e-Government stakeholders—Who are they and what do they want?

There is an increasing recognition that various stakeholder groups for e-government have a significant role to play in ensuring the long-term success of the e-government enterprise. This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the stakeholders’ multiple perspectives by proposing typologies of stakeholder roles, and stakeholder benefits, respectively, and embedding these in a stakeholder benefits analysis tool. A literature review is used to surface the diverse existing categorizations of e-government stakeholders and their interests and the benefits sought. This review informs a proposal for a typology of stakeholder roles, and for a typology of stakeholder benefits, which together are used to construct an initial proposal for a stakeholder benefits analysis tool (SBAT), which can be used to map stakeholder roles to stakeholder benefits. This tool has been tested by an expert group, and revised. This exploratory study is an important first step towards the development of tools and approaches for understanding the benefits sought by a wide range of different stakeholder groups in e-government. Progress in the development of such tools is important for the development of knowledge and practice, policy, and evaluation with respect to stakeholder engagement with, and participation in, e-government.     

Transparency and technological change: Ensuring equal and sustained public access to government information

The Obama administration campaigned on the platform of increased transparency and access to government information after the limitations of the Bush years. As part of this focus on transparency, the Obama administration is emphasizing the use of e-government and new social media services to open up access to government. This paper explores the considerations and challenges of this approach, such as the inclusion of members of the public with limited access to the internet, the use of non-governmental channels to disseminate government information, the permanence of digital-born government information, and the design of e-government.     

Tutoring conjunctions and construction of geometry concepts in the early childhood education: The case of the angle

Recent research concerning the understanding of geometrical concepts, such as the concept of angles, shows that children of pre-school age, as far as it concerns problems of angle comparison, systematically focus on visual comparative procedures. We suggest, however, that social interaction of a child having the role of tutor in diverse guided environments, could allow the building of this concept in the nursery school on strategies that have formed in natural settings. Sixty-four (64) subjects were accessed according to their performance in a test of angle comparison. They were introduced for an equal period to two experimental guidance conditions. In the first condition, the code of guidance is exclusively verbal and, in the second, the symbolic code of the Logo environment suceeds the verbal communication. Results show, on one hand, much more systematic improvement in a subjects performance where different contexts of guidance were used. On the other hand, in the verbal guidance experimental condition, children’s correct answers showed a dinstinct progress to the stage of finally advancing their performance.     

Pedagogy and possibility thinking in the early years

Connecting to current work in the area of creative pedagogies, this paper reports findings of an exploratory study that sought to identify what characterises possibility thinking in young children's learning experiences and how teachers’ pedagogical practice fosters this critical aspect of creativity. It focuses in particular on pedagogy, seeking to demonstrate how approaches adopted facilitated children's possibility thinking. Possibility thinking has been conceptualised as being central to creative learning although its role, as manifest in the learning engagement of children and the pedagogical strategies of practitioners has not been fully illuminated. The co-participative research team involved in this study comprised staff in an early childhood centre, in an infant and a primary school, working collaboratively with three university-based researchers. The 12-month long segment of a longer study employed various data collection methods including video-stimulated review (VSR) to facilitate reflection, critical conversations, classroom observation, interviews and examination of planning documents. The paper illuminates the perspectives and embedded values that the teachers expressed whilst reflecting upon their practice, and highlights common pedagogical themes, including the practice of ‘standing back’, profiling learner agency and creating time and space. Particular strategies were employed by each of the teachers. These approaches appeared to foster possibility thinking in young learners. In addition, the paper considers the development of the teachers’ thinking through the phases of the research process and presents a model for conceptualising a pedagogy of possibility thinking.     

Aspects of negative numbers in the early 17th century

This paper argues that the questions, posed by researchers in the field of didactics of mathematics, require new historical research which mainly concerns the problems related to the emergence and evolution of concepts. Motivated by recent historico-didactical studies on negative numbers, the author explores two different types of problems through which these numbers started being used systematically in mathematics. The first problem deals with the correspondence between the terms of an arithmetical and a geometrical progression, which constitutes the theoretical basis of logarithms; the second deals with the application of algebraic syntactical ruies in the theory of equations. In the specific context of these problems, concepts, such as negative logarithm or negative root, were established in the early 17th century, long before the appearance of a general concept of negative quantity in mathematical textbooks. The analysis of these problems reveals the conventional character of negative numbers and poses certain questions about the meaning of the various concrete models, traditionally employed in their teaching (via temperature, debits and credits, etc.). Recent, large-scale empirical research has shown a major percentage of failure in understanding negative numbers and their operations; this fact is related to the meanings attributed to negative numbers during their introduction at school. The matter of revising traditional teaching models is considered in connection with a constructive learning hypothesis; there is a need for new problem-situations, which entirely justify the meaning of the concept that must be used and constructed by the pupil and allow a fruitful interaction with it. The case of negative numbers provides an illuminating example of the role historical problems can play in the creation of situations like these.     

A Study of the Development of the Concept of Mechanical Stability in Preschool Children

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether preschool children (aged 4.5–6 years) can construct the concept of mechanical stability through structured hands-on activities involving the building of a tower on an inclined plane and through the use of cans of various sizes and weights. The data derived mainly from direct observation and the visual component of video tape recordings of thirty-seven children. These children formed three treatment groups which participated in structured-guided, structured-unguided and unstructured-unguided activities respectively. There is strong evidence that appropriately structured activities involving children's action on objects and the objects immediate reaction, as well as children's opportunity to vary this action, complemented with a scaffolding strategy can help children construct the concept of mechanical stability and apply it in other similar contexts. The paper also presents a theoretical framework for the teaching and learning of physics in the early years.     

A multimethod examination of the relationship between coaching behavior and athletes' inherent self-talk

The aim of the present research was to investigate the relationship between coaching behavior and athletes' inherent self-talk (ST). Three studies were conducted. The first study tested the construct validity of the Coaching Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ) in the Greek language, and provided support for its original factor structure. The second study examined the relationships between coaching behavior and athletes' ST in field, with two different samples. The results showed that supportive coaching behavior was positively related to positive ST (in one sample) and negatively related to negative ST (in both samples), whereas negative coaching behavior was negatively related to positive ST (in one sample) and positively related to negative ST (in both samples). Finally, the third study examined the relationships experimentally, to produce evidence regarding the direction of causality. The results showed that variations in coaching behavior affected participants' ST. Overall, the results of the present investigation provided considerable evidence regarding the links between coaching behavior and athletes' ST and suggested that coaches may have an impact on athletes' thoughts.     

Analyzing e-government research: Perspectives,philosophies, theories,methods, and practice

In recent years, there has been rapid growth in the volume of research output on the topic of e-government. To understand this research better, we used content analysis of eighty-four papers in e-government-specific research outlets (two journals and one conference series). Our analytical focus took in five main aspects: perspectives on the impacts of e-government, research philosophy, use of theory, methodology and method, and practical recommendations. Normative evaluation identified some positive features, such as recognition of contextual factors beyond technology, and a diversity of referent domains and ideas. Alongside this, though, research draws mainly from a weak or confused positivism and is dominated by over-optimistic, a-theoretical work that has done little to accumulate either knowledge or practical guidance for e-government. Worse, there is a lack of clarity and lack of rigor about research methods alongside poor treatment of generalization. We suggest ways of strengthening e-government research but also draw out some deeper issues, such as the role of research philosophy and theory, and the institutional factors – particularly pressures of competition and time – that may constrain development of e-government as a research field.