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This paper seeks to demonstrate the pedagogical potential of incorporating virtual reality (VR) and primary sources in social studies education. It seeks to highlight how VR can enhance student engagement, foster critical thinking and provide immersive contextualization for historical events. Despite acknowledging challenges, this paper advocates for the purposeful adoption of VR technology in the classroom to enrich the teaching and learning of history.

This paper explores the integration of virtual reality and primary sources in social studies education by providing a detailed lesson plan that could be used as a model for this type of teaching, as well as other resources and opportunities to do so. It highlights the potential of VR to enhance engagement, historical thinking and historical empathy.

Integrating virtual reality and primary sources can support student engagement, critical thinking and historical empathy. There are also challenges that can be mitigated through careful planning.

This paper provides teachers with a pedagogical model and resources for integrating VR and primary sources, along with challenges and methods for mitigating those, in their secondary social studies classroom.

This paper offers a unique model for combining virtual reality and primary sources for secondary social studies educators. It provides an example lesson plan exemplifying its application and emphasizing VR’s potential to support teaching and learning.

To elaborate the nature of fact-checking in the domain of political information by examining how fact-checkers assess the validity of claims concerning the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and how they support their assessments by drawing on evidence acquired from diverse sources of information.

Descriptive quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 128 reports written by the fact-checkers of Snopes – an established fact-checking organisation – during the period of 24 February 2022 – 28 June, 2023. For the analysis, nine evaluation grounds were identified, most of them inductively from the empirical material. It was examined how the fact-checkers employed such grounds while assessing the validity of claims and how the assessments were bolstered by evidence acquired from information sources such as newspapers.

Of the 128 reports, the share of assessments indicative of the invalidity of the claims was 54.7%, while the share of positive ratings was 26.7%. The share of mixed assessments was 15.6%. In the fact-checking, two evaluation grounds, that is, the correctness of information and verifiability of an event presented in a claim formed the basis for the assessment. Depending on the topic of the claim, grounds such as temporal and spatial compatibility, as well as comparison by similarity and difference occupied a central role. Most popular sources of information offering evidence for the assessments include statements of government representatives, videos and photographs shared in social media, newspapers and television programmes.

As the study concentrated on fact-checking dealing with political information about a specific issue, the findings cannot be extended to concern the fact-checking practices in other contexts.

The study is among the first to characterise how fact-checkers employ evaluation grounds of diverse kind while assessing the validity of political information.

Driven by the development of the global digital economy, knowledge management in industrial enterprises offers more possibilities for green innovation. Based on the perspective of external knowledge sources, this study aims to construct a panel regression model to explore the relationship between digital economy and industrial green innovation efficiency.

Panel data from 30 regions in China from 2011 to 2020 were selected as research samples. All data are obtained from national and provincial statistical yearbooks. Coupling coordination degree analysis, entropy method, panel regression analysis, robustness test and threshold effect test by Stata 16.0 were used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results demonstrate the hypotheses and reveal the following findings: the digital economy is positively related to industrial green innovation efficiency and external knowledge sources, and external knowledge sources mediate the relationship between them. Moreover, based on the threshold test results, the digital economy has a double-threshold effect on industrial green innovation efficiency.

Based on the perspective of external knowledge sources, the proposed mediating mechanism between the digital economy and industrial green innovation efficiency has not been established previously, further enriching the research on the antecedents and outcomes of external knowledge sources. Moreover, this study estimated the direct influence mechanism and double-threshold effect of the digital economy on industrial green innovation efficiency from theoretical and empirical analysis, thus responding to the call of scholars and adding to existing research on how the digital economy affects the green transformation of industrial enterprises.

Source credibility is a key influencing factor across both commercial and social marketing. It is perhaps even more important for the latter given that the issues under consideration generally have substantial implications for both individual and societal health and well-being. The Act-Belong-Commit campaign is a world-first population-wide application of social marketing in the area of positive mental health promotion. This study aims to focus on the perceived credibility of the Act-Belong-Commit campaign as a source of information about mental health as a predictor of three types of behavioural responses to the campaign: adopting mental health enhancing behaviours; seeking information about mental health and mental health problems; and seeking help for a mental health problem.

A state-wide survey was undertaken of the adult population in an Australian state where the Act-Belong-Commit campaign originated. The survey included measures of the above three behavioural responses to the campaign and measures of respondents’ perceptions of Act-Belong-Commit’s source credibility. Logistic regression analyses were performed to determine whether the three behavioural responses can be predicted based on perceived source credibility. The predictive performance of the model was examined by receiver operating characteristic curve analysis.

Greater perceived source credibility was significantly associated with having done something for their mental health and for having sought information, and an increased likelihood, but not significantly so, of having sought help for a mental health problem.

