Public libraries embrace citizen science: Strengths and challenges

Can public libraries become hubs for citizen science? In line with the principles of citizen science, this question was answered collaboratively with librarians from the Barcelona Network of Public Libraries who performed two hands-on activities. One activity was a training course taken by 30 librarians from 24 different libraries which enabled them to envisage citizen science implementation at each library. The other activity consisted of co-creating a citizen social science project and involved 40 library users, seven librarians from three different cities, and professional scientists. The analysis considers the perspectives of both librarians and users, through participant observation, surveys, and a focus group to identify strengths and challenges. The overall results suggest that public libraries can offer leadership in the promotion of citizen science and contribute to the mission of public libraries to act as local community hubs. The main challenges identified were related to the complexity of collaboration, uncertainty regarding research co-creation, and participant retention strategies.     

Citizen reactions to municipalities’ Instagram communication

In this paper, we explore how local governments are using Instagram as a communication tool to engage with their citizens, using data from the municipalities of Andalusia (Spain). We seek to identify the determinants of local government use of Instagram, the determinants of activity in this channel and the determinants of citizen reactions in order to understand the influence of media types (picture, video or album) used in municipality posts, and to understand content type (what the post is about). Instaloader, an open source intelligence (OSINT) tool for Instagram, was applied. It made it possible to automatically extract all posts of the analysed municipalities (14,742 posts). These were later automatically analysed using R, an open source software. It was determined that of the 29 Andalusian local governments with the highest populations, only those that maintain an account on Instagram, totalling 17 municipalities (58.62%), would be part of the final analysis. Our findings demonstrate that when local governments have a high level of debt, they do not maintain and actively use Instagram accounts. We also found that quality of posts’ content is more important than quantity of followers, since there is no significant relationship between citizen reactions and the number of inhabitants of a municipality or the number of followers (audience), while there is a significant negative relationship between the number of posts (activity) and reactions. Our results also highlight that the level of reactions can be stimulated by certain media and content types.     

Implementation of the flipped classroom and its longitudinal impact on improving academic performance

Educational technology research and development - The objective has been to know the impact of the flipped classroom methodology on the academic performance of students during their training...     

Exploring collaborative caption editing to augment video-based learning

Educational technology research and development - Captions play a major role in making educational videos accessible to all and are known to benefit a wide range of learners. However, many...     

Evaluation of the level of problem solving skills of Turkish higher education graduates in technology-rich environments

Educational technology research and development - This study aims to evaluate the level of Turkish higher education graduates’ problem-solving skills (PSSs) in technology-rich environments...     

Drivers of teachers’ intentions to use mobile applications to teach science

Education and Information Technologies - Using mobile applications in science education has proven to be effective as it adds multiple benefits including learning gains, motivation to learn, and...     

辽宁老工业基地振兴的统计综合评价

利用熵值法对辽宁省2003-2012年的各项指标数据赋权,建立辽宁老工业基地振兴的统计综合评价模型,对辽宁省老工业基地振兴进行统计综合分析,并提出相关政策建议.     

大学生微视频学习行为影响因素研究:UTAUT视角

伴随移动学习、碎片化学习、翻转课堂等概念的普及和发展,微视频学习成为学生学习的重要手段。为研究大学生微视频学习的行为规律,以技术接受和使用统一理论(UTAUT)为研究视角,对大学生微视频学习行为的影响因素进行研究。利用社会科学统计软件和结构方程模型对收集到的问卷进行数据分析。研究结果表明:绩效期望、努力期望和社会影响对大学生微视频学习行为具有积极正向的影响;行为意向对使用行为具有积极正向的影响;便利条件对使用行为的影响不显著;性别、年级、网络学习经验对研究模型中潜在变量之间的关系具有调节作用。     

Research results of two personal learning environments experiments in a higher education institution

This paper focuses on institutionally powered personal learning environments (iPLEs). The concept of the iPLE can be seen as a way universities can incorporate learner-centred approach into the architecture of their technology-enhanced learning environments. The aim of this paper is to pose that there are other ways to learn complementary to virtual learning environments, such as using distributed Web 2.0 tools from personal learning environments (PLEs). With that aim in mind, this paper presents an exploratory study with two different iPLE configurations, analyses how they modify the learning–teaching process, and reports their perceived usefulness from the students' point of view. These two case studies were carried out by a research group of educational technology from a Spanish university in graduate and postgraduate courses. As reported by other case studies, the results revealed that students use the environment basically in the academic context and this usage is conceived as another time and effort requiring task. This fact can be observed in the low level iPLEs customization. The overall conclusions we can extract are, on the one hand, that the new environment to integrate informal and formal learning should be flexible and adaptable to the student's needs and preferences and, on the other hand, that academic tools might someday become personal tools.