Search results

Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the annotation of digital resources for information sharing, social interaction and knowledge production. This study aims to examine the perceived value of SA as contributing to learning in multiple undergraduate courses.

In total, 59 students in 3 upper-level undergraduate courses at a Canadian university participated in SA-enabled learning activities during the winter 2019 semester. A survey was administered to measure how SA contributed to students’ perceptions of learning and sense of community.

A majority of students reported that SA supported their learning despite differences in course subject, how SA was incorporated and encouraged and how widely SA was used during course activities. While findings of the perceived value of SA as contributing to the course community were mixed, students reported that peer annotations aided comprehension of course content, confirmation of ideas and engagement with diverse perspectives.

Studies about the relationships among SA, learning and student perception should continue to engage learners from multiple courses and from multiple disciplines, with indicators of perception measured using reliable instrumentation.

Researchers and faculty should carefully consider how the technical, instructional and social aspects of SA may be used to enable course-specific, personal and peer-supported learning.

This study found a greater variance in how undergraduate students perceived SA as contributing to the course community. Most students also perceived their own and peer annotations as productively contributing to learning. This study offers a more complete view of social factors that affect how SA is perceived by undergraduate students.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how the potential of altmetrics varies around the world by measuring the percentage of articles with non-zero metrics (coverage) for articles published from a developing region (Latin America).

This study uses article metadata from a prominent Latin American journal portal, SciELO, and combines it with altmetrics data from Altmetric.com and with data collected by author-written scripts. The study is primarily descriptive, focusing on coverage levels disaggregated by year, country, subject area, and language.

Coverage levels for most of the social media sources studied was zero or negligible. Only three metrics had coverage levels above 2 per cent – Mendeley, Twitter, and Facebook. Of these, Twitter showed the most significant differences with previous studies. Mendeley coverage levels reach those found by previous studies, but it takes up to two years longer for articles to be saved in the reference manager. For the most recent year, coverage was less than half than what was found in previous studies. The coverage levels of Facebook appear similar (around 3 per cent) to that of previous studies.

The Altmetric.com data used for some of the analyses were collected for a six month period. For other analyses, Altmetric.com data were only available for a single country (Brazil).

The results of this study have implications for the altmetrics research community and for any stakeholders interested in using altmetrics for evaluation. It suggests the need of careful sample selection when wishing to make generalizable claims about altmetrics.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze collaboration networks and their patterns among higher education institutions (HEIs) in Chile and the Latin American region. This will provide evidence to educational managements in order to properly allocate their efforts to improve collaboration.

This quantitative study examines collaboration using a social network analysis (SNA) approach. The main source used to quantify collaboration is co-authorship of scholarly publications retrieved from the Web of Science scientific search engine.

The paper provides evidence that there is a low collaboration rate within-country as well cross-country among HEIs in Latin America. The collaboration network in Chile is highly dependent on two institutions; Pontificia Universidad Católica and Universidad de Chile. These institutions are considered leaders of opinion and knowledge facilitators. The density of the whole network is relatively low; only 5 percent of the potential connections exist in the current network.

The main limitation of this paper is that it does not take into account other possible collaborative efforts such as books, manuscripts, or other types of collaboration that do not result in tangible documents. However, co-authorship based on publications has been considered to be a good estimator of collaboration.

Collaboration is critical to promote research and increase its capacity. The approach presented in this study is helpful for educational managers in charge of allocating resources to effectively have an impact on collaboration. Decision makers will benefit from the evidence-based results generated by the SNA framework.

An understanding of the current status of research collaboration in Latin America allows researchers to detect the main areas of opportunity, which in turn serve to improve future decision making in this area.