Affordances,Technical Agency,and the Politics of Technologies of Cultural Production

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig).     

Number sense growth in kindergarten: a longitudinal investigation of children at risk for mathematics difficulties

Number sense development of 411 middle- and low-income kindergartners (mean age 5.8 years) was examined over 4 time points while controlling for gender, age, and reading skill. Although low-income children performed significantly worse than middle-income children at the end of kindergarten on all tasks, both groups progressed at about the same rate. An exception was story problems, on which the low-income group achieved at a slower rate; both income groups made comparable progress when the same problems were presented nonverbally with visual referents. Holding other predictors constant, there were small but reliable gender effects favoring boys on overall number sense performance as well as on nonverbal calculation. Using growth mixture modeling, 3 classes of growth trajectories in number sense emerged.     

'Well,I've Not Done Any Work Today. I Don't Know Why I Came to School'. Perceptions of Play in the Reception Class

The place of play in the education of young children has been the focus of much interest in the past. But the findings from this research project demonstrate that there remains a significant amount of confusion about the role that play has in young children's education. In particular we found that there is a clear distinction between the rhetoric and reality of play in the reception class. Further, there was evidence of real anguish for some early years workers who were failing to offer the play activities that they knew should be provided. These findings are particularly interesting at present, since the debate on the role of play has once again emerged as fundamental in the attempt to define a curriculum appropriate to the needs of the 3-6 year olds who, from the year 2000, will be required to work within the highly contentious Foundation Stage of the National Curriculum.     

Reference Desks in Public Libraries: What Happens and What To Know

With staffing and funding shortages and rapidly changing expectations from patrons, what is actually happening at the reference desk in today’s libraries? Understanding the needs today’s reference librarians face can be useful in developing ways to support those needs. Asking them to make some predictions on the future of public library reference work gives Library and Information Science (LIS) students, and libraries preparing for the future, a valuable look at the expertise provided by experience. This understanding will help make some realistic decisions about reference staffing and service needs and provide some guidance for those aspiring to careers in public library reference.     

Social Network Analysis and Professional Practice: Exploring New Methods for Researching Technical Communication

This article provides background on social network analysis, an innovative research paradigm that focuses on the importance of social networks. The article begins by giving background on the development of social network analysis and different methods used by social network analysis researchers. The article then examines how these methods can be used in the field of technical communication by focusing on how technical communicators form social networks and connect diverse audiences.     

Going the Distance in Academic Libraries: Identifying Trends and Innovation in Distance Learning Resources and Services

In 2012, U.S. News & World Report ranked nineteen institutions on its Up-and-Coming national universities list. The universities were put on the list based on rankings from experts in higher education administration. The experts were asked to identify institutions that had implemented innovative ideas in the areas of academics, faculty, and student life. This article examines the distance education services and resources that are provided by the libraries at each of the Up-and-Coming universities in order to identify innovative ideas and trends related to the support of distance library users.     

Disciplining the Virtual Home Front: Mainstream News and the Web During the War in Iraq

Considered by many to be the first war of the Information Age, the 2003 War in Iraq provided a unique opportunity for observing how the American mainstream press defined the Web's journalistic value and how it reacted to the competition from alternative online news sources. In an attempt to exert control over the Web as a journalistic space, the mainstream press used rhetorics of “professionalism” to discipline online news seekers into conforming to the definition of “news” favored by the mainstream press. This essay analyzes these tactics and their implications for the Web's journalistic potential, and concludes with a call for a more collaborative online journalism that maintains journalistic credibility while also incorporating a wider variety of perspectives.     

Exclusion of Travellers in state schools

Travellers in Scotland and the rest of the UK are often still mobile. In particular, the showground and circus communities remain highly mobile for much of the year. The overt stereotyping, discrimination and racial prejudice faced mostly by Gypsies and Travellers is said to keep them out of schools and certainly has contributed to low attendance levels and even non-attendance and dropout before the due leaving date. The research carried out in Scotland over a six-year period included both quantitative and qualitative methods, targeted schools, local authorities and a range of Travellers representing different groups, life-styles and generations. The reality of disrupted learning for schools and for Travellers is revealed. For thosewho do access schools and attend regularly there are still many covert barriers to successful learning. Such institutional discrimination has not previously been researched and is hardly acknowledged, yet makes a significant contribution to Travellers' success or failure in school. The mismatch between these pupils' particular learning needs and the provision made for a settled, local community offers a paradigm for many other interrupted learners: reduced selfesteem, demotivation, disaffection and eventual dropout for some.The essentially excluding school system and the self-excluding Traveller pupil (parental condoned absence) conspire to perpetuate cycles of underachievement and marginalization, confirming their social exclusion within society. Yet, at a grass roots level, innovative projects and approaches are being developed on an ad hoc basis. At the European level, particular emphasis is put on the need for open and Distance Learning to support Travellers. The lack of state funded-support for out of school learning does little to engage Travellers with learning. The findings are described and analysed within the broader framework of the literature and practices in this area in Europe and Australia.     

Reshaping the “Pillow Angel”: Plastic Bodies and the Rhetoric of Normal Surgical Solutions

This essay uses the controversial “Ashley Treatment” to argue that normative body rhetorics have become untethered from and more influential than traditional medical perspectives in determinations about surgical intervention. While disagreeing greatly over the ethics of the “Treatment,” both its supporters and critics construct rhetorics of a “healthy” body against which pre- and post-Treatment bodies can be evaluated. These rhetorics demonstrate how “health” and “illness” can be defined more through social ideology than medical certainty, resulting in fluid notions of what it means to have a “normal” body and how surgical techniques should be employed to achieve normality.     

HIGHER EDUCATION FOR THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE: THE STATE OF THE ART AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

This paper offers some aims for education at the university level for middle‐age and older adults. A review of the scope of knowledge and practice in this field is presented along with a brief analysis of some factors leading to the growing interest in this area, in which a lack of empirical knowledge and clear philosophy is evident. Research findings from life‐span developmental studies on the cognitive, personality, and motivational characteristics of older people are discussed in terms of their implications for higher education. In the light of these considerations, suggestions for planning academic programs for older adults are presented. Academic programs must be rooted in curricula that concurrently foster age integration at the university while attending to the special needs of middle‐age and older adults. Academic programs require programs of action research and training for educators and students of adult development. This is seen as essential to promote future progress in this area.