Search results

To explore the potential of conversations with an authentic audience through blogging for enriching in young writers the understanding of the communicative function of writing, specifically language and vocabulary use.

We situate our work in the language acquisition model of language learning, in which learners develop linguistic competence in the process of speaking and using language (Krashen, 1988; Tomasello, 2005). We also believe that language learning benefits from formal instruction (Krashen, 1988). As such, in our work, we likened engaging in blogging to learning a language (here, more broadly conceived as learning to write) through both natural communication (acquisition) and prescription (instruction), and we looked at these forms of learning in our study.

We were interested in the communicative function of language learning (Halliday, 1973; 1975; Penrod, 2005) among young blog writers, because we see language learning as socially constructed through interaction with other speakers of a language (Tomasello, 2005; Vygotsky, 1978).

The readers and commenters in this study supported young writers in their language study by modeling good writing and effective language use in their communication with these writers. Young writers also benefited from direct instruction through interactions with adults beyond classroom teachers, in our case some of the readers and commenters.

Blogging can extend conversations to audiences far beyond the classroom and make writing a more authentic endeavor for young writers. Teachers should take advantage of such a powerful tool in their writing classrooms to support their students’ language study and vocabulary development.

Purpose: The study makes use of situational crime prevention framework for analyzing online community reactions to the banning of deepfake pornographic content from Reddit.

Methodology/approach: Qualitative text analysis of user comments posted to Reddit’s rule-change announcement (N = 582) was carried out. Analysis relied on the original 25 techniques of situational crime prevention that were adapted into a table of activities and mechanisms meant specifically for use with online platforms.

Findings: Analysis indicates that Reddit users voiced several shortcomings that are currently present in Reddit’s platform management approach. In particular, users emphasized issues related to the lack of a consistent and transparent approach to community rule enforcement, as users believed the rule changes to be sudden and poorly reasoned. The general reactionary nature of Reddit’s approach to moderating community-harming actions also was a point of emphasis, alongside the platform’s continued rigid stance on freedom of expression, even with regard to illegal and demeaning content. Regarding Reddit and the new rules on involuntary pornography and the sexualization of minors, enforcement of sitewide policy appears contingent on external influences, such as attention from mainstream media or financial matters, rather than stemming from an inherent stance on decreasing community-harming activities.

Research limitations: The study only pertains to a specific rule change by Reddit and subsequent reactions from the platform’s community. Future research is needed to test the applicability of the adapted table of 25 techniques of situational crime prevention in the context of other online platforms.

Originality/value: First, the study applies the situational crime prevention approach in the context of moderating online platforms. Second, results from the study shed light on current practices in online content moderation from the perspective of criminological theory, as well as inform specific actions that can be taken to decrease the presence of community-harming phenomena and improve the enforcement of sitewide policy rules in general. Finally, by adapting the original 25 techniques of situational crime prevention to online content moderation, the study suggests a tentative roadmap for similar research in the future.

In recent years, we have seen a paradox. No matter how much the government strives to incorporate technology into classrooms as a learning resource for students, both national and international reports prove that this is a difficult aim to achieve purpose. Training both preservice and in-service teachers is vitally important for technology to become part of everyday school life. But to achieve this, we must move away from the techno-centric focus of technology. This chapter analyzes the importance of focusing on implementing technologies in the learning activities that teacher-trainers design to prepare preservice teachers. We describe seven types of activities: assimilative, informative management, applicative, communicative, productive, experiential, and evaluation. All of these technology-based learning activities, organized in learning sequences, potentially help teachers to come to terms with technological knowledge in their pedagogical content area.

Purpose: The emotions that accompany failure, in and of organizations, and their consequences have been researched in multiple domains of management, but comparative approaches have seldom been attempted. The failure of organizations to survive has been a common occurrence over centuries, particularly in the modern era of start-ups, innovation, and political, economic, and environmental turbulence. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, failure at many levels of society, including the organizational and individual, has increased significantly and produced even more intense emotions. Study Design/Methodology/Approach: For this conceptual chapter, literature from many disciplines was consulted on failure in organizations, and the emotions it elicit, including studies on the process of failure as well as its outcomes. Findings: Failing and failure are likely to evoke negative emotions, with negative consequences for the actor. However, positive emotions can also occur, and a matrix of emotional valence and consequences presents an intriguing set of possibilities. The dimensions of emotions (valence, intensity, duration, and frequency) interact with a wide range of contributing factors (salience, personality, identity, emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, prior experience of failure, and context) in producing the emotions of failure and their consequences. Originality/Value: This chapter contributes to the literature by explicating the types of emotions that emanate during and after failure across many domains of management research, their dimensions and contributing factors, and the consequences for the individual actor. The model of the emotions of failure that is presented here assembles a wider variety of elements than prior research has offered. We indicate avenues for further research as we approach an era of even more demanding challenges.

