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Education is widely recognized as a key domain for the promotion of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), prompting an increased focus on sustainable development in foreign language education. Despite increased attention, guidelines about SDGs are often primarily policy-based without concrete guidance, and the integration of education for sustainable development (ESD) within higher education curricula has been slow. This paper aims to mitigate this gap by providing an outline for the curriculum development for three elective English courses integrating SDG themes.

The paper begins by introducing the SDGs, ESD and its application to language education. From there, this paper outlines three content and language integrated learning courses that integrate global issues into their curriculum. Finally, there is a discussion and consideration of various factors to consider when implementing global issues into an English language classroom.

Following practical examples of how to integrate global issues into an English language classroom, considerations such as socio-cultural context, teaching context and the expertise of the instructor are discussed.

This paper covers a variety of social topics related to sustainable development in addition to the often addressed environmental topics. Many guidelines about integrating SDGs into education are policy-based without concrete guidance, so this paper aims to provide practical examples and considerations.

Agriculture is one sector where the Internet of things (IoT) is expected to make a major impact. Yet, its adoption in the sector falls behind expectations. The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art of IoT in agriculture and investigate its slow adoption in the sector.

The authors have undertaken a systematic review and a synthesis of 1355 relevant publications over the last decade.

This literature review reveals that the “big three” barriers for the overall sector are cost, skills and standardization. The lack of connectivity and data governance are two key reasons why most of the proposed IoT solutions are standalone systems of limited scope, while the majority of commercial IoT efforts focus on practices in the protected indoor environment. Lastly, the analysis of past research along the five layers of the IoT system architecture reveals limited attention to barriers and solutions at the business layer, which represents a research opportunity for information systems scholars.

It is possible that some of relevant publications were missed in the literature search, although the search queries were kept as broad as possible to avoid the exclusion of any relevant work. Any publication written in any other language other than English was excluded from the review. Given the geographical distribution of the reviewed English publications (see section 4.1), it is highly likely that important works written by Chinese and European scholars in their native language were overlooked.

This study provides practical insights into the technical and organisational challenges on the ground. It is the hope that this literature review lays the groundwork for IS researchers who are well positioned to investigate technology adoption challenges in the relatively understudied agriculture sector.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review of adoption barriers and solutions across all five layers of the IoT system architecture.

This study aims to analyze and synthesize literature on consumer privacy-related behavior and intelligent device-to-device interactions within the Internet of Things (IoT).

We conducted a systematic review using Elsevier’s Scopus database, focusing on studies published in English from 2000 to 2023. The review targeted articles within selected social sciences and business disciplines, specifically concerning consumer behavior in IoT contexts.

We categorized the privacy literature into three thematic clusters: legislation and policy, business implications and consumer behavior. Within the consumer behavior cluster, our analysis indicates a shift from general Internet and e-commerce privacy concerns prior to 2016, toward issues related to advertising and policy between 2017 and 2018, and increasingly toward pronounced concerns in technological systems, particularly IoT, from 2019 onwards. We identify eight distinct areas of privacy concern within IoT and propose a framework that links antecedents and privacy concerns to subsequent attitudes and behaviors. This framework highlights varying patterns of information disclosure and bridges theoretical constructs with empirical research in IoT privacy.

Originality lies in enhancing the Antecedents-Privacy Concerns-Outcomes (APCO) macro-model by integrating diverse theoretical perspectives on technological and individual-specific antecedents, alongside privacy concerns and beliefs. This comprehensive integration enriches the framework, enabling it to predict and categorize consumer behavior in IoT environments more effectively. The revised model provides a robust tool for understanding privacy-related behavior within the IoT, significantly enriching its theoretical relevance and practical applicability.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to science communication literature by further highlighting the underexplored role of organizational and corporate perspectives in science communication.

The paper takes the form of a conceptual article that uses two illustrative vignettes to highlight the power of corporate science communication.

