Eavesdropping Twitter: What students really think about writing centers

In recent decades, writing centers have moved from the margins of campus power toward the center (Essid 2014). Because our connections to professors and administrators have increased, students may be less likely to speak freely during consultations, on surveys, and in focus groups. Where, then, might we hear students’ “real talk” about writing centers? In the latter half of July 2015 and the beginning of August, I aimed to find out. My hypothesis was that Twitter might be a space to find “voices that are often left out of our surveys of satisfaction” (Lerner 4). Therefore, I spent a month surveilling Twitter, trying to listen in and access what students say about us when we aren’t likely to be listening. I found Twitter to be a public space in which students feel comfortable talking frankly about school matters, including writing center matters.University Writing Cente

What can managers do for creativity? : brokering creativity in the creative industries

'Creativity' has become a fashionable term in the contemporary managerial and political lexicon, signalling generalised approval in education, business and the arts. In Britain, 'creative industries' has replaced 'cultural industries' as the umbrella term for artistic and cultural production and distribution, and 'creativity' has been incorporated into the national tourism brand . In business, managers and academics use 'creativity' to indicate an organisation's capacity for innovation, flexibility and autonomy; these 'creative' values are seen to have replaced operational efficiency and strategic planning as the primary source of 'competitive advantage' in business. In education, creativity has spread beyond its original context of arts based subjects and is used to refer to a generalised ability to solve problems and generate new concepts across the entire curriculum. The term creativity has become so all-embracing as to lose any clearly defined meaning and value. Ask any organisation, industry or individual whether they would ever admit to being 'uncreative' and the corruption of meaning is only too apparent. It seems that we are all creative now. Creativity has become both the language and currency of today's knowledge economy

Digital transformation in the arts : a case study

This paper considers the interaction between digital technology and cultural organisations and the challenges and opportunities this presents for practice and for policy. The paper is based on one of eight 'digital R&D' projects supported by NESTA, Arts Council England and the AHRC, designed to analyse the effects of digital innovation in UK arts organisations. The paper focuses on a series of residencies in three UK arts organisations. The research aims to identify the cultural conditions which support or prevent short-term digital innovation becoming 'embedded' in the ongoing practice of a cultural organisation. The paper considers differing practices, attitudes and expectations between creative technologists and arts organisations. These differing 'cultures of innovation' may help us to understand why digital innovations often fail to move beyond temporary and pragmatic problem-solving towards more challenging, transformational effects on organisational strategy and culture

Are Virtual Learning Environments used to facilitate collaborative student learning activity? Findings of an institutional evaluation

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are used extensively within higher education, primarily as an educational tool, but can also have additional functionality. There has been considerable debate, both internal to the university and in the external academic community, about the value of a VLE, e.g. MacLaren (2004), Sharp et al. (2005) and Conole and de Laat (2006). The focus of this debate is whether or not a VLE is primarily used as a transmissive tool, in which the teacher determines VLE content and communication and which tends to be teacher initiated while the student adopts a passive role (Jonassen & Land, 2000). Whilst a transmissive approach may be an important element in students’ learning experiences, there is little evidence to suggest such usage facilitates deep learning

Virtual Learning Environments: the students' perspective

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are used extensively within higher education, primarily as an educational tool, but they can also have additional functionality. There has been considerable debate, both internal to the university and in the external academic community about the value of a VLE. The need to undertake a detailed examination of how students use a VLE has been a recurring theme in this debate. The purpose of this study was to ascertain how students used the university's VLE. The study's aims were: To find out what students use on the VLE; To determine what the students use the VLE for; To investigate student perceptions of the VLE; To find out what additional information and features students would like; To identify factors influencing student usage of the VLE. Study methodology followed principles for examining students experiences of technology reccommended for the JISC e-learning programme and used in the JISC LEX and LXP projects. The study used a naturalistic approach, recruiting student volunteers to complete various tools that would provide a triangulated, essentially open ended approach to obtaining students perspective on how they used the VLE. Three methods of data collection were used: Online questionnaire (n=407); Diary completed once a week for an 8 week period (n=14); and Focus group: (n=14). Quantitative data provided in the questionnaire and diary were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis whilst qualitative data obtained from all three data collection methods were analysed following the problems of thematic coding. The main study themes were structural consistancy; provision of learning materials; communication; student motivation; collaboration and enhanced use of the VLE

Folic acid in pregnancy and mortality from cancer and cardiovascular disease : further follow-up of the Aberdeen folic acid supplementation trial

Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions. Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge Professor Marion Hall, who set up the original randomised trial of folic acid supplementation. The authors also thank Ms Katie Wilde and the Data Management Team, University of Aberdeen, for their help with the extraction and linking of data and the data analysts from ISD Scotland.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Prospective associations between objective measures of physical activity and fat mass in 12-14 year old children: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)

Objective To investigate associations between physical activity at age 12 and subsequent adiposity at age 14

Discovery and publishing of primary biodiversity data associated with multimedia resources: The Audubon Core strategies and approaches

The Audubon Core Multimedia Resource Metadata Schema is a representation-free vocabulary for the description of biodiversity multimedia resources and collections, now in the final stages as a proposed Biodiversity Informatics Standards (TDWG) standard. By defining only six terms as mandatory, it seeks to lighten the burden for providing or using multimedia useful for biodiversity science. At the same time it offers rich optional metadata terms that can help curators of multimedia collections provide authoritative media that document species occurrence, ecosystems, identification tools, ontologies, and many other kinds of biodiversity documents or data. About half of the vocabulary is re-used from other relevant controlled vocabularies that are often already in use for multimedia metadata, thereby reducing the mapping burden on existing repositories. A central design goal is to allow consuming applications to have a high likelihood of discovering suitable resources, reducing the human examination effort that might be required to decide if the resource is fit for the purpose of the application