Varying criticality of key success factors of national e-Strategy along the status of economic development of nations

Many studies mention the importance of national e-Strategy as it is a vital contributing factor for ICT-enabled development. However, it is difficult to find a conceptual framework that suggests how the national e-Strategy should be defined and applied by the target country. This creates more confusion for policy makers. This paper reviews previous research on national e-Strategies to recognize its significance as a major contributing factor. Based on that, this research defines the critical success factors of national e-Strategy and investigates the possibility of prioritizing factors by the scale of economy through a Delphi survey. By reviewing the evaluated status of e-Readiness and co-relating the evaluation with economic status, we may further investigate the significance of the digital divide and national e-Strategy. The outcome of this research may be applicable in differentiating critical success factors from general ingredients of National e-Strategy.     

“Street Love”: How Street Life Oriented U. S. Born African Men Frame Giving Back to One Another and the Local Community

This Participatory Action Research (PAR) project worked with four active street life oriented U. S. Born African men, to document how a community sample of street life oriented U. S. Born African men between the ages of 16–65, frame and use “street life” as a Site of Resiliency (Payne, Dissertation, 2005; Journal of Black Psychology 34(1):3–31, 2008). Qualitative data was collected in the form of 20 individual and two group interviews. These data reveal an inter-generational, conceptualization and use, of the term “street love” in street life oriented U. S. born African men. Also, these data reveal that notions of “street love” extend out a critique of community professionals (e.g., community researchers/interventionists, social workers, etc.) as being unable and unwilling to produce “real help” in the local community. Examples of street love, revealed in the study, include the men offering advice/counsel, money or “free turkeys” during Thanksgiving to one another as well as other members of the local community. Results support Payne’s (2005) three-dimension conceptualization of “street love”: (1) individual, (2) group and (3) communal level expressions of “street love”.

批评性话语分析视角下的性别不平等

批评性话语分析是国外近二十年来兴起的一种话语分析方法。尽管批评性话语分析对权势与控制的方方面面多有涉及,但社会不平等尤其是性别不平等在这一话语分析方法下却鲜有论及,本文将着力探讨这一问题。在分析性别不平等表现的同时,以批评性话语分析为方法论分析形成原因和解决的途径。     

Super-Girl: strength and sadness in Black girlhood

This paper complicates notions of Black girlhood by examining the dual experiences of gendered racism that result in both strength and sadness in Black girls’ educational experiences. I highlight the need for a curriculum of liberation to combat historical and current social conditions negatively impacting school-aged Black girls, such as harsh disciplinary practices, low academic expectations, and sexual objectification. The Super-Girl phenomenon serves as a metaphor illustrating the balance and imbalance of multiple social constructs. Utilising constructivist grounded theory [Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory. London: Sage], the key concepts in the research derived directly from the voices of 18 school-aged girls (8–13) as well as my observations, interpretations, and related experiences. Data collection utilising observation notes, interviews, written responses, and activity products provided from monthly sessions over the course of two years, offer critical insight into some of the complexities of Black girlhood. The most striking common themes abstracted from their voices were concepts related to ‘strength’ and ‘sadness’ in their lives. Thematic narratives were found to be most relevant to (1) negative teacher–student relationships, as well as, (2) policed bodies and sexual objectification. This work offers specific recommendations for future girl empowerment programming, curriculum, and evidence-based intervention development that can aide in liberating Black girls.     

‘Knowledge’, curriculum and social justice

This article considers the place of knowledge in developing a socially just curriculum. It pursues the unusual route of a critique of Social Realism, a small but influential tendency in curriculum studies which claims that knowledge has been squeezed out by recent curriculum reforms and that there has been a descent into relativism. This paper shares the Social Realist view that ‘powerful knowledge’ is needed, and particularly by disadvantaged or marginalised young people. However, it critiques Social Realism's limited definition of ‘powerful knowledge’, arguing that for knowledge to be truly powerful, it must open up issues of power and inequality. It contests the Social Realist argument that critical pedagogy which begins from a subaltern stance is intrinsically relativist, arguing instead that alternative perspectives can help uncover concealed truths and break through hegemonic paradigms and ideologies. It argues that this is entirely compatible with a Critical Realist epistemology. Furthermore, the paper presents reasons why a socially just curriculum needs to draw upon the vernacular knowledge of marginalised groups as well as the canonical knowledge of academic disciplines to produce truly powerful knowledge and a social justice curriculum.     

