How students perceive teachers’ nonverbal and verbal communication at agricultural universities in Austria,Slovenia and Albania

Purpose: This study attempts to close the research gap created by the fact that existing studies neglect the problem of how effectively agricultural professors from different European countries communicate. The aim is to identify similarities and differences in the numbers of agricultural professors perceived by students as engaging in verbal and nonverbal immediacy communication.

Methodology: An online survey was conducted among students of agricultural universities from Austria, Slovenia and Albania.

Findings: The results show that professors of agriculture from Austria, Slovenia and Albania should generally not be satisfied with their own communication patterns and should thus try to improve their communication. The result also reveals cultural differences in the shares of agriculture professors employing different communication patterns in Austria, Slovenia and Albania. Compared to Austrian and Slovenian students, their Albanian peers perceive that most of their professors use nonverbal immediacy communication. According to Austrian students, the majority of their professors use verbal immediacy. On the contrary, Albanian students assessed that some of their professors employ verbal immediacy.

Practical Implications: The results show the professors of agriculture should improve the way they communicate to students. In particular, the Albanian professors should improve their verbal communication especially in terms of providing timely and quality feedback to students.

Theoretical implications: The study reveals differences in immediacy communication among countries (Austria, Slovenia and Albania) which the scientific literature considers to have a high-context culture.

Originality/Value: Given that no study has yet examined how students perceive professors’ communication in different European countries, this research helps understand the characteristics of agricultural professors’ communication.     

Spatial Analysis of the Public Library Network in Slovenia

Column Editor's Note. As the Column Title indicates, this column brings Global Perspectives to the Journal of Library Administration. Library administrators in different types of libraries share case studies, research, reports, or articles from a wide variety of geographic locations outside of North America. Prospective authors are invited to discuss possible future contributions with the column editor at: Jim.Agee@yahoo.com.

The article presents the project Spatial Analysis of the public library network in Slovenia; the approach, related work, methods used, main findings, impacts, and transferability to other environments. The network of public libraries in Slovenia is quite well developed and consists of slightly over 1,000 service points, i.e., local libraries, their external service points, and bookmobile stops. Public libraries are one of the pillars that preserve the Slovenian language and enhance the local social life. The travel distance to the nearest library is highly important, even more when taking into account social gatherings, access to online databases, and participation in educational and other meetings. Spatial analysis has been performed by using the methods of geographical information systems. A part of the project is also the development of a lightweight Web geodatabase/geoprocessing tool for the planning of library services. Library administrators could directly and easily use the tool for daily and strategic planning to analyze in detail the spatial level of the sociodemographic characteristics of the potential users in the vicinity. The findings have shown significant differences among regions, recommended improvements of the library network, suggested the refinement of the role of the library services according to the perceived needs of the local people, and confirmed the importance of the mobile libraries for rural and remote areas.     

The Slavic Humanities Index: Current Developments and Future Plans

The author describes the Slavic Humanities Index, a bibliographic database of scholarly and cultural articles on subjects including history; literature; language teaching; linguistics; philosophy; ethnology; performing arts; and cultural, borderland, and regional studies. She discusses its development, its current form and functionality, and plans for the future.     

JOURNALISM EDUCATION IN SLOVENIA

This article presents the findings of the first research into editors’ views of journalism education in Slovenia. The results of a mail survey and in-depth interviews reveal that although the vast majority of editors are not particularly familiar with the curriculum of current journalism studies, they identified a broad general knowledge and practical journalistic knowledge as the curriculum's advantages, with—inconsistently—the latter also being described as the curriculum's main deficiency, together with the lack of any knowledge of special fields such as law and economics. The editors’ negative attitudes to journalism education are grounded less in actual knowledge of what the Journalism Faculty offers its students than a priori convictions and stereotypes about journalism graduates being incompetent theorists. Factors in the media and in society that might be hindering journalists’ professionalism are overlooked, while the blame for editors’ negative experiences with journalism graduates is almost exclusively ascribed to the Faculty. Although the Slovenian university journalism curriculum has been reformed several times in the past few decades, the old image of the Faculty of Social Sciences as a remnant of the old communist political school is still firmly grounded in the mentality of Slovenians, yet rejected by the editors.     

