Self-selection patterns in Mexico-U.S. migration: the role of migration networks

This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. We first present a simple theoretical framework showing how such networks impact on migration incentives at different education levels and, consequently, how they are likely to affect the expected skill composition of migration. Using survey data from Mexico, we then show that the probability of migration is increasing with education in communities with low migrant networks, but decreasing with education in communities with high migrant networks. This is consistent with positive self-selection of migrants being driven by high migration costs, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection of migrants being driven by lower returns to education in the U.S. than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987)

Self-selection patterns in Mexico-U.S. migration: The role of migration networks

This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. We first present a simple theoretical framework showing how such networks impact on migration incentives at different education levels and, consequently, how they are likely to affect the expected skill composition of migration. Using survey data from Mexico, we then show that the probability of migration is increasing with education in communities with low migrant networks, but decreasing with education in communities with high migrant networks. This is consistent with positive self-selection of migrants being driven by high migration costs, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection of migrants being driven by lower returns to education in the U.S. than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987).Migration, migration networks, educational attainments, self-selection, Mexico

Self-selection patterns in Mexico-U.S. migration : the role of migration networks

The authors examine the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. They first present a simple theoretical framework showing how such networks impact on migration incentives at different education levels and, consequently, how they are likely to affect the expected skill composition of migration. Using survey data from Mexico, the authors then show that the probability of migration is increasing with education in communities with low migrant networks, but decreasing with education in communities with high migrant networks. This is consistent with positive self-selection of migrants being driven by high migration costs, and with negative self-selection of migrants being driven by lower returns to education in the U.S. than in Mexico.Population Policies,Voluntary and Involuntary Resettlement,Human Migrations&Resettlements,Anthropology,Technology Industry

Communities of Practice and Virtual Learning Communities – An Exploratory Study

The use of new information and communication tools such as; Web 2.0, social networks, wikis, blogs continues to grow for learning in higher education. More and more instructors worldwide have already started incorporating these tools for their course delivery and pedagogy. The growing literature suggests that virtual communities of practice (CoPs) and virtual learning communities (VLCs) are becoming common for collaboration and sharing resources due to the emergence of Web 2.0 tools and other social networks within higher education institutions. This exploratory study examines the existence of such communities of practice or learning communities in higher education particularly among business school instructors. The data is collected through phone and e-mail interviews with academic staff. The preliminary findings suggest that business schools professors have still not become part of CoPs and VLCs

A Study of Socio-economic Factors and Role of Extended Family in Children’s Basic Education in Rural Ghana: The Case of Effutu Municipality

The decentralized system of education delivery in Ghana through the Central government or the Ministry of Education has created space for understanding of how schools and communities should operate and how communities should assume an important role in schools but less on how informal bodies should be backed with the requisite support to be actively involved in their children’s education. This creates a policy and practice gap which is more pronounced in poor rural communities and Effutu Municipality is no exception. In recognition of this, the study sought to explore the role of the extended family in resource constraint communities from the perspectives of individual parents in two schools in a rural Ghana. The case study adopted a qualitative method of interviews with twelve parents to gain understanding of their involvement in children’s education including the socio-economic challenges within such context. Additional data were collected through interviews with teachers. The data were analysed through coding to identify themes. The study findings reveal that in rural communities, the notion of parents goes beyond the biological parent to wider family and community networks in part as a result of seasonal migration. It identified grandparents, mothers in particular as playing a vital role in children’s education. Consequently, the study recommends that policies on education decentralization should reflect the local factors which impact on extended family’s role in children’s education. Keywords: Extended family role, socio-economic challenges, community networks, and individual parent

Writing With vs. Writing About: Co-producing Consciousness-Raising Fiction With Young Women From Aid-Supported Communities in Malawi

While some African women have access to education and avenues for writing and publishing their creative work, there remains a gap in accessibility for young African women from aid-supported communities to write and share stories of importance to them. In contrast to their own silencing, these young women are often written about by the aid organizations supporting their communities for fund or awareness raising purposes. The way in which young women from aid-supported communities are written about can present issues of representation, as often the author is from another culture and a position of privilege. Co-producing consciousness-raising fiction with young women from aid-supported communities offers another approach to representing their stories and has the benefit of sharing knowledge, skills and networks. Through this activity, young women from aid-supported communities can gain access to further education, develop networks for submitting and publishing their creative work, and find their own voice. Furthermore, writing with rather than writing about these young women allows authors working with aid-supported communities to co-produce stories of both cultural and global relevance

