanding the impacts of implementing statutes on the poor, policymakers can develop a deliberately inclusive strategy that leverages technology to support access to assistance in measurable models that can be implemented at the federal, state, and county levels. This can further democratize the government-to-citizen relationship and support greater accountability to taxpayers.     

Stakeholders as researchers: A multiple case study of using cooperative inquiry to develop and document the formative leadership experiences of new school library professionals

Cooperative inquiry, a form of qualitative research used in community building, has not often been applied in educational contexts. Through the lens of formative leadership theory, the researchers studied the abilities of three new school librarians trained in cooperative inquiry and leadership to engage in collaborative problem solving for technology-related school challenges. Due to internal and external factors, participants experienced various levels of success with their challengers, but cooperative inquiry proved to be a viable methodology to evaluate the outcomes of library education for school librarians' formative leadership.     

Inclusion or exclusion?: A narrative inquiry of a language teacher’s identity experience in the ‘new work order’ of competing pedagogies

This paper investigates how an EFL teacher negotiates her identity to adapt to the ‘new work order’ in an English education department at a university in China. From a narrative inquiry perspective, it aims to illuminate the complexity of teacher identity in the context of a reform where teachers must reconcile conflicting selves in order to contend with a workplace in which liberal and traditional pedagogies coexist. The findings show that teachers need to shift their identities to survive change. Exclusion from the workplace community of practice can be seen as an alternative form of participation in the reform practices.     

Authentic and self-directed learning in vocational education: Challenges to vocational educators

This article analyses the dilemmas and practical tensions in implementing competence-based vocational education. Eleven case studies were conducted, including observation of lessons and interviews with teachers and students. The results show that schools meet various fundamental issues in realising this approach. A crucial question is how to stimulate the acquisition and use of a way of knowing and thinking that is based on vocational theory. Reflection, authenticity and coaching are relevant characteristics that are hardly put into practice yet. To understand these results the article reflects on factors that account for the distance between promising concepts and actual teaching practice.     

Examination of how social aspects moderate the relationship between task characteristics and usage of social communication technologies (SCTs) in organizations

Because of the increasing significance of social communication technologies within an organization, they have become a new form of information processing, resulting in business process transitions and increased benefits. By applying media richness theory and social theories, this study investigated how social communication technologies (SCTs) can be used by an employee to fit his/her task characteristics. Additionally, it also examined how the employee's social relationships moderated media usage in the current job environment and how this usage influenced the task performance. Five media were selected in this study (telephone, video conferencing, email, instant messaging, and blog). Using a hierarchical regression approach, we found that task characteristics were related to media usage, whereas social factors (social influence and social affinity) moderated the degree of the relationships. A few particular media and technologies seemed to perform well, however these are influenced by the social aspects. Moreover, the usage of social technologies results in positive task performance. The performance of a few specific technologies demonstrated binding effects (email performance was associated with instant messenger performance). In summary, we found that the usage of SCTs is instrumentally determined by the interaction between the task and social relationships.