Roma pupils’ identification with school in Slovenia and Serbia: case studies

The research presented in this paper aims to challenge the belief held by some education professionals that Roma pupils do not value education. The research sample included groups of Roma pupils from two countries (Slovenia and Serbia) and from different socio-economic backgrounds. The results suggest that the majority of the pupils are aware of the importance of education. However, there are significant differences in their sense of identification with school. Roma pupils from families whose socio-economic background is comparable to that of the majority population are more appreciative of educational success, feel more accepted by teachers and classmates and are better able to connect education with their own lives. Roma pupils from families of lower socio-economic background associate school with failure, discrimination and rejection by teachers and classmates. Barriers to these pupils’ learning and social participation may be related to their tendency to drop out of the compulsory education.     

The Bologna reform at the department of library and information science and book studies, university of Ljubljana

Relevance of the new Bologna study programme at the Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at University of Ljubljana is demonstrated from different aspects. The example of IS&R themes and topics which are recognized as one of LIS core areas is used to show the differences from the previous study programme in terms of content, together with coverage of Web 2.0 related themes. In regard to teaching and learning methods it is shown how e-learning is used to support the educational process. At the end a few insights into employability of future graduates are added.     

Upstream supply chain management in e-government: The case of Slovenia

The paper highlights the importance of the holistic treatment of e-government. The main challenges and benefits of renovating both upstream and downstream e-government supply chains are reviewed. A new definition of e-government that includes the whole supply chain of the public administration is proposed. Several limitations of current approaches and rankings, that often neglect upstream SC and their detrimental consequences, are highlighted. The case study of the somewhat unsuccessful informatization of Slovenian public procurement illustrates the main problems posed by ignorance of supply chain management principles. It shows that the main challenges are not on the technological side but are instead connected with business process renovation, project management, unclear goals and responsibilities and difficult coordination among various ministerial and governmental bodies.     

The Tyranny of the Empty Frame

This study explores the notion of the “tyranny of the empty frame” within the online departments of the two leading Slovenian newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik, where online journalists—newsworkers with little or no training or experience in photojournalism—are required to provide each news item with at least one photograph. By adopting newsroom observation and in-depth interviews with online journalists working for Delo and Dnevnik, we investigate paradoxes associated with this imperative. Despite often being faced with a desperate search for “any image,” online journalists at both institutions are reluctant to use citizen-produced photographs—their use appears to be an aberration rather than a norm. Instead, they frequently resort to using what they refer to as a “symbolic photograph” to overcome the lack of visual material originating from the reported event. This move from indexical–iconic nexus to metaphoric visual communication signals challenges to the dominant paradigm of press photography. At the same time, we suggest that we should not view the phenomena of citizen photojournalism as a radical break with the past but as the latest development in a series of interrelated processes, intellectual projects of modernity, such as ocularcentrism, journalism, capitalism and the nation state.     

Practice of Hypertext

Despite scholarly research inconsistencies in conceptualizations of hypertext, there seems to be a consensus among scholars from different epistemological grounds that hypertextuality as a communication potential refers to the interconnectivity and interlayering of textual parts in an extended nonlinear chain of integrated content that enables innovation in practices within the triad journalist–text–reader. However, within this rather large area of research, media and journalism scholars have paid minimal attention to hypertext as practice despite hypertext raising many questions regarding the processes and relations of news making. In this paper the author attempts to fill this research gap and to investigate how hypertext shapes different phases of online news making, that is, gathering, selecting, and assessing information, and how these processes influence journalist–source–audience relations. This study thus provides analysis of data gathered through participant observation in the online departments of two leading Slovenian print media organizations, Delo and Dnevnik, and in-depth interviews with their online journalists and editors. The analysis indicated that (1) lack of reasoning and a conservative mind-set prevail among online staffers when conceptualizing hypertext; (2) the normalization of hypertextual news making is subordinated to speed and timeliness in news delivery; and (3) nurtured journalist–source–audience relations bring little to strengthen the social relevance of news. These results confirmed hypertext as a commodity rather than emphasizing its public character. The practice of hypertext at the two Slovenian newspapers indicates a phenomenon that could be labelled as journalistic deskilling in online news making.