Invisible colleges in the adult education research world

Invisible colleges - researchers’ networks of communicating academic work – are power-generating actors shaping research fields. A key question concerns the relation between local research communities and their dependence on global actors. A key arena is articles and citations in academic journals. An actor-network-inspired empirical investigation of the geographical origin of articles and references in the journal “Studies in the Education of Adults” and a check of references to journals in “Adult Education Quarterly” was made. The origin of articles and study objects in the International journal of Lifelong education was also analysed. Some conclusions can be drawn from the material. One is the heavy impact of “real” geographical location, i.e. the origins of texts and references are located in very specific areas on the map, i.e. in spite of the possibilities of cyberspace and global mobility. Another conclusion is the unilateral relation between an Anglo-American centre and a periphery in the distribution systems of texts. Adult education is faced with a contradictory situation between culturing invisible colleges in adult education and getting resources in the emerging economy of publications and citations through membership in other invisible colleges. (DIPF/orig.

Link community detection using generative model and nonnegative matrix factorization

Discovery of communities in complex networks is a fundamental data analysis problem with applications in various domains. While most of the existing approaches have focused on discovering communities of nodes, recent studies have shown the advantages and uses of link community discovery in networks. Generative models provide a promising class of techniques for the identification of modular structures in networks, but most generative models mainly focus on the detection of node communities rather than link communities. In this work, we propose a generative model, which is based on the importance of each node when forming links in each community, to describe the structure of link communities. We proceed to fit the model parameters by taking it as an optimization problem, and solve it using nonnegative matrix factorization. Thereafter, in order to automatically determine the number of communities, we extend the above method by introducing a strategy of iterative bipartition. This extended method not only finds the number of communities all by itself, but also obtains high efficiency, and thus it is more suitable to deal with large and unexplored real networks. We test this approach on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world networks including an application on a large biological network, and compare it with two highly related methods. Results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over competing methods for the detection of link communities.This work is supported by Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (2013CB329301), National Natural Science Foundation of China (61303110, 61133011, 61373053, 61070089, 61373165, 61202308), PhD Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (20130032120043), Open Project Program of Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education (93K172013K02), Innovation Foundation of Tianjin University (60302034), the TECHNO II project within Erasmus Mundus Programme of European Union, and the China Scholarship Council (award to Dongxiao He for one year's study abroad at Washington University in St Louis). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Visual literacy and visual communication for global education: innovations in teaching e-learning in art, design and communication

This paper presents the (student) proceedings of a successful inter-university co-operation between a research university and a university of applied sciences, in the field of Visual Literacy and Visual Communication. The origin lays in the international symposium “Digital Communities for Global Education” (Enschede NL, 2006) and the start was a web-based course in Informational Graphic Design. The ongoing development is an experimental master course in which students of both institutes work together. The participating professors are also involved in European Co-operative networks as well as Trans Atlantic- and Euro-Asian ones. Participating students are coming from all over the world so give the course a multi cultural character.\ud Research questions for the project are 1) what is the universal content of a message and 2) how can this message be encoded? 3) what factors do influence the interaction processes in networked education

SOCIAL NETWORKS AS A COMPONENT OF EDUCATIONAL AREA OF THE HIGH SCHOOL

Currently, there is an active process of expanding the educational space, including the higher education of the Russian Federation, at the expense of informatization. Informatization of educational area of higher education is impossible without using web-technologies and, such as social networks. The authors of the article suggest social networks to be understood as a working version of an “interactive multi-user website that implements a network social structure consisting of a group of nodes — social objects (groups of people, communities) and links between them (social relationships), on the basis of which participants can establish relationship with each other. Currently, there are several main functions of social networks: educational; adaptive (acts as a resource of adaptation); compensatory (replacing institutional mechanisms of adaptation); informational (supports communication between authors of social interaction); transit (allows an individual to make the transition along the social ladder); coordination; social support functions (strengthen communication within and outside the network) and the function of a sociocultural marker. Social networks, speaking as a special social space of the Internet, have become the sphere in which traditional forms of socialization and social relations are transformed, and communication as a type of leisure activity becomes possible not in the traditional form of direct live communication, but acquires the features of simple communication. The authors state that at present using social networks in the educational area of the higher school of the Russian Federation is minimal. The network educational community on the basis of a social network - a virtual educational environment - is necessary, first of all, for students who have difficulties in communicating directly or need additional knowledge and skills that an educational institution cannot provide. From the point of view of education, social networks can be: freely available (non-specialized networks for which professional communities are not paramount and purely professional communities of practice) and in a corporate format (free-access networks; not specialized (“general profile” network)). The advent of Web 2.0 has expanded the possibilities of using social networks in education, has changed the attitude to the Internet as a whole, and teachers have begun to more actively use the Internet services for educational and educational purposes, in extracurricular activities and creative activities. It has already been experimentally proven that network communities can serve as pedagogical practices for development: co-thinking, tolerance, mastering decentralized models, critical thinking