Being nationalist: identity within a post-Ottoman state

The thesis defines and explores three different modalities of nationalism - diagnosis, activism and redemption - in the context of contemporary Bulgaria. Nationalists see a significant divergence between 'who we should be' and 'who we are'. This is accentuated by Bulgarian citizens' experiences of socio-political chaos and uncertainty. The thesis looks at the political rituals which aim to redeem the 'ill' Bulgarian nation, conceived as both post-Ottoman and post-Soviet. It focuses the importance of affect for understanding the relevance of the nation for citizens’ sense of self. I begin by examining the apparatus of production through which the Bulgarian national subject is imbued with a particular character. I consider how it has been constituted historically and how it continues to be moulded by contemporary discourses. I demonstrate that 'being Bulgarian' is nowadays a primarily negative state of being, defined through the discourse of the ill nation. As far as nationalists are concerned, this illness can be cured only through attempting, out of the debris of historical contingency, to renew social structures so that they more closely resemble the ideal. My research focused on one nationalist organisation in Bulgaria which attempted to fulfil this task: VMRO (or IMRO- the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Movement). I explore how the organisation creates and renews itself as a descendant of the national revival movements of the 19th and early 20th century, and thus as a valid form of contemporary nationalism, while at the same time it fills the role of a modern political party. To heal the nation, VMRO declares a need to be vigilant against further catastrophes and to address the consequences of previous ones. It thus interprets existing social grievances according to specific narratives about the nation’s problems and prescribes redemptive action. VMRO addresses a public which has internalised a sense of being judged by 'the international' (often imagined as 'a dictate'). This is not the 'real' international, but an imagined, power-laden domain. Nationalists engage with this domain by constructing illicit discourses which challenge this nexus of power. In the thesis, I explore how the traditional imperatives of a nationalist organisation - making claims for territories, populations and minority issues - are hybridized by the organisation's dialogic engagement with both 'the international', with citizens' daily concerns and their affective states

A Virtual Teacher Community to Facilitate

Paper presented at the ISSEP 2006: Informatics Education – The Bridge between Using and Understanding Computers, Viluis, Lithuania, 7-11 November 2006Information technologies revolution calls for new skills and teachers’ qualifications. In order to help secondary school education to meet the requirements raised by the changes in information and educational technologies, development of new curricula and supporting materials is necessary, on the one hand, and building relevant teachers knowledge and skills, on the other. The paper discusses the problem for supporting teachers’ professional development. Building a virtual community of teachers and experts is proposed in order to support teachers in building new knowledge and skills and to motivate and help them to collaborate, share and reuse educational resources.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

A Virtual Teacher Community to facilitate professional development

Information technologies revolution calls for new skills and teachers’ qualifications. In order to help secondary school education to meet the requirements raised by the changes in information and educational technologies, development of new curricula and supporting materials is necessary, on the one hand, and building relevant teachers knowledge and skills, on the other. The paper discusses the problem for supporting teachers’ professional development. Building a virtual community of teachers and experts is proposed in order to support teachers in building new knowledge and skills and to motivate and help them to collaborate, share and reuse educational resources

A influência de digital influencers no processo de decisão de compra do público feminino

Orientador : Danielle Mantovani Lucena da SilvaTrabalho de Conclusão de Curso (especialização) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curso de Especialização em Marketing EmpresarialInclui referênciasResumo : A finalidade deste estudo é identificar o grau de influência que digital influencers de moda têm no processo de decisão de compra do público feminino, principalmente em função das redes sociais que são os canais utilizados por esse tipo de formadores de opinião. As redes sociais mudaram muito o processo de decisão de compra por produtos e neste sentido, os formadores de opinião, especialmente os de moda, influenciam consideravelmente a forma como o público feminino decide pela compra de artigos de moda. Ainda, as blogueiras que em sua maioria surgiram do anonimato, publicam conteúdos em diferentes formatos (posts, vídeos, fotos) que falam sobre novas tendências de moda e dessa forma estimulam o consumo. As milhares de seguidoras dessas blogueiras se influenciam e consomem os produtos postados por elas. Para a pesquisa, primeiramente, na fase teórica, foram levantados conceitos do comportamento do consumidor, grupos de referência, redes sociais, celebridades e blogs de moda. Na etapa empírica, foram realizadas entrevistas com a responsável por uma marca que utiliza blogueiras para estimular o consumo de seus produtos para uma análise de variação das vendas de uma marca que vende somente pelo Instagram, logo depois que houve um anúncio com uma blogueira. Também foi realizada uma entrevista com uma consumidora que tem por costume seguir digital influencers. Após a análise e interpretação dos dados, pode-se compreender que as decisões de compra de consumidores do público feminino são muito influenciadas por blogueiras de moda e digitais influencers, especialmente pelas as que utilizam o Instagram como mídia para falar sobre outras marcas

