Big-Time Musical

The last note of the overture die, the lights come on, and once again a Stars Over Veishea production is underway. Behind the music, dancing, costumes and staging which the audience sees each spring at Veishea, lies 5 months of work involving nearly 750 students

Restart: The Resurgence of Computer Science in UK Schools

Computer science in UK schools is undergoing a remarkable transformation. While the changes are not consistent across each of the four devolved nations of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), there are developments in each that are moving the subject to become mandatory for all pupils from age 5 onwards. In this article, we detail how computer science declined in the UK, and the developments that led to its revitalisation: a mixture of industry and interest group lobbying, with a particular focus on the value of the subject to all school pupils, not just those who would study it at degree level. This rapid growth in the subject is not without issues, however: there remain significant forthcoming challenges with its delivery, especially surrounding the issue of training sufficient numbers of teachers. We describe a national network of teaching excellence which is being set up to combat this problem, and look at the other challenges that lie ahead

Text Versus Paratext: Understanding Individuals’ Accuracy in Assessing Online Information

Fake news has emerged as a significant problem for society. Recent research has shown that shifting attention to accuracy improves the quality of content shared by individuals, thereby helping us mitigate the harmful effects of fake news. However, the parts of a news story that can influence individuals’ ability to discern the true state of information presented to them are understudied. We conducted an online experiment (N=408) to determine how different elements (text and paratext) of a news story influence individuals’ ability to detect the true state of the information presented. The participants were presented with the headline (control), main text, graphs/images, and sharing statistics of true and fake news stories and asked to evaluate the story's accuracy based on each of these elements separately. Our findings indicate that individuals were less accurate when identifying fake news from headlines, text, and graphs/images. When asked to evaluate the story based on sharing statistics, they were able to distinguish fake stories from real news with greater accuracy. Our findings also indicate that heuristics that apply to true news are ineffective for detecting the veracity of fake news

NF04-608 Fighting Methamphetamine in Nebraska: Strategies for Individuals and Communities

This NebFact discusses a few ideas on to help protect your family, neighbors and community from dangers associated with methamphetamine (commonly called meth). You can implement these ideas as an individual, as part of a community plan, or develop your own strategies. The goal is not simply to educate your family on the hazards of using meth, but also to help protect them from the many other hazards posed by meth use and production

Knowledge creation as an approach to facilitating evidence informed practice in early years settings : Examining ways to measure the success of using this method with early years practitioners in Camden (London).

This paper has three key aims. First it examines the authors’ attempts to use knowledge creation activity as a way of developing evidence informed practice amongst a learning community of 36 early years practitioners in the London Borough of Camden. Second, it seeks to illustrate how the authors approached the idea of measuring evidence use and our engagement with two separate measurement scales: the ‘ladder of research use’ and Hall and Hord’s (2001) Levels of Use scale. Finally we examine the ‘trustworthiness’ of our approaches to measuring evidence use, which we explored via in-depth semi structured interviews. Our findings would appear to be encouraging, suggesting that knowledge creation activity provides an effective way of communicating research and keeping it top of mind; also that our interview data would appear to support the trustworthiness of our measurement scales as a means to ascertain levels of evidence use. At the same time the approach we have developed does have its limitations: namely, that it is only really applicable to situations where researchers are working regularly with practitioners on areas of practice development, where the general desire is that these areas should become evidence-informed. We suggest, however, that in school systems such as England’s, where the expectation is that schools or alliances of schools should lead their professional development activity, often in partnership with universities, it is likely that these instances will soon be increasing in number

The Structuration of Task-oriented Communication in Innovative Virtual Teams

With advanced communication technologies, business managers can globally recruit talented members to form virtual teams and collaborate on innovative projects. While virtual teams enjoy superiority in their composition of talents, they also face more collaborative issues resulting from the diversity of members’ backgrounds and the limitations of communication technologies. Formal task interventions have been suggested to mitigate the severity of these collaborative issues in virtual teams. In this study, we aim to investigate the underlying mechanisms through which task interventions compensate the limitations of communication technologies and facilitate the exchange of individuals’ perspectives. By adopting the lens of structuration theory, we hypothesize that task interventions establish or modify the structural properties of the team-task environment, which in turn shape virtual teams’ communication patterns. This study can provide a better understanding of how virtual teams learn to coordinate their task work more effectively by initiating task interventions