The key argument is that corporate science communication is a compound ideology that results from merging the hegemonic corporate voice with the ultimate/god-term science (see the work of Kenneth Burke) to form a mega-ideological construct and discourse. Such communication can be so powerful that vulnerable publics and powerful advocates speaking on their behalf have little to no recourse to effectively challenge such discourse. While critiques of corporate science communication in practice are not new, what the authors offer is a possible explanation as to why such discourse is so powerful and hard to combat.

The value of this paper is in the degree to which it both sets an important applied research agenda for the field and fills a critical void in the science communication literature. This conceptual article, in the form of a critical analysis, fills the void by advocating for the inclusion of organizational perspectives in science communication research because of the great potential that organizations have, via science communication, to shape societal behavior and outcomes both positively and negatively. It also coins the terms “compound ideology” and “mega-ideology” to denote that while all ideologies are powerful, ideologies can operate in concert (compound) to change their meaning and effectiveness. By exposing the hegemonic power of corporate science communication, future researchers and practitioners can use these findings as a foundation to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns wielded by big corporate science entities and the public relations firms often hired to carry out these campaigns.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

This quasi-experimental study examined the effectiveness of audio-visual and written feedback (AVF + WF) on undergraduate students versus only receiving WF in the context of an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) online classroom during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown.

The study used the estimator Difference in Difference (DID) to compare a treated and control group in a pre-and post-test under the application of six treatment sessions, plus a student's perception survey at the end of the treatment. The treated group that received the multimodal feedback showed higher improvement rates in the paragraph content between the first and final drafts than students in the control group.

Results indicated that receiving a combination of AVF + WF had a statistically significant effect on mechanics (p < 0.001) and the use of transition words (p = 0.003).

These findings will benefit educational agents, professors and stakeholders for social and economic development.

While previous studies have only used student perceptions of the feedback, this study contributes with empirical data through quasi-experimental analysis and measures the effectiveness of feedback in online learning environments.

The purpose of this paper is to consider some possible reasons for the relatively high rate in Wales of children looked after by local authorities.

Selected potential explanations for Wales having higher rates were tested against aggregate data from published 2021 Government statistics. Wales was compared with England and English regions for area deprivation, local authority spending, placements at home and kinship foster care. Descriptive statistics were produced, and linear regression was used where appropriate.

Wales has higher overall children looked-after rates and a bigger recent increase in these than any English region. Deprivation in Wales was higher than in most English regions. However, a smaller percentage of Welsh variation in local authority looked-after rates was explained by deprivation than was the case for England. Spending on preventative services has increased in recent years in Wales whilst decreasing in England, and there was not a clear relationship between spending on preventative services and the looked-after rate. Wales had a higher rate of care orders placed at home and more children per head of population in kinship foster care than any English region. Some of the explanations that have been suggested for Wales’s particularly high looked-after rates seem to be supported by the evidence from aggregate data and others do not. Practice variation is likely to also be an important part of the picture.

This is an original comparison of Wales, England and English regions using aggregate data. More fine-grained analysis is needed using individual-level data, multivariate analysis and qualitative methods.

Despite opposition from housebuilders, the Nationally Described Space Standard (NDSS) was introduced in 2015 amid concerns about shrinking home sizes. This paper examines Planning Appeal cases to examine how the standard has been enforced.

This paper considers how the NDSS has informed the regulation of housing size, based on an overview of post-2015 Planning Appeal Decisions in England where the gross internal area of the home was below the NDSS.

Appeals by developers have tended to fail where homes are “significantly” – i.e. 10% or more – below the NDSS. However, in some instances – especially where local authorities have not adopted the NDSS – the Planning Inspectorate rules considerably smaller homes “adequate”. These discrepancies appear related to (subjective) judgements about who might occupy the space, alongside consideration of layout, light and fenestration.

This paper is the first exploration of how the NDSS has been enforced, highlighting important contradictions in the adjudication of space standards. Many of these contradictions emerge because the NDSS is discretionary rather than mandatory, with the paper suggesting the need for clearer guidance on their application.