Digital Projects in the Romanticism Classroom: A Practical Guide to Student Use of WordPress

This collaborative essay explores some of the opportunities and challenges faced by instructors and students when digital projects are integrated into the Romantic classroom. It is based on our experience with two iterations of a course on literary manuscripts of the period, and is written by the instructor of course and two students, who returned for the second iteration of the course, a year later, as ‘digital coaches.’ We discuss the excitement and creativity afforded by working in a digital medium, as well as its utility when working with digitized objects like literary manuscripts. We also address the pitfalls, as some students struggle with the demands of mastering new technologies and with writing for digital dissemination. We found that student success was improved by explicit guidance, throughout the course, in how to construct a digital project. We share a set of how-to resources we have developed for other instructors wishing to integrate digital pedagogy into their classes, including video tutorials, assignments, grading rubrics, and links to student digital projects. We also address questions of platform selection, sustainability, assignment design and student evaluation

Beyond information: factors in participation in networks of practice, a case study of web management in UK Higher Education

Purpose To explore the pattern and significance of cross-organizational ties in an emergent professional field, web production in UK Higher Education. Methodology/Approach The research is based on in-depth interviews with 21 practitioners and analysis of activity in cross-organizational spaces, such as an online community and a series of annual practitioner conferences on the web in HE (1997-). Findings The cross organizational spaces have support and symbolic roles as well as informational ones. They have overlapping but different membership and agendas. Key factors that govern individual participation and so the shape of cross-organizational spaces are differential involvement in technical innovation, degree of organizational embedding or marginality, differences in organizational position and role, orientation towards centralisation or decentralisation and orientation towards marketing or IT. There is some sense of occupational community among web managers, but within that also diversity and a significant fracture line between marketing and IT perspectives on the role. This may explain the lack of formal professionalization. As a more natural boundary practice between organizations than marketing, IT has more public visibility, possibly influencing the course jurisdictional struggles over who should control the web. Research limitations/implications As a heavily contextualised study, its detail reflects particular features of HE in the UK at one period as well as specific aspects of the web as a technology. Nevertheless, underlying factors which seem to influence participation and non-participation in cross-organizational networks may be generalisable to many occupations, particularly where knowledge is rapidly changing. Practical implications Some suggestions about how cross-organizational knowledge sharing is most effectively supported can be derived from the analysis. IT is a natural focus for cooperation, but there is a risk of this masking the importance of other professional practices. Efforts at formal professionalization may be devisive because people have different professional ambitions and there are individual and organizational benefits in not professionalizing the role formally. New practitioners may be the most active in using extra-organizational networks to assist them to become more embedded locally. Old hands, though they have high prestige and centrality, may increasingly take their own path away from the community. Aspects of local roles such as involvement in innovation or decentralist strategies favour participation in cross-organizational networks. Originality/value of paper Most studies of knowledge sharing have focussed on the factors which influence it within an organization, yet cross-organizational sharing is also of importance, even for established professions as the boundaries of organizations become more open. For new occupations cross-organizational ties may be a critical resource, and not only for sharing information or support, but for making sense of what the job is about at the deepest level. The research is also original in analysing a relatively little researched occupational group, those producing web sites for a living. It will be relevant to those interested in online and people centred information seeking, in professionalization and occupational identity

Professionalization and Dissemination of Project Management in Italy. Structuring an Organizational Field

The prevailing view looks at Project Management (PM) as a neutral and objective corpus of managerial knowledge. This perspective explains its growing popularity as an adaptive response by the organizations related to some significant environmental changes and the consequential changes in the strategies and organizational structures. This paper aims to propose an alternative vision - called Situationist - of the processes of professionalization and dissemination of PM. Through this different lens new elements emerge – institutional processes and power dynamics – suggesting different considerations. With respect to them, the work shows the preliminary results of an ongoing larger qualitative research program about the structuration of an organizational field in Italy

Developing the scales on evaluation beliefs of student teachers

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the validity and the reliability of a newly developed questionnaire named ‘Teacher Evaluation Beliefs’ (TEB). The framework for developing items was provided by the two models. The first model focuses on Student-Centered and Teacher-Centered beliefs about evaluation while the other centers on five dimensions (what/ who/ when/ why/ how). The validity and reliability of the new instrument was investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis study (n=446). Overall results indicate that the two-factor structure is more reasonable than the five-factor one. Further research needs additional items about the latent dimensions “what” ”who” ”when” ”why” “how” for each existing factor based on Student-centered and Teacher-centered approaches

Mapping ms-ptc programmatic core competencies to emerging professionalization standards: are our students fully prepared?

This paper explores evaluation of graduate student preparedness for work in technical communication and emerging professionalization standards by way of an alumni survey. This paper argues that these core competencies can be evaluated and aligned and provides an example confirming both the New Jersey Institute of Technology Masters of Science in Professional and Technical Communication (NJIT MS-PTC) and the Society of Technical Communication (STC) Body of Knowledge (BOK) and core competencies used in STC certification. The study was conducted through the month of October 2013 and queried alumni of the NJIT MS-PTC program. This paper seeks to suggest a method to map core competencies of any university program to professionalization standards and contributes to the debate on student preparedness and program evaluation

Where Minds Meet: The “Professionalization” of Cross-Strait Academic Exchange

In international relations, transnational academic exchange or, more generally, cultural ex-change is usually seen as a function of the quality of bilateral relations. As a variety of public diplomacy intended to win the “hearts and minds” of intellectuals in another country, the development of educational exchanges depends on the twists in foreign policy. Academic exchange across the Taiwan Strait commenced in the late 1980s, directly after the lifting of the travel ban, and had gathered momentum by the mid-1990s. It even accelerated further after the inauguration of the pro-independence Chen-government in Taiwan in 2000, creat-ing the “paradox” of the expansion of social contacts in times of frosty political relations. One possible explanation for this is that due to the rather unique situation in the Taiwan Strait people-to-people exchanges between Taiwan and mainland China have been officially promoted as a substitute for official contacts. What is often neglected by analysts of cross-Strait relations, however, is the fact that academic exchange is also a response to the global pressure to internationalize higher education. Within this two-dimensional framework (in-ternational relations and the internationalization of higher education), cross-Strait academic exchange has been developing its own dynamic. The outcome has been an increasing amount of nonofficial communication and the growing “professionalization” (in the sense of the academic profession) of academic exchange.Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, academic exchange, international relations, public diplomacy, internationalization of higher education, cross-Strait relations