Recognition,inclusion and democracy: learning from action research with young people

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon learning from three action research projects conducted as part of a Europe-wide project exploring young people’s social and political participation. Challenging dominant discourses about what ‘counts’ as participation and what does not, the paper explores how, through the action research projects, young people engaged in knowledge democracy in ‘new democratic arenas’. Building upon experiential knowing and creating knowledge and learning through practice, the young people explored their own democratic knowledge production, communication and engagement within a context of shifting discourses of participation, democratic engagement and active citizenship. The increasing preference of young people for more informal forms of participation as lived practice reflects a shift to young people constructing their own modes of participation and ‘remaking democracy’ in their own vision and according to their own needs. By working outside of the confines of normative assumptions of democratic practice and participation, young people exercised their own ‘political’ agency in response to their own priorities, interests and concerns and, in doing so, illustrated that new forms, understandings and practices of knowledge democracy can emerge that reflect the promise of inclusive democratic societies more meaningfully.     

How to Address “I've Already Written My Paper,Now I Just Need to Find Some Sources”: Teaching Personal Voice through Library Instruction

Teaching students how to employ their personal voice has always presented a unique challenge to composition instructors. Although teaching students how to engage in scholarly dialogue lies at the heart of every composition program, many students remain unsure, intimidated, and even skeptical of this mode of communication. As a result, research papers often take the form of unsupported monologues in which citations are merely ornamental, lengthy summaries, or numerous information resources are cited without one voice serving as an arbitrator. Library instructors face the same dilemma as composition instructors do when teaching students how to apply information to their research. Beyond teaching students how to identify an information need and to effectively and efficiently access and critically evaluate information, library instructors must teach students how information and personal voice are incorporated into research. In doing so, library instruction corrects the common misunderstanding that research equates to integrating resources into a prewritten paper, that any opinionated resource is acceptable to use, that the research process is similar to writing book reports, and that mediation between scholarly voices is unnecessary. By learning about personal voice in library instructional sessions, students begin to develop their own scholarly identity, understand the conversation of scholarship, and realize the function that their personal voice serves, as well as the strength and integrity that the research process lends to it.     

An Erosion Model of Employee Turnover Based on Network Centrality

An Erosion Model (EM) of employee turnover is introduced to explain the previously observed negative relationship between network centrality and employee turnover. The EM hypothesizes that social support moderates the centrality–turnover relation as those more active in the organization's social network experience less job strain due to esteem provided by work peers. Three EM hypotheses were supported using meta-analytic procedures with significant relations identified between centrality and turnover (k=5, r=.29), social support and centrality (k=7, r=.23), and social support and turnover intentions (k=17, r=.35). Future research for EM expansion and practical applications are proposed.     

Delivering distance training to rural health care professionals

This article reports on a project that delivers distance training to rural health care professionals. Traveling to provide training on information-seeking skills to rural health professionals is time consuming and costly. In addition to face-to-face training, the University of South Alabama Biomedical Library's SAMNet project seeks to deliver multimedia training to rural health care professionals. The project uses information technology to package training courses combining PowerPoint slides and video instructions. This article describes the rationale, training module design and development, and the information technology and software used in the project. Multimedia packaged distance training courses provide a practical alternative to on-site training for rural health care professionals. It enables librarians to provide training without traveling long distance, thus saving time and money. Additionally, rural health care professionals may access the modules at a time convenient to them and proceed at a pace suitable to their learning style.     

The Duality of Structure in China's National Television Market: A Network Analysis of Audience Behavior

This study adapts Giddens' structuration theory to assess audience agency and its relationship with media structures. It employs network analysis to examine the co-evolution of audience duplication patterns and elements of media structure in China's national television market. The findings reveal that Chinese audiences tend to gravitate to channels with greater market share, higher household penetration rates, and more drama programming. Furthermore, channels tend to adjust their levels of drama programming relative to patterns of audience duplication in the long run. Finally, there was evidence of higher-order patterns of audience behavior, suggesting the existence of channel repertoires, and market concentration.     