Virtual Training Centers of the I*Teach Project - Continuous learning

New methodology of continuous education offers the opportunity to acquire new skills as well as general social skills in a flexible and synchronic manner. It also allows to learn and develop newly acquired knowledge by combining it with additional information in a manner that is much better adjusted to the possibilities of organizing the learner’s own educational process. This flexibility of learning has become the key factor motivating students to continue their education especially in the context of modern and dynamically changing labor market

THE VIRTUAL TRAINING CENTER: A SUPPORT TOOL FOR TEACHERS COMMUNITY

Communities of practice for teachers are emerging, where the issues of life long learning of in-service teacher is supported by a collective effort and by applying modern methodologies and tools. The paper describes how effective support to teachers communities is achieved by means of a Virtual Training Center, that is the virtual meeting place of the community, which was built during the I*Teach pilot project. Teachers who have similar goals, but few opportunities to physically meet each other and with other project participants, may share information and discussions about the development phases that precede and follow the actual application of the proposed methodologies and tools within their classrooms

Information management barriers in complex research and development projects : an exploratory study on the perceptions of project managers

Many organizations depend on the success of rapidly deployed, limited time frame and multipartner projects as an important element of their business strategies. Information management is regarded as a critical and upmost important issue, especially in projects. Complex projects require additional team collaboration and a consistent information management strategy to support the development of the project. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study on information management barriers in complex projects, particularly focusing issues and difficulties recognized by project participants and managers. Our study intends to fill the gap in empirical research regarding this subject and to provide new insights for project managers of complex projects to devise more effective information management strategies and tools to set up and run information technology platforms.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

The Barfie handbook of pedagogical and scientific approaches to children's books and intercultural education

