Corporate governance : the role of other constituencies ; paper presented at the Conference on Workable Corporate Governance: Cross Border Perspectives, held in Paris, March 17-19, 1997

Paper Presented at the Conference on Workable Corporate Governance: Cross-Border Perspectives held in Paris, March 17-19, 1997 To appear in: A. Pezard/J.-M. Thiveaud: Workable Corporate Governance: Cross-Border Perspectives, Montchrestien, Paris 1997. The paper discusses the role of various constituencies in the corporate governance of a corporation from the perspective of incomplete contracts. A strict shareholder value orientation in the sense of a rule that at any time firm decisions should be made strictly in the interest of the present shareholders would make it difficult for the firm to establish long-term relationships as the potential partners would have to fear that, at a later stage of the co-operation, the shareholders or a management acting only on their behalf could exploit them because of the inevitable incompleteness of long-term contracts. One way of mitigating these problems is to put in place a corporate governance system which gives some active role to the other stakeholders or constituencies, or which makes their interests a well-defined element of the objective function of the firm. A commitment not to follow a policy of strict shareholder value maximization ex post can be efficient ex ante. Such a system would clearly differ from what is advocated by proponents of a "stakeholder approach", as it would limit the rights of the other constituencies to those which would have been agreed upon in a constitutional contract concluded between them and the founder of the firm at the time when long-term contracts are first established

Using Constructivism in Technology-Mediated Learning: Constructing Order out of the Chaos in the Literature

There are a variety of epistemological positions underlying constructivism learning theory in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to identify and categorize the positions of constructivism learning theories, their relationships to each other, and the implications for instructional practice for each position. This paper clarifies these positions by differentiating the major forms of constructivism along two dimensions. The first dimension defines the constructivist position along a continuum between an understanding of reality as being objective at one end, and a view of reality that is defined subjectively at the other end. The second dimension defines each position on a continuum where knowledge is either socially constructed at the one end, or individually constructed at the other end

A study of using SmartBox to embed emotion awareness through stimulation into e-learning environments

(c) 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Emotions strongly influence human's behavior in individual and social situations and must be seriously considered in any human activity, such as e-Learning. Indeed, the embedding of emotional awareness features into virtual learning environments could offer a more authentic and challenging e-Learning experience, either individual or collaborative. However, the lack of empirical results together with the complexity attributed to the management by computers of human emotions and affective data, seriously limits the advances in e-Learning as it impedes to virtualize many real-world learning situations in which emotions play a significant role. In this paper, we investigate the use of the SmartBox device for emotion measurement of distance learners during their study as well as the development of affective strategies based on the SmartBox's stimulation capabilities. The aim is to collect emotion data from different sources in order to provide the most appropriate affective responses that positively influence distance learners' study and results and ultimately enhance the e-Learning process.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

FUTURE FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS' SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE COLLABORATION IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT

Discussion boards provide an interactive venue where new and future language teachers can reflect, evaluate, solve problems or simply exchange ideas (e.g., Bonk, Hansen, Grabner-Hagen, Lazar, & Mirabelli, 1996; DeWert, Babinski, & Jones, 2003; Kumari, 2001; Pawan, Paulus, Yalcin, & Chang, 2003). In addition, encouraging future teachers to learn with technology before teaching with it allows them to become comfortable using various computer applications. This article examines transcripts from a semester-long asynchronous discussion between foreign language methodology classes at two different universities. Social and cognitive presence in the discussions was analyzed using Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s Framework of a Community of Inquiry (2001). The results indicate that students engaged in a high degree of interactivity as well as all types of social and cognitive presence. These findings indicate that students not only progressed in their cognitive understanding of the pedagogical topics, but also employed social presence, the more dominant of the two, to aid their discussions. The topics seemed to play an important role in the type of cognitive activity evident in the discussions. These results differ from those of studies which found that students did not engage in interactivity (Henri, 1995; Pena-Shaff & Nicholls, 2004) and others which noted low levels of social presence (Garrison, et al. 2001; Meyer, 2003)

Analysis of Learning Management Systems According to a Holistic View on Corporate Education Services

