LEADER as a vehicle for neo-endogenous rural development in England

LEADER emphasises neo-endogenous approaches where local rural development relies as much as possible on “bottom-up” activities. This research shows that the mainstreaming of LEADER saw certain compromises regarding the philosophical aspiration to give greater weight to local issues, local resources and local engagement. However, many LAGs learned to apply flexibility to meet local opportunities and challenges demonstrating how LEADER can empower local actors. Future challenges require LEADER to be more integrated with other rural policies and for the procedural elements to be simplified, especially for the smaller projects that have been found to make real impact at a very local level

Developing academic skills In blended environments

More teacher-centred in general, Higher Education Institutions are moving towards the incorporation of innovative and interactive practices and programmes, and in the last decades e- and b-learning have increasingly become credible alternatives to traditional modes of teaching and learning, and rethinking their curricula and strategies to incorporate e-approaches and digital technologies. The catalysts for this change thrive on the need to keep pace with other universities and recruiting students. The main goal of this paper is to briefly describe a PhD programme of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, and to put forward some selected blended strategies, namely concerning the use of digital technology to enhance learning and develop academic skills. Even though this paper does not directly address the topic of ESP, best practices described here are multi-disciplinary in nature, and offer insights as regards teaching practices and clues for academic and professional development and research on this topic. Stemming from the definition of ‘academic skills’, several online teaching and learning strategies are described. We therefore focus our paper on three selected strategies, used in this PhD for developing project group-work, writing academic papers and presenting research to peers. We delve on three main academic skills (collaboration, writing and presentation), as they are the basis for meaningful and lifelong learning. These are transferable and extensive and rely on students’ critical thinking and also on their team-work and initiative abilities, requiring them to be effective communicators and negotiators. The PhD programme makes use of blended strategies and digital technology to enhance participants’ learning experiences, sustaining the development of their academic skills. Students are required to participate in, produce and disseminate scientific research. Describing how different academic skills are developed throughout the PhD modules, the present text offers a fresh outlook on digital technology as a means of leveraging students’ academic/research skills, putting forth practices that can be relevant for a wide variety of academic and professional domains. The program described is blended and offered in sequential subjects, allowing students to concentrate on a topic at a time and carry out more in-depth and focused research, integrating individual and collective knowledge. This structure and flexible delivery mode also meet the students’ needs due to their professional obligations, promoting opportunities of continuous lifelong learning. Regarding academic skills, by relying strongly on collaboration, interaction and peer feedback, the PhD fosters autonomous learning and critical thinking, offering students the opportunity to engage in networking and the development of interpersonal skills, which are crucial for their academic future, and closer to what will be expected from them in their professional lives.publishe

The role of social media in empowering the involvement of women in information technology workforce in Iraq

The underrepresentation of the women workforce in the field of Information Technology (IT) in Iraq has been closely observed over the last few years. One of the facts is that social media have been widely and intensively used in Iraq, which is an effective way to empower women in the IT workforce. This study aimed to investigate women's awareness of using social media to get empowered in the IT workforce as well as the role of the social media in women empowerment in this sector. In order to achieve the objectives of this research and based on the theory of cyberfeminism, the current study conducted a survey amongst the female students of the University of Baghdad - College of Education Ibn al-Haytham and tried to find out how the use of social media is contributing to the growth of women participation in the IT workforce. For this purpose a sample of 162 female students was taken from this college. The quantitative method was used to collect data for this study. The findings in this study revealed there was a significant relationship between women's awareness and the encouragement of women in the IT workforce through the use of the social media. Besides, there was a significant relationship between the empowerment of women and the encouragement of women in the IT workforce through the use of the social media. Hence, women's awareness and empowerment of women through the social media encouraged the involvement of women in the IT workforce. In addition, this study recommends several suggestions for further research

Desperately Seeking Selznick: Cooptation and the Dark Side of Public Management in Networks

Most literature on public-sector networks focuses on how to build and manage systems and ignores the political problems that networks can create for organizations. This article argues that individual network nodes can work to bias the organization's actions in ways that benefit the organization's more advantaged clientele. The argument is supported by an analysis of performance data from 500 organizations over a five-year period. A classic theoretical point is supported in a systematic empirical investigation. While networks can greatly benefit the organization, they have a dark side that managers and scholars need to consider more seriously

The adoption and adaptation of good practice : Cross-national knowledge transfer in placemaking using the peer review method

The transfer of knowledge is a prominent feature in transnational networks regardless of whether they are aimed at practitioners, policy makers or researchers. Yet the process of transferring knowledge between countries and organisations is poorly understood, while the inclusion of citizens in the knowledge transfer process receives very little attention. This paper makes a contribution towards closing this gap in knowledge by presenting the outcomes of transnational knowledge transfer project aimed at community engagement in placemaking processes. The paper analyses the process and the outcomes of the knowledge transfer before critically discussing the barriers and challenges that were encountered. It concludes that knowledge exchange needs to be organised not only between officials but also between them and the communities they want to engage in their home cities. The concept of shared leadership has been found to capture the dynamics of knowledge exchanges well, but to ensure that organisations benefit from the application of new knowledge shared leadership needs to be balanced with strong strategic leadership. The implications of including citizens in a learning process through which tactic knowledge is shared between officials and communities are also discussed.Non peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Overview of Memotion 3: Sentiment and Emotion Analysis of Codemixed Hinglish Memes

Analyzing memes on the internet has emerged as a crucial endeavor due to the impact this multi-modal form of content wields in shaping online discourse. Memes have become a powerful tool for expressing emotions and sentiments, possibly even spreading hate and misinformation, through humor and sarcasm. In this paper, we present the overview of the Memotion 3 shared task, as part of the DeFactify 2 workshop at AAAI-23. The task released an annotated dataset of Hindi-English code-mixed memes based on their Sentiment (Task A), Emotion (Task B), and Emotion intensity (Task C). Each of these is defined as an individual task and the participants are ranked separately for each task. Over 50 teams registered for the shared task and 5 made final submissions to the test set of the Memotion 3 dataset. CLIP, BERT modifications, ViT etc. were the most popular models among the participants along with approaches such as Student-Teacher model, Fusion, and Ensembling. The best final F1 score for Task A is 34.41, Task B is 79.77 and Task C is 59.82.Comment: Defactify2 @AAAI 202