Wikipedia editing and information literacy: A case study

Purpose: This paper aims to evaluate the success of a Wikipedia editing assessment designed to improve the information literacy skills of a cohort of first-year undergraduate health sciences students. Design/methodology/approach: In this action research case study (known hereafter as “the project” to differentiate this action research from the students’ own research), students researched, wrote and published Wikipedia articles on Australia-centric health topics. Students were given a pre- and post-test to assess levels of self-confidence in finding, evaluating and referencing information. Student work was also analysed in terms of article length and quantity and the type of information sources used. Findings: Tests revealed that students’ self-confidence in their information literacy skills improved overall. Analysis of student work revealed that students wrote longer articles and incorporated more references than expected. References used were of appropriate quality relevant to the article despite minimal instructions. Originality/value: There are few studies that investigate information literacy development through Wikipedia editing in Australian universities. This study shows that Wikipedia editing is an effective way to carry out student assessment prior to essay writing and an innovative platform to improve information literacy skills in undergraduate students

“Stickiness”: Gauging students’ attention to online learning activities

Purpose: Online content developers use the term “stickiness” to refer to the ability of their online service or game to attract and hold the attention of users and create a compelling and magnetic reason for them to return repeatedly (examples include virtual pets and social media). In business circles, the same term connotes the level of consumer loyalty to a particular brand. This paper aims to extend the concept of “stickiness” not only to describe repeat return and commitment to the learning “product”, but also as a measure of the extent to which students are engaged in online learning opportunities. Design/methodology/approach: This paper explores the efficacy of several approaches to the monitoring and measuring of online learning environments, and proposes a framework for assessing the extent to which these environments are compelling, engaging and “sticky”. Findings: In particular, the exploration so far has highlighted the difference between how lecturers have monitored the engagement of students in a face-to-face setting versus the online teaching environment. Practical implications: In the higher education environment where increasingly students are being asked to access learning in the online space, it is vital for teachers to be in a position to monitor and guide students in their engagement with online materials. Originality/value: The mere presence of learning materials online is not sufficient evidence of engagement. This paper offers options for testing specific attention to online materials allowing greater assurance around engagement with relevant and effective online learning activities

Taste Heterogeneity, IIA, and the Similarity Critique

The purpose of this paper is to show that allowing for taste heterogeneity does not address the similarity critique of discrete-choice models. Although IIA may technically be broken in aggregate, the mixed logit model allows neither a given individual nor the population as a whole to behave with perfect substitution when facing perfect substitutes. Thus, the mixed logit model implies that individuals behave inconsistently across choice sets. Estimating the mixed logit on data in which individuals do behave consistently can result in biased parameter estimates, with the individuals' tastes for desirable attributes being systemically undervalued.Heterogeneity, Mixed Logit, Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives, IIA, Similarity Critique, Ecological Fallacy

Harnessing the ancestors: mutuality, uncertainty and ritual practice in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

In the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, chronic economic uncertainty has seen social relations stretched to breaking point. Informants speak of a 'war between men and women'. While grinding poverty, death in the shape of the 'axe' (HIV/AIDS) and suspicion stalk the land, and the project of building the umzi (homestead) falters, hope for the future and with it, trust between people, leaches away. One response to such uncertainty is a turn to ritual. Through a nearly relentless schedule of ritual activity which invokes the ancestors and the Christian deity in various forms, Xhosa people attempt to dam up trust, secure ongoing investment in the rural homestead and sustain ties of reciprocity both among rural people and between them and their urban kin. It is also through the staging of these rituals that women, acting together and in support of each other, are increasingly assertive – often in the face of a violent, rearguard opposition from men - in their efforts to exercise agency over the differentiated, fragmented and fragile social and economic relationships within their homesteads and across their villages

Catalonia could follow Scotland in using its independence movement as leverage to win more devolved powers

Scotland voted No to independence on 18 September, in part because the leaders of the three main parties in Westminster offered the country a deal to devolve more powers to the Scottish Parliament. Ainslie Noble writes on the differences between the campaigns in Scotland and Catalonia. She argues that with the Spanish government acting to prevent Catalonia from holding a referendum, the popular support for independence could similarly be used as leverage to push for more devolved powers