BARFIE (Books and Reading for Intercultural Education) is a European thematic network in intercultural education aimed at teachers, librarians, parents, children and school authorities that uses books and other media for children aged 6 to 16. BARFIE was developed in 2002, 2003 and 2004 with funding from the European Union as a Comenius network, involving at its core 14 European countries, with its teaching institutions, schools, libraries, and school authorities, while reaching out to involve schoolchildren, teachers, researchers, publishers and the public in general not only in those countries but all over Europe. BARFIE has developed a collection and catalogue of books for children and young people on intercultural education, which can be consulted at www.barfie.net and in book form. In the collection there are around 10 books from each of 14 European states that are members or partners of the BARFIE network. The books were carefully selected by experts on children’s books and young adult books, librarians, teachers and educators with the aim of developing ideas and concepts for teaching multiculturality, being European, fighting xenophobia and racism, integrating difference and celebrating similarities. Simultaneously, BARFIE developed an online catalogue of projects on intercultural education and children’s fiction, which pools together resources of European projects developed under the European Union framework, such as The Reader’s Corner. European Style Fairy Tales, at www.autopen.com/euro.fairy.shtml; Children’s Polar Library, at www.barnenspolarbibliotek.com/; Communicating tradition and culture across the internet: Traditional Tales at www.eurotales.eril.net; Europe of Tales, at www.europeoftales.net; Netlibris, at www.netlibris.net; and The European Picture Book Collection, at www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/ . BARFIE further developed pedagogical materials to be used in connection with the books in the collection in the form of seminars for teachers on: Global Citizenship; Getting to Know Central European Countries through Their Books; the European Picture Book Collection; Netlibris International; or Art Basics for Children; A Handful of Stories. In order to reach schoolchildren and teachers BARFIE developed teaching packages at European and local levels on: Learning English as a Foreign Language through BARFIE books; Introducing Portuguese and the Portuguese Culture through BARFIE Books; the BARFIE Picture Book Collection, as well as introductory sessions on particular books of the collection for school use. Finally, BARFIE brought together teachers, librarians, and researchers on its three seminars: the first took place in Vienna and was hosted by the Austrian Ministry of Education and the Kinderliteraturhaus in Vienna; the second venue was Bratislava and the BARFIE seminar joined efforts with the Biennial of Illustration in Children’s Literature and IBBY in Slovakia; the third seminar was held in Warsaw and was sponsored by the IBBY section of Poland and the Polish National Library and the Austrian Kinderliteraturhaus. This collection of articles tells you more about BARFIE, its efforts, aims and achievements. It describes work done under BARFIE inspiration and the enthusiasm of teachers who were keen to take the BARFIE books into their schools and thus broaden national curricula into European spaces of communication, exchange and intercultural learning. It offers you pedagogical materials to work from, ideas to take back into libraries and schools, as well as resources to integrate with your teaching and living. The collection of articles also presents scientific and pedagogical frameworks to think about children’s books, reading and interactive learning in contemporary Europe. In the three sections of the collection – Using the Resources of the BARFIE Network (section 1), From Books into Other Media: Reading, Using & Performing, (Section 2), and Children’s Books and Children’s Literature – Research and Position Papers (section 3) there is material for you to use in the classroom, in the library or at home, as well as material to reflect on and to improve your professional practice. This collection does not, however, describe all BARFIE activities. You can find more about these on the BARFIE webpage, at www.barfie.net, through the BARFIE newsletters, as well as through the contact persons in each European country that are on the partner section of the BARFIE webpage. Feel free to use the BARFIE resources and to join our network!Este documento foi elaborado no ãmbito do programa Comenius 3 Network (Comenius contract 90769-CP-1-2001-1-AT-COMENIUS-C3

A contingency analysis of precarious organizational temporariness

This paper extends our current understanding of organizational temporariness. The life of a temporary British trade union branch established to recruit Eastern European migrant workers reveals ‘precarious temporariness’, which is less predictable than the ‘planned temporariness’ typically portrayed in the literature. This different type of temporariness was associated with four key contingencies affecting the branch: dispersed governance, bottom-up initiatives, uncertain resourcing, and an effectuation logic. Analysis of the case extends our existing understanding of organizational temporariness and points to an extension of existing theorizing by highlighting the contingent nature of temporariness. The broader managerial implication of the findings is that for projects facing contingencies of the kind studied, the conventional linear approach of target setting and performance management will be less effective than an ongoing process of communication and consultation

An artificial intelligence tool for heterogeneous team formation in the classroom

Nowadays, there is increasing interest in the development of teamwork skills in the educational context. This growing interest is motivated by its pedagogical effectiveness and the fact that, in labour contexts, enterprises organize their employees in teams to carry out complex projects. Despite its crucial importance in the classroom and industry, there is a lack of support for the team formation process. Not only do many factors influence team performance, but the problem becomes exponentially costly if teams are to be optimized. In this article, we propose a tool whose aim it is to cover such a gap. It combines artificial intelligence techniques such as coalition structure generation, Bayesian learning, and Belbin's role theory to facilitate the generation of working groups in an educational context. This tool improves current state of the art proposals in three ways: i) it takes into account the feedback of other teammates in order to establish the most predominant role of a student instead of self-perception questionnaires; ii) it handles uncertainty with regard to each student's predominant team role; iii) it is iterative since it considers information from several interactions in order to improve the estimation of role assignments. We tested the performance of the proposed tool in an experiment involving students that took part in three different team activities. The experiments suggest that the proposed tool is able to improve different teamwork aspects such as team dynamics and student satisfaction