Stated choice experiments can be used to estimate the parameters in discrete choice models by showing hypothetical choice situations to respondents. These attribute levels in each choice situation are determined by an underlying experimental design. Often, an orthogonal design is used, although recent studies have shown that better experimental designs exist, such as efficient designs. These designs provide more reliable parameter estimates. However, they require prior information about the parameter values, which is often not readily available. Serial efficient designs are proposed in this paper in which the design is updated during the survey. In contrast to adaptive conjoint, serial conjoint only changes the design across respondents, not within-respondent thereby avoiding endogeneity bias as much as possible. After each respondent, new parameters are estimated and used as priors for generating a new efficient design. Results using the multinomial logit model show that using such a serial design, using zero initial prior values, provides the same reliability of the parameter estimates as the best efficient design (based on the true parameters). Any possible bias can be avoided by using an orthogonal design for the first few respondents. Serial designs do not suffer from misspecification of the priors as they are continuously updated. The disadvantage is the extra implementation cost of an automated parameter estimation and design generation procedure in the survey. Also, the respondents have to be surveyed in mostly serial fashion instead of all parallel.

Purpose – This chapter contributes to comparative biopolitics and reviews primatological literature, especially about our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

Design/methodology/approach – Biopolitics in this chapter means evolutionarily informed political science, with emphasis on power relations. I review the literature on intrasexual and intersexual dominance interactions among individuals and competitive and/or agonistic interactions among groups in the Great Apes (Hominidae, formerly Pongidae): orangutan (Pongo with two species and three subspecies), gorilla (Gorilla with four subspecies), bonobo (Pan paniscus), and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes with four subspecies). In the final section I present some (speculative) thoughts on Pan prior or the modern human ancestor.

Findings – Not only Man is a political animal.

Originality/value – Impartial, objective, and as complete as possible review of the literature for the students of (comparative) politics, ethology, and psychology.

Recent reports suggest that employees have concerns about their company’s leadership and ethical environment. Despite more stringent regulations, top executives are continuing to pursue aggressive financial reporting practices by managing earnings. In this study, the authors find that individuals have more significant concerns about the workplace environment when the chief financial officer (CFO) manages earnings that result in personal gain relative to when the CFO manages earnings that benefit other stakeholders (i.e., employees and investors). Further, the authors show that this negative effect of earnings management for personal gain on workplace environment quality becomes more prominent when the control environment is weak and when the CFO possesses accounting expertise. The authors add to the body of academic knowledge on financial reporting, ethical leadership, and the workplace environment. Business practitioners can use our study to inform their decisions, particularly those about financial reporting and managing the workplace environment.

2019 was a big year. The Great Hack and investigative journalism of Carole Cadwalladr exposed the machinations of Cambridge Analytica. The US senate summoned Mark Zuckerberg to face an extended interrogation on the ways in which Facebook screens content. Greta Thunberg fomented a global ‘climate emergency’ movement with attacks on lying political leaders. If 2016 saw ‘post-truth’ rise to prominence as a concept, 2019 was characterised by myriad efforts to champion truth and counter misinformation. And then the COVID-19 crisis hit. The urgency we began to feel in 2019 to address the ills in our society and hunt for a cause and cure has intensified. We now daily ask at whose door we can lay the blame and, from there, what solutions we can implement. For now, we have drawn the battle lines between tech and society and looked to pit governments against technologies which have changed the face of media. But amidst this flurry of activity, we need to stop and ask ourselves: are we setting our sights on the right actors and are we taking the right next steps?

Written in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this contribution responds to the burning debate on how to overcome our current infodemic and immunise against future outbreaks. It offers an alternative narrative and argues for a much more radical course of action. It posits that we have misidentified the root cause of our current post-truth reality. It argues that we are in fact experiencing the extreme consequence of decades of poor education the world over. It champions a shift from drilling young people in so-called facts and figures to developing those deep levels of literacy in which critical thinking plays a fundamental part. This is not to exculpate the Facebooks and Twitters of our time – new tech has no doubt facilitated the dissemination of half-truths and untruths. But it is to insist upon contextualising our current albeit horrifying reality within a much more complex and longer-running societal challenge. In other words, this chapter makes a fresh clarion call for rethinking how we have got to where we are and where we might most meaningfully go next, as well as how, indeed, we might conceptualise the links between technology, government, media and education.