The contested space that local knowledge occupies: understanding the veterinary knowledges and practices of livestock farmers in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

The chapter examines the local knowledge system implicated in the production and husbanding of livestock, and specifically in relation to the management of tick-borne diseases of cattle in rural South Africa. It critically explores the nature of both local and scientific knowledges and their complex interplay. It considers the implications of this for veterinary programmes more widely

Application of orthogonal polynomials to geostatistics

Geostatistics is a field of study that deals with spatially dependent attributes. As information regarding these attributes is usually only available at sample locations, estimates must be made at unsampled locations. Sample data are usually measured on point support within the study region, however in reality decisions are based on small blocks and not on points. A change-of-support model is required to obtain the theoretical distribution of block values given the sample point values. Estimates arc then made for a collection of blocks, referred to as a panel. Kriging is a generic term adopted by geostatisticians for a family of estimators appropriate for spatially distributed data. The main focus of this study is the method of Disjunctive Kriging that employs the use of a family of orthogonal functions known as the Hermite polynomials. This thesis presents comparisons of the results from Disjunctive Kriging with those from the more commonly used methods of Ordinary Kriging and Indicator Kriging. Ordinary Kriging can be used to generate estimates for each small block in the study region. Panel estimates can then be derived from the block estimates within each panel. Indicator Kriging and Disjunctive Kriging use change-of-support models to obtain estimates of functions of the attribute for the panels in the study region based on the chosen block support size. Two sets of isotropic data are analysed, one of which is approximately normally distributed and the other is positively skewed. Exhaustive data is available for both sets of data for comparative purposes

In the Shambles of Hollywood: The Decadent Trans Feminine Allegory in Myra Breckinridge

When Twentieth Century Fox announced there would be a 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s controversial novel Myra Breckinridge (1968), Candy Darling considered it her prime opportunity to break into mainstream cinema. The novel follows its titular character, an addled trans woman obsessed with the films of the 1940s, as she seeks to claim her inheritance from an uncle who runs an acting academy in Hollywood. Darling, a trans woman herself, had begun her acting career in Andy Warhol’s movies, where she formed an important part of the Factory set along with other trans feminine people such as Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. But these underground films had a limited circulation, and it was Darling’s deepest-held ambition to become a legitimate starlet. When she applied for the role, she was rejected in favour of the cisgender actress Raquel Welch [fig. 1]. ‘They decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite’, she recounted. While Welch obviously lent the production some star power at the time, Darling’s exclusion seems counterintuitive: she was about the same age as Myra in the novel and was also obsessed with vintage Hollywood, modelling herself after peroxide blonde actresses such as Lana Turner, Kim Novak, and Jean Harlow. She could recite whole passages from films such as Picnic (1955), demonstrating something of Myra’s encyclopaedic film knowledge; in fact, Warhol thought ‘she knew even more about forties movies than Gore Vidal did’. In the novel there are several references to Myra’s career as an underground film star prior to her transition that may well allude to films such as Warhol’s Flesh (1968), a film that Darling had actually been in. She was, in other words, already engaged in the sexual avant-gardism Myra Breckinridge apparently represented, as well as what in the novel becomes a tragi-comic obsession with the Golden Age of Hollywood. &nbsp

Scotland's approach to participatory planning : characterising the charrette

Since 2010 the ‘charrette’ has been promoted by the Scottish Government as an effective approach to community and stakeholder involvement in participatory design; yet, there has been little opportunity to formally reflect on the mainstreaming programme that has now delivered sixty charrettes across Scotland. This paper presents a preliminary review of the programme by focusing on charrette commissioning, construction and delivery as detailed in post-completion reports. The purpose is to better understand what constitutes a Scottish charrette. For this study the researcher identified forty-six reports published between 2011 and 2016. A conceptual framework guided report content analysis, which found eight charrette characteristics with sufficient content to derive subcategories. These characteristics and subcategories broadly describe charrette design and implementation. To conclude, this analysis is used to develop a charrette-descriptor table, which provides a preliminary means to distinguish between different charrette-approaches found in Scotland