According to the still growing importance of services and especially knowledge-based services the importance of lifelong learning increases, too. In these premises the European Union targeted a rate of workforce participating in lifelong learning to at least 15 %, the current value is 9,3 %. The main impulse for current participants in an ongoing learning process is to improve career opportunities and to perform better in their jobs.Keeping these changes in mind, corporate education services are a good example of knowledge-based services. First of all, these services integrate the customer in depth to identify their specific needs and to deliver the service. Therefore, they can be seen as a good example of services following a service-dominant logic. Secondly, this sector gains on importance due to the economic as well as the demographic changes. Thirdly, corporate education services bear potential for economic growth. In 2008 market had a volume of 26,5 billion Euro in Germany. With the aspired increase in lifelong learning there is still potential to increase this number.Therefore this paper examines the potentials of current learning management systems to support corporate education services from a holistic perspective based on Kirkpatricks Four-Level Model. Based on this analysis potentials for further improvements of the support of the learning process are derived

Reaching across narrative space: Re-interpreting one teacher’s experience with technology

In this paper, the authors investigate one teacher’s utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by drawing context from two of his life-stories: one that he interprets as “ruin” and the other “success.” Methodologically grounded in narrative inquiry, this paper contains excerpts from the teacher’s authentic narratives and their interpretation from the point of information systems research, known as the social process model. The findings emphasize that with the dialogic involvement of educational researchers, it is possible to reach a deeper understanding of the events that influenced the teacher’s experience with technology. Such synergistic alliances amongst educational researchers and teachers are key for detecting and overcoming the linguistic and operational barriers that exist between ICT theorists and practitioners

Discussion, Cooperation, Collaboration: The Impact of Task Structure on Student Interaction in a Web-based Translation Exercise Module

A major challenge facing the online translation instructor is to design learning opportunities that encourage communication and the sharing of ideas between students. This article asks how such group interaction may be facilitated and evaluates, in particular the impact of task structure on student interaction in an online translation exercise module. Drawing on an empirical study carried out at Dublin City University during the academic year 2003/14, the article compares levels of intermessage referencing, the number and size of message clusters, and extent and type of cognitive presence evident in messages posted by students given three different types of task structure: those involving discussion groups, cooperative groups and collaborative groups. The article concludes that online interaction is most successful in discussion groups, followed in order of positive outcomes by cooperative groups and collaborative groups

Ethnic Survival in Achebe’s Novels: a Postcolonial Perspective

This article examines ethnic survival in three of Chinua Achebe’s novels, using postcolonial theory. He depicts Igbo culture as transforming the impact of colonisation; the self-preservation of the natives as persistent; and colonisation as not being an unmitigated subjugation of the indigenous terrain. Igbo unity and integration challenges Africa’s efforts at nation building. Is Igboland socio-politically stronger than the Kangan nation merely because of monogenic culture, smaller size, and cohesion? Do ethnic loyalty and modernisation hinder tribes from developing a sense of nationhood? Or, could fruitful nationalism be grown from the seeds of ethnicity? How effective is Westernisation in transforming parochialisminto patriotism? These are issues under discussion here

Analyzing Cognitive Presence in Online Courses Using an Artificial Neural Network

This work outlines the theoretical underpinnings, method, results, and implications for constructing a discussion list analysis tool that categorizes online, educational discussion list messages into levels of cognitive effort. Purpose The purpose of such a tool is to provide evaluative feedback to instructors who facilitate online learning, to researchers studying computer-supported collaborative learning, and to administrators interested in correlating objective measures of students’ cognitive effort with other measures of student success. This work connects computer–supported collaborative learning, content analysis, and artificial intelligence. Method Broadly, the method employed is a content analysis in which the data from the analysis is modeled using artificial neural network (ANN) software. A group of human coders categorized online discussion list messages, and inter-rater reliability was calculated among them. That reliability figure serves as a measuring stick for determining how well the ANN categorizes the same messages that the group of human coders categorized. Reliability between the ANN model and the group of human coders is compared to the reliability among the group of human coders to determine how well the ANN performs compared to humans. Findings Two experiments were conducted in which artificial neural network (ANN) models were constructed to model the decisions of human coders, and the experiments revealed that the ANN, under noisy, real-life circumstances codes messages with near-human accuracy. From experiment one, the reliability between the ANN model and the group of human coders, using Cohen’s kappa, is 0.519 while the human reliability values range from 0.494 to 0.742 (M=0.6). Improvements were made to the human content analysis with the goal of improving the reliability among coders. After these improvements were made, the humans coded messages with a kappa agreement ranging from 0.816 to 0.879 (M=0.848), and the kappa agreement between the ANN model and the group of human coders is 0.70