Learning to be critically reflective: exploring fiction writing and adult learning

Many educators in adult, community and higher education contexts are concerned with fostering reflective learning amongst their students. This paper explores the concept of critical reflection and considers how engaging with fiction may be an innovative pedagogical approach to support critical learning opportunities. Drawing upon interviews with fiction writers, ways in which critical reflection may be encouraged in connection to reading and writing fiction are taken up by exploring three different thematic areas that relate to a Habermasian framework of knowledge constitutive approaches to learning. These different areas can be categorised as (a) technical-rational, (b) humanistic and (c) critical or emancipatory. The first of these considers critical reflection as a way to develop technical capacities as a creative writer. The next section takes up a humanistic framework to explore the value of individual and collective learning opportunities to enhance personal growth and critical reflection. The third area of discussion considers a deeper critical or emancipatory framework of learning through critical reflection which may lead to social change. The paper concludes by considering the value of arts-informed adult education approaches, such as those related to fiction writing, to enhance the development of critical reflection amongst adult learners.     

Pedagogy of the anxious: rethinking critical pedagogy in the context of neoliberal autonomy and responsibilization

Critical pedagogy, and the work of Paulo Freire in particular, understands the struggle for emancipation as involving the emergence, as historical subjects, of those who have been marginalized. In this regard, this tradition could be said to foreground a politics of the subject as central to its philosophy. However, scholars of critical pedagogy have not adequately attended to the reorganization of subjectivity that neoliberalism itself proposes. In the context of a pervasive anxiety produced by contemporary processes of precarity and fragmentation, neoliberalism asks us to understand ourselves on the basis of principles of individual responsibility, autonomy, and competition. Starting from the Foucauldian notion of governmentality and the Lacanian notions of drive and desire, I describe how this neoliberal recomposition of the subject poses a challenge to key principles in critical pedagogy. Thus, Freire’s account of the paralysis that characterizes the oppressed stands in contrast to the particular autonomy and hypermobility that neoliberalism demands. Likewise, the privileging of the sphere of consciousness in Freire overlooks the structure of libidinal investments within neoliberal circuits of consumption and communication. This interrogation has implications for critical education in the present, which I argue should invite students to betray the compulsions of their anxious autonomy in favor of a collective commitment and enlivened agency.     

Framing Sustainable Rural Learning Ecologies: A Case for Strength-based Approaches

In this paper, we suggest strength-based approaches for the creation of sustainable rural learning ecologies. We have framed the creation of rural learning ecologies with appreciative inquiry (AI) as a framework and argue that it begins from understanding rurality from positive psychology. The premise within AI has been seen to be the shift from deficient understanding of rural spaces to consideration of them as areas with untapped potential. Arguments for strength-based approaches are based on the fact that they promote improvement from within. This is placing rural communities at the forefront and removing them from the receiving end. We argue that such approaches are giving acknowledgement to rural dwellers that they are better placed to address their solutions drawing from different forms of capital. This paper argues that rural education improvement strategies are possible when educational leaders draw from the capacities that exist in rural spaces.     

A cloud computing adoption in Indian SMEs: Scale development and validation approach

The purpose of this research article is to identify the critical success criteria/factors that affect the cloud computing adoption and examine structure, reliability and validity of the criteria in the SMEs industry. This study considers nine types of criteria/factors with fifty-one sub-criteria, which have somewhat previously been used, and creates a ranking model that offers decision makers to measure the prior implementation of cloud computing adoption. A questionnaire-based survey research was used to collect data from 110 firms belonging to the SMEs industry in India. In this paper, the data collected was analysed by an integrated approach. Firstly, an Analytic Hierarchy Process approach was applied to find the significant fact of each criterion as the assessable indices of the cloud computing adoption. Secondly, an Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were used to examine structure, reliability and validity of the criteria. The data was tabulated in a Microsoft Excel sheet and then imported in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 20) for analysis. The findings discovered that ‘Security and Privacy’, ‘Organizational Risk’, ‘Sharing and Collaboration’, ‘Confidentiality’, and ‘Integrity’ have a major effect on the adoption of cloud computing. The research was conducted in the SMEs industry in India, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. The findings and recommendations offer cloud computing service providers as well as users with a better understanding of what affects the cloud computing adoption feature, with a relevant understanding of the current scenario. The research aided in the application of the new technology of cloud computing adoption in the SMEs industry in India through the use of a wide range of criteria. The findings also help organizations study their information technology investments when applying cloud computing.     

试论话语形式对意识形态的作用——从批评话语分析角度比读两则在线新闻

批评话语分析（CDA）的方法论主要建立在Halliday的系统功能语言学的三大元功能理论基础上。从词汇选择、及物性、情态、图象使用等方面对两则在线新闻进行的对比性分析上看,新闻语篇中作者使用的不同话语形式隐含着不同的意识形态,从而影响读者对新闻的判断力。