Quality assessment of service bundles for governmental one-stop portals: A literature review

Service bundles, in the context of e-government, are used to group services together that relate to a certain citizen need. These bundles can then be presented on a governmental one-stop portal to structure the available service offerings according to citizen expectations. In order to ensure that citizens utilise the one-stop portal and comprised service bundles for future transactions, the quality of these service bundles needs to be managed and maximised accordingly. Consequently, models and tools that focus on assessing service bundle quality play an important role, when it comes to increasing or retaining usage behaviour of citizens. This study focuses on providing a rigorous and structured literature review of e-government outlets with regard to their coverage of service bundle quality and e-service quality themes. The study contributes to academia and practice by providing a framework that allows structuring and classifying existing studies relevant for the assessment of quality for government portals. Furthermore, this study provides insights into the status quo of quality models that can be used by governments to assess the quality of their service bundles. Directions for future research and limitations of the present study are provided as well.     

News Sources and Follow-up Communication

For sports actors, social media provide the opportunity to bypass sports journalism's gatekeeping function and to disseminate sports-related information to target groups directly. Thus, social media have been conceptualized as a competitor to journalism. We argue that the relation is much more diverse. We differentiate between competitive, integrative, and complementary facets of the relationship between sports journalism and social media. Our study focuses on complementarity and analyzes how far social and mainstream media serve as sources for each other. Therefore, we combine an online survey among 122 German sports journalists, an analysis of the Twitter networks of German sports journalists during the Winter Olympics 2014, and a content analysis of the most popular news items in social media. Results suggest that sports journalists perceive social media accounts of athletes as beneficial news sources, especially to gather inside information. Huge sports events influence the social media activities of sports journalists as they tend to have stronger connections to athletes at these times. Whereas social media appear to be significant sources for sports journalism, sports media content receives little attention in social media. However, our results indicate that sports journalism and social media indeed maintain a complementary relation.     

Biomechanical comparison of the double-push technique and the conventional skate skiing technique in cross-country sprint skiing

Abstract

The aims of the study were to: (1) adapt the “double-push” technique from inline skating to cross-country skiing; (2) compare this new skiing technique with the conventional skate skiing cross-country technique; and (3) test the hypothesis that the double-push technique improves skiing speed in a short sprint. 13 elite skiers performed maximum-speed sprints over 100 m using the double-push skate skiing technique and using the conventional “V2” skate skiing technique. Pole and plantar forces, knee angle, cycle characteristics, and electromyography of nine lower body muscles were analysed. We found that the double-push technique could be successfully transferred to cross-country skiing, and that this new technique is faster than the conventional skate skiing technique. The double-push technique was 2.9 ± 2.2% faster (P < 0.001), which corresponds to a time advantage of 0.41 ± 0.31 s over 100 m. The double-push technique had a longer cycle length and a lower cycle rate, and it was characterized by higher muscle activity, higher knee extension amplitudes and velocities, and higher peak foot forces, especially in the first phase of the push-off. Also, the foot was more loaded laterally in the double-push technique than in the conventional skate skiing technique.     

Relative age effects in Australian Football League National Draftees

Abstract

This study examined the birth distribution for adolescent (i.e. <20 years) and mature age players (i.e. ≥20 years) selected in the Australian Football League (AFL) National Draft between 2001 and 2012. Birth-date information was accessed for all first time AFL national draftees and players were then classified as either adolescent (N = 736) or mature age (N = 70) draftees. Chi-squared analysis showed a clear bias in the birth distribution of adolescent draftees towards players born in the first part of the classification period for both quartile (P < 0.001) and half-year (P < 0.001) compared to the Australian national population. There was a reverse relative age effect (RAE) for mature age draftees, with a significant bias towards players born in the latter part of the selection period for both quartile (P = 0.047) and half-year (P = 0.028) compared to the Australian national population. The selection bias towards relatively older players in adolescent AFL draftees may be related to advanced physical and psychological maturity, and exposure to higher-level coaching compared to their younger counterparts. The reverse RAE in mature age draftees is a novel finding and supports the need for strategies to encourage continued participation pathways for talented Australian football players born later in the selection year.