Despite the acknowledged importance of source credibility, there has been little published research that the authors are aware of that has looked at the impact of such on the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first published study of the association between source credibility and behavioural response to a social marketing campaign.

This research paper explores the roles of electronic texts in research projects in the humanities and seeks to deepen the understanding of the nature of scholars' engagement with e-texts. The study used qualitative methodology to explore engagement of scholars in literary and historical studies with primary materials in electronic form (i.e., e-texts). The study revealed a range of scholars' interactions with e-texts during the whole research process. It uncovered a particular pattern of information-seeking practices in electronic environments called netchaining and the main types of uses and contributions of e-texts to research projects. It was found that e-texts play support and substantive roles in the research process. A number of influences from electronic environment are identified as challenges and aids in working with e-texts. The study does not have statistical significance. It indicates a need for further research into scholarly practices, training requirements, and new forms of service provision. Study results are relevant for the development of digital collections, information services, educational programs, and other forms of support for the use of technology in research. The results can be also used to inform approaches to text encoding and development of electronic information systems and have implications for organizational and industry policies. The study found a range of scholars' interactions and forms of intellectual engagement with e-texts that were not documented and analyzed by earlier studies. It provides insights into disciplinary variations in the humanities and contributes to the understanding of scholarly change catalyzed by information technology.

This is a case study on the opportunities provided by Open Source library systems and the experience of delivering these systems through a shared service.

This chapter derives from desk research, interviews, and direct involvement in the project. The format is a case study, setting out a detailed timeline of events with information that can be applied in other settings.

This chapter presents reflections on the value and limitations of collaboration amongst libraries and librarians on an innovative approach to library systems and technologies. It also presents reflections on lessons learned from the processes and detailed discussion of the success factors for shared services and the reasons why such initiatives may not result in the outcomes predicted at the start.

Libraries and IT services considering Open Source and shared service approaches to provision will find material in this study useful when planning their projects.

The nature of collaboration and collaborative working is studied and observations made about the way that outcomes cannot always be predicted or controlled. In a genuine collaboration, the outcome is determined by the interactions between the partners and is unique to the specifics of that collaboration.

The case study derives from interviews, written material and direct observation not generally in the public domain, providing a strong insider’s view of the activity.

Part I of this chapter applies the principles of the philosophy of science and the derived scientific method to analyze the foundational concepts and core proposition of the Resource-Base View (RBV) as popularized by Barney (1986, 1991, 1997). This analysis identifies seven fundamental conceptual deficiencies and logic problems in Barney's conceptualization of “strategically valuable resources” and in Barney's VRIO framework for identifying strategically valuable resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. Three problems – the Value Conundrum, the Tautology Problem in the Identification of Resources, and the Absence of a Chain of Causality – relate to the RBV's and VRIO's failure to provide an adequate conceptual basis for identifying strategically valuable resources. The Uniqueness Dilemma, the Cognitive Impossibility Dilemma, and an Asymmetry in Assumptions about Resource Factor Markets result in an inability of the VRIO framework to support identification of resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. More fundamentally, the core proposition of the RBV – that resources that are strategically valuable, rare, inimitable, and organizationally embedded are sources of sustainable competitive advantage – is argued to result directly in the Epistemological Impossibility Problem that precludes use of the scientific method in RBV research. This chapter argues that until these conceptual deficiencies and logic problems are recognized and remedied, the RBV – in spite of its current popularity – is and will remain theoretically sterile and incapable of contributing in any systematic way to the development of strategy theory.

Part II of this chapter then suggests how foundational concepts developed within the competence perspective on strategy provide essential remedies for the identified deficiencies and problems in the RBV – and thereby provide a more conceptually adequate basis for representing the nature of firms in the scientific study of their interactions and competitive outcomes.

Theories of platform strategy and adoption have been largely derived from studies of their application in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. These platforms vary in openness, with the model of open source software providing the best-known exemplar for open platforms.

This exploratory field study examines the degree to which nine attributes of ICT platforms are applicable to open platforms in biotechnology. Using a combination of interview and secondary data, it identifies three patterns of such biotechnology platforms – IP commons, hackerspaces, and crowdsourced patient registries – and the degree to which these nine attributes apply. It shows the impact of ICT platforms and open source software on open source approaches to biotechnology, and how the latter are affected by the technical, legal, and institutional differences between information technology and biotechnology.

Instead of open source software platforms organized around modular interfaces, complements, ecosystems, and two-sided markets, this study instead suggests a model of open source knowledge platforms which benefits from economies of scale but not indirect network effects. From this, it discusses the generalizability of the ICT-derived models of open source platforms and offers suggestions for future research.