Information and information technologies as applied in political strategy modeling

This paper analyzes modern information technologies as applied in the political environment and considers the content and peculiarities of using IT programs in strategic political modeling.     

Tertiary Student Writing: A Resource Commitment Model

This paper reports a survey of the ways in which resources are committed to the improvement of student writing in the U.S.A., Canada and Australia. The findings are reported in terms of a model offering five levels of resource commitment ranging from zero, which implies no specific resource commitment, to the level at which an institution‐wide teaching policy is implemented. The practical implications of each level are considered and the paper concludes with a brief discussion of the relevance of each approach to current concerns about the quality of student writing.     

Planning mobile futures: the border artistry of International Baccalaureate Diploma choosers

This paper reports on a study of students choosing the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma over state‐based curricula in Australian schools. The IB Diploma was initially designed as a matriculation certificate to facilitate international mobility. While first envisaged as a lifestyle agenda for cultural elites, such mobility is now widespread with more people living ‘beyond the nation’ through choice or circumstance. Beck and others highlight how the capacity to cross national borders offers a competitive edge with which to strategically pursue economic and cultural capital. Beck’s ‘border artistes’ are those who use national borders to their individual advantage through reflexive strategy. The study explored the rationales and strategy behind the choice of the IB Diploma curriculum expressed by students in a focus group interview and an online survey. This paper reports on their imagined transnational routes and mobile orientations, and how a localised curriculum limits their imagined mobile futures.     

The Information Efficiency of New Knowledge Production in the Era of Network Communications

The distinctive characteristics of communication in the process of producing new knowledge are analyzed. The importance of the coordination of strategies for developing innovative solutions and the cognitive integration to provide the effectiveness of this process is noted. For the comparative evaluation of coordination technologies, it is suggested to use the concept of communication efficiency, which is defined as a function of minimizing transaction costs. Using this concept, the comparative efficiency of modern network forms of interaction coordination is analyzed and a conclusion about their significant positive impact on the performance of innovation organizations is formulated.