Developing Social Media to Engage and Connect at the University of Liverpool Library

ABSTRACT

This case study presents the Liverpool experience of using social media as an academic library to enhance audience engagement and create a community of users. It looks at the development of social media in the library, focusing on the concerted effort to grow followers and develop a meaningful use of these tools. It considers the value of taking a team approach, ensuring a diversity and breadth of output. Using social media effectively enables libraries to connect with users in a space they already occupy and bring added value to existing activities. A strong, well maintained social media presence enhances a library's national and international profile and ensures good on campus relationships with main stakeholders. This case study demonstrates the relevance of social media as a communication channel and the importance of selecting the correct platform depending on audience or aims. A literature review and recommendations based on experience are included.     

Closing the Feedback Loop: Ensuring Effective Action from Student Feedback

Feedback from students can informimprovement in higher education institutionsand be part of the students' role in universitymanagement. To be effective it is important to`close the loop': from student views, throughidentifying issues and delegatingresponsibility for action, to informingstudents of the action resulting from theirexpressed views. The focus of this paper is theStudent Satisfaction Approach, aninstitution-wide survey used internationally.The paper explores the different waysuniversities feed back information to studentsfollowing institution-wide surveys, includingthe different presentation styles and the typesof issues that are presented to students,drawing on international examples.     

Ugandan adolescents’ sources,interpretation and evaluation of sexual content in entertainment media programming

Although mounting evidence in Western nations indicates that entertainment media influence young people’s sexual socialisation, virtually no research has addressed the topic in sub-Saharan Africa. The present study employed 14 focus groups of Ugandan high school students to identify media through which they were exposed to sexual content, how they interpreted and evaluated that content, and how they compared its influence with that of parents, schools and religious institutions. Participants most often mentioned TV, followed by print media and Internet as sources of sexual material. Media were said to present discrepant messages regarding the timing of sexual debut, with international programming urging early sexual debut and local programming described as urging young people to delay sex. Young people spoke of turning to ssengas and kojjas for sexual advice, and a number of boys suggested pornography could also be educational. Both local and international programming was interpreted as conveying views of men as sex driven and women as submissive in sex and relationships. Participants expressed the belief that sexual media content had a negative impact on young people. Most nevertheless assessed these messages as more influential than other sources of sexual socialisation.     

ICT and resource–based learning: implications for the future

Current learning and teaching methods, such as resource–based learning, require children to make use of a range of resources within and outside school. However, access to learning resources, especially ICT (information and communications technology), depends on the facilities available within a child's school, home and local community. A research project entitled "Children, Access and Learning: Resource–based Learning and the Impacts of Environment and Learning Cultures" was undertaken by CIRT (Centre for Information Research) at the University of Central England in Birmingham, UK between March 2000 and September 2001. This research emerged from concerns that circumstances in and beyond school may disadvantage those children without easy access to resources. This article outlines some of the findings of the research in the context of current debates surrounding the growing importance of ICT in education.     

Incorporating physical activity‐based interventions in school psychology research and practice: A systematic review

Physical activity provides a myriad of well‐documented social‐emotional, behavioral, and academic benefits for youth. While research suggests that physical activity should be integrated within the school day to support the well‐being of students, an understanding of related empirical work within school psychology research and practice is unclear. School psychologists are well positioned to systematically incorporate physical activity within their intervention practices, particularly given their role and expertise in implementing and evaluating interventions. Authors engaged in a systematic review of 20 years (1998–2018) of physical activity intervention research within 10 peer‐reviewed school psychology journals and six school psychology‐related journals. Authors analyzed 22 studies to glean a comprehensive understanding of the literature base and highlight the ways in which physical activity can be incorporated to support school and student outcomes. Suggestions for research and practice in school psychology are discussed in light of the examined literature.     

Infant Proneness-to-Distress Temperament, Maternal Personality, and Mother-Infant Attachment: Associations and Goodness of Fit

66 mother-infant pairs were examined when the infants were 9 and 13 months. The purpose of this report was to examine relations between infant proneness-to-distress temperament, maternal personality characteristics, and mother-infant attachment. There were no main-effect relations between infant proneness-to-distress temperament as assessed at 9 months and infant attachment classification at 13 months. This was true whether security of attachment (A and C vs. B) or proposed temperament (A1-B2 vs. B3-C2) groupings of attachment classifications were examined. Infant proneness-to-distress temperament, however, was associated with maternal behavior and personality. Furthermore, security of attachment could be predicted by an interaction between maternal personality and infant proneness-to-distress. The importance of considering goodness-of-fit relations in predicting attachment security is discussed.     

Co-Organizing the Collective Journey of Inquiry With Idea Thread Mapper

This research integrates theory building, technology design, and design-based research to address a central challenge pertaining to collective inquiry and knowledge building: How can student-driven, ever-deepening inquiry processes become socially organized and pedagogically supported in a community? Different from supporting inquiry using predesigned structures, we propose reflective structuration as a social and temporal mechanism by which members of a community coconstruct/reconstruct shared inquiry structures to shape and guide their ongoing knowledge building processes. Idea Thread Mapper (ITM) was designed to help students and their teacher monitor emergent directions and co-organize the unfolding inquiry processes over time. A study was conducted in two upper primary school classrooms that investigated electricity with the support of ITM. Qualitative analyses of classroom videos and observational data documented the formation and elaboration of shared inquiry structures. Content analysis of the online discourse and student reflective summaries showed that in the classroom with reflective structuration, students made more active and connected contributions to their online discourse, leading to deeper and more coherent scientific understandings.