Drag it together with Groupie: making RDF data authoring easy and fun for anyone

One of the foremost challenges towards realizing a “Read-write Web of Data” [3] is making it possible for everyday computer users to easily find, manipulate, create, and publish data back to the Web so that it can be made available for others to use. However, many aspects of Linked Data make authoring and manipulation difficult for “normal” (ie non-coder) end-users. First, data can be high-dimensional, having arbitrary many properties per “instance”, and interlinked to arbitrary many other instances in a many different ways. Second, collections of Linked Data tend to be vastly more heterogeneous than in typical structured databases, where instances are kept in uniform collections (e.g., database tables). Third, while highly flexible, the problem of having all structures reduced as a graph is verbosity: even simple structures can appear complex. Finally, many of the concepts involved in linked data authoring - for example, terms used to define ontologies are highly abstract and foreign to regular citizen-users.To counter this complexity we have devised a drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface that makes authoring Linked Data easy, fun, and accessible to a wide audience. Groupie allows users to author data simply by dragging blobs representing entities into other entities to compose relationships, establishing one relational link at a time. Since the underlying representation is RDF, Groupie facilitates the inclusion of references to entities and properties defined elsewhere on the Web through integration with popular Linked Data indexing services. Finally, to make it easy for new users to build upon others’ work, Groupie provides a communal space where all data sets created by users can be shared, cloned and modified, allowing individual users to help each other model complex domains thereby leveraging collective intelligence

“Violence is who we are”: Adolescents constructing human rights consciousness in “postwar” Guatemala

National education reforms in Guatemala’s postwar years have centered on supporting civic skills and human rights awareness, while largely silencing historical analysis of the recent armed conflict. But given the scale of Guatemala’s “postwar” violence and instability, it is unclear whether young people find relevance in the principles of human rights, as well as how they interpret their disarticulation from Guatemala’s history of violence. Everyday experiences with a deeply unequal society may further undermine this educational approach and the peacebuilding goals that underlie it. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural and urban communities, this paper explores how “postwar” generation youth construct human rights consciousness, drawing on the language and principles of human rights to generate their own narratives about past and present violence. Young peoples’ interpretations of human rights pivot along interpretations of past and present injustice, exhibiting three contrasting stances: narratives of denial in which adolescents reject the normative claims of the human rights framework, narratives of skepticism in which they question whether human rights can be effectively practiced in Guatemala, and narratives of empowerment in which they embrace justice initiatives for past and present violence through the lens of human rights. While outlining a typology of human rights consciousness among Guatemalan adolescents, I explore how young people draw on the multiple histories and silences that they have been presented with through formal and informal educational encounters.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108492/1/Bellino_Listening to press.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108492/4/Bellino_Educating for HR consciousness.pdfDescription of Bellino_Listening to press.pdf : Main articl

Children’s agency in the National Curriculum for England: a critical discourse analysis

Questions of children’s agency have experienced a resurgence in education theory over the past years. Yet, there have been few attempts to examine children’s agency in the context of a primary classroom from the viewpoint of the curriculum. This gap is being addressed by a longitudinal project exploring the impact of the National Curriculum for England on children’s agency through a critical discourse analysis of the curriculum text and an ethnography of three primary schools in England. This paper reports on the results of the critical discourse analysis examining how children’s agency is talked about (or silenced) in England’s curriculum

Mine, Yours, … Ours? Managing Stakeholder Conflicts in an Enterprise Blockchain Consortium

When major corporations build and manage own platforms, most of the conflicts are resolved internally. With the rise of blockchain systems, also blockchain-based platforms are increasingly tried out, which are governed in a decentralized fashion. But moving from hierarchical efficiency to a democratic inclusiveness, in which blockchain proponents believe, is difficult: the variety of included actors raise a variety of conflicts, when platform users become platform complementors or even owners. To manage these conflicts, it is necessary to analyze each actor in detail. This paper reflects on the developments within an ongoing enterprise blockchain consortium in a small European country in the automotive domain from a governance perspective. We portray the consortium’s stakeholder conflicts, propose solutions for these conflicts and relate them to literature on blockchain governance. Our findings contextualize several theoretical stances, emphasizing the importance of the organizational over the technological embedment in blockchain governance

