Implementing Web 2.0 in secondary schools: impacts, barriers and issues

One of the reports from the Web 2.0 technologies for learning at KS3 and KS4 project. This report explored Impact of Web 2.0 technologies on learning and teaching and drew upon evidence from multiple sources: field studies of 27 schools across the country; guided surveys of 2,600 school students; 100 interviews and 206 online surveys conducted with managers, teachers and technical staff in these schools; online surveys of the views of 96 parents; interviews held with 18 individual innovators in the field of Web 2.0 in education; and interviews with nine regional managers responsible for implementation of ICT at national level

Initial experiences in developing e-health solutions across Scotland

The MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project is a collaborative effort between e-Science, clinical and ethical research centres across the UK including the universities of Oxford, Glasgow, Imperial, Nottingham and Leicester. The project started in September 2005 and is due to run for 3 years. The primary goal of VOTES is to develop a reusable Grid framework through which a multitude of clinical trials and epidemiological studies can be supported. The National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow are looking at developing the Scottish components of this framework. This paper presents the initial experiences in developing this framework and in accessing and using existing data sets, services and software across the NHS in Scotland

Assessing Student Exposure to and Use of Computer Technologies through an Examination of Course Syllabi

A syllabus analysis instrument was developed to assist program evaluators, administrators and faculty in the identification of skills that students use as they complete their college coursework. While this instrument can be tailored for use with a variety of learning domains, we used it to assess students\u27 use of and exposure to computer technology skills. The reliability and validity of the instrument was examined through an analysis of 88 syllabi from courses within the teacher education program and the core curriculum at a private Midwest US university. Results indicate that the instrument has good inter‐rater reliability and ratings by and interviews with faculty and students provide evidence of construct validity. The use and limitations of the instrument in educational program evaluation are discussed

Making Sense of Entrepreneurship Journals: Journal Rankings and Strategy Choices

Dozens of peer-reviewed, English language journals are currently published in our field. How ought we to evaluate them? This paper seeks to answer this question. To do so, we utilize both relevant literature and data on Entrepreneurship journals. The literature derives from both information science and other research areas that reflect on their journals. The data derives from six citation measures from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. We find 59 currently published English language, peer reviewed journals in Entrepreneurship. Contestable judgments based on their impact measures suggest that one of these 59 could be considered as “A+, four as “A”, five as “AB”, eight as “B”, four as “BC”, 23 as “C”, thirteen as “barely detectable”, and one as “insufficient data but promising”. Journal rankings affect the resources and prestige accorded to business schools, disciplines and subdisciplines, and individual scholars. However, the need to fit evaluations to school strategy implies that no rating system, ours included, is definitive. Multiple measures are needed, letter grades are misleading, and journal rankings should match the institution’s strategy and priorities in stakeholder service. A wider purpose of this study is to alert readers to the range of current methodologies and the limits of conventional rankings. Our conclusions appear innocuous, but standard practice is to use restrictive measures, to employ letter grades, and to prioritize only one stakeholder: scholars. These practices are poorly suited to the Entrepreneurship field

SaveDisney.com and Activist Challenges: A Habermasian Perspective on Corporate Legitimacy

This study develops a Habermasian framework for evaluating and generating challenges to organizational legitimacy. The launch of the SaveDisney.com web site represents an innovative example of an Internet-based activist public successfully challenging a corporation’s legitimacy and advocating for changes in corporate governance. Legitimacy research has focused on strategies used by organizations to build legitimacy (e.g., Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975; Metzler, 2001), but scholars rarely address how publics challenge legitimacy claims. Using Habermas’ conceptualization of communicative action and legitimacy to explore the SaveDisney.com case offers insight into ways that activist publics successfully challenge and reject the legitimacy claims of powerful corporations

Innovation brokers and their roles in value chain-network innovation: preliminary findings and a research agenda

Intervention approaches have been implemented in developing countries to enhance farmer's livelihoods through improving their linkages to markets and inclusiveness in agricultural value chains. Such interventions are aimed at facilitating the inclusion of small farmers not just in the vertical activities of the value chain (coordination of the chain) but also in the horizontal activities (cooperation in the chain). Therefore value addition is made by not just innovating products and services, but also by innovating social processes, which we define as Value Chain-Network Innovation. In Value Chain-Network Innovation, linkage formation among networks and optimisation is one of the main objectives of innovation enhancing interventions. Here some important roles for innovation brokers are envisaged as crucial to dynamise this process, connecting different actors of the innovation system, paying special attention to the weaker ones. However, little attention has been given to identify different innovation brokering roles in those approaches, and to the need that they facilitate innovation processes and open safe spaces for innovation and social learning at different organisational settings and levels, to have more effective and sustainable impacts. This paper offers some preliminary empirical evidence of the roles of innovation brokers in a developing country setting, recognising the context-sensitive nature of innovations. Two cases from work experience with intervention approaches are analysed in light of the theories of innovation brokering, presenting some empirical evidence of different types of arrangements made by innovation brokers. A third case was taken from the literature. Data from questionnaires, key informant interviews, participant observations of different types of activities and processes carried out in those approaches, SWOT analysis and project reports were used for the analysis of different types of brokering roles and to draw some lessons. One important outcome of this preliminary analysis was that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in integration with other media facilitate new ways of social organisation and interaction of innovation networks, which offer more possibilities for processes of innovation, aggregating value to the production and sharing of knowledge. There is already a transition of paradigm for approaching agricultural innovation to more participative and open approaches, which offers a promissory landscape for organising the value chain actors in a way that is more favourable for small farmers

Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4: summary report

The research project on Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4 was a major initiative funded by Becta to investigate the use and impact of such technologies in and out of school. The purpose of this research was to help shape Becta's own thinking and inform policy-makers, schools and local authorities on the potential benefits of Web 2.0 technologies and how their use can be effectively and safely realised. This document is he summary of the reports published for this project

Complete LibTech 2013 Print Program

PDF of the complete print program from the 2013 Library Technology Conferenc