Seeing Academically Marginalized Students’ Multimodal Designs from a Position of Strength

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students’ multimodal designs to highlight opportunities presented for expanding literacy practices traditionally not often available to lower-tracked students. Findings highlight the authorial stances and rhetorical force that this cohort of students employed in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We echo arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus aims to counter deficit views of academically marginalized students’ in-school literacy practices and to examine openings for equity through authoritative stance-taking, multivoicedness, and multiple paths to authoring that multimodal composition affords

From Total Islam to the Islamic State: Radicalization Leading to Violence Dynamics as a Subject of Reciprocal Affordance Opportunities

This article aims to clarify the role of the Islamic State’s (a.k.a. ISIS) online activities on radicalization. To that effect, all empirical endeavors on the underpinning phenomenon in Vox-Pol’s library were systematically reviewed and assessed. This exhaustive review suggests that Radicalization Leading to Violence (RLV) offers a nuanced conceptualization of the complex, emergent, and non-linear and dynamic phenomenon. Findings of the included studies were recorded, visualized, and clustered, allowing the discussion of possible scenarios, and thus, the inference of a utilitarian model of RLV dynamics based on the conceptual map of the literature. On the basis of connectivity and affordance opportunities (online and offline [beyond the digital realm]), Total Islam (i.e., a totalizing identity marker rather than an indicator of religiosity) is posited to be a critical element of the inferred model. ISIS is argued to use both affordance opportunities in a way that capitalizes on the manifestations of Total Islam to mobilize those embracing this form identity across different RLV trajectories. To that end, the paper is concluded by discussing its implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research

Collaborative Writing in L1 School Contexts: A Scoping Review

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Digital Social Enterprise for Sustainable Development: Insights from the Case Study in Nepal

It is generally agreed that digital social enterprises (DSE) through the digitalization process can contribute to sustainable development. However, there are a few theoretical and empirical studies in this research stream. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a qualitative interpretive case study in Nepal. Applying the theory of affordances as an analytical tool, we identified five digital affordances: transactability, communicability, accessibility, manageability, and digitizability. By actualizing these affordances, DSEs can contribute to access to market and finance, social engagement, waste management, and digitized information. We also identified various challenges such as lack of awareness about digital affordances and capabilities to actualize those affordances, lack of digital culture, and poor mapping system that can inhibit the actualization of the affordances and showed the facilitating conditions that can address these challenges. Finally, we suggest future research avenues

Constructing narrative and phenomenological meaning within one study

© 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to argue for the articulation of the affordances of two qualitative methodologies when used within one study to address the multi-dimensional nature of the research phenomena. Design/methodology/approach: This paper considers one example of combining narrative inquiry and phenomenological inquiry to construct new understandings of teacher learning from an Australian study. Findings: The author draws on the individual meaning-making and shared social phenomena of professional learning explored for five secondary school teachers. Findings are accessed in two ways: narrative inquiry enables the construction of unique professional learning narratives and phenomenological inquiry proposes commonalities in the teachers’ experiences. Research limitations/implications: Selected examples from the study are used to explore what may be learnt from combining two interpretative methodologies within one study with limited references to the overall research findings. Practical implications: These qualitative methodological designs and their implementation within one study have positive influences on the multifaceted nature of the construction of meaning-making in teacher professional learning. Furthermore, using two qualitative methodologies together provide insights on the study phenomena, in this instance, highlighting the personal aspect of expert teachers’ professional learning needs and the disruptive dissonance of ongoing problematics as central for the teachers throughout their professional learning. Originality/value: This study offers one possibility for combining methodologies to access the meaning-making in teacher learning and one avenue for creating hermeneutic understanding in using the methods within this approach