Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the provision of audiovisual materials in UK public libraries and their economic value.

A questionnaire survey of all the public library authorities in the UK was used to investigate current provision of audiovisual material, expected future provision, and the amounts spent on and generated by audiovisual collections. Data collected, together with those available from other reputable sources, were then used to estimate the cost benefit or value of audiovisual provision.

The provision of audiovisual material in UK public libraries is widespread and varied. While audiovisual collections provide economic value and generate income from charging for loans, there are significant costs inherent in providing such services. Concerns are raised about the constant developments in media formats and the ability to make adequate provision. A cost benefit of 1:1.34 using the PVB (present value benefits) based on maximum loan charges was found, meaning that the UK gets £1.34 direct benefit from every £1.00 spent on the audiovisual service.

There are different methods used by economists to estimate value of public services, all having limitations. The method used in this research is no exception. The cost‐benefit ratio found is based on maximum loan charges. However, this figure would be higher if the PVB had been based on purchase costs or lower if the PVB had been based on mean loan charges. Further, the figures do not include indirect benefits or option benefits, so are likely to be underestimates of the true cost benefit of the audiovisual service.

This research is likely to be of interest to public library managers and funding bodies needing evidence for the value of audiovisual provision.

This is the first attempt to put a monetary value on audiovisual provision in the UK. It also provides insights into current and future audiovisual provision.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the ways in which hip-hop pedagogies and literacies encouraged middle school students to explore performance poetry as a tool to “(w)right” the truth(s) about learning and living in their local and global communities.

Collaborative self-study research methodologies were used by the author, a black male teacher educator and hip-hop cultural insider, along with two white, female reading specialists and hip-hop cultural outsiders, to collect and analyze the practices and behaviors used in The Shop – an after-school hip-hop-based spoken word poetry club for middle school students in a small, urban public school district in Northeastern USA.

Three primary findings emerge: teachers with limited cultural and content knowledge of hip-hop may struggle to negotiate real and perceived curricular constraints associated with using pedagogies with hip-hop texts and aesthetics in traditional school contexts, the intersections of teachers’ racial, cultural and gender identities informed the respective practices and behaviors in a number of interesting ways, and using hip-hop pedagogies for social justice in public schools requires a delicate balance of both transparency and discretion on the part of teachers.

Study findings are salient for in- and pre-service English teachers and English educators, as they offer insights and reflections on the instructional and relational challenges cultural outsiders may face when using hip-hop culture to create spaces and opportunities for young people to talk back and speak truth to power.

Speech recognition machines currently on the market are all built upon the same research foundation. The most important milestones on the road to present‐day systems are reviewed in this article based largely on an interview with Dr Roger Moore of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment.

This study aims to explore how youth poets wrote in a community of practice and how their out-of-school poetry writing contributed toward developing disciplinary literacy.

In this qualitative case study, the authors studied youth’s writing by drafting narrative field notes, collecting student writing and process drawings and interviewing participants.

The authors found that the poets in this study maintained ownership of their writing and engaged in writing processes in ways that reflected Behizadeh’s (2019) conception of authenticity as writing that connects both to students’ experiences, and to the purposes and audiences of their writing context.

This out-of-school context provides implications for how English Language Arts teachers can rethink what disciplinary literacy looks like in classroom writing instruction.

By maintaining ownership of their writing, the youth agentively positioned themselves not only as students accumulating disciplinary knowledge but also as participants in a community of practice.

How can we digitize the spoken word in a way that maximizes its usefulness and accessibility over as long a period as possible? This editorial lists six issues: copyright and ownership; selection at both the collection and contents level; conversion, formats, and analog input; segmentation and structuring; metadata at both the bibliographic and contents level; and maintenance and refreshing.

This article aims to share findings from a youth-informed study with interracial anti-racist youth activist groups in two urban high schools.

The study used mostly critical ethnographic methods.

The findings showed that the agency of youth activists amplified their literacies of love and resistance, organizing, critical teaching, and knowledge. More research is needed in English education related to youth organizing activities across contexts as youth organizing work is largely unknown or underused by educators and schools.

Overall, this research supports humanizing collectives that amplify the literacies of youth and position youth-centered education for liberation.

AT A TIME when tape cassettes are being marketed and promise in time to replace discs as the standard form of sound recording, it may be thought inopportune to write about discs of literature. But the latter are still being issued successfully, and there are good reasons why they should continue to be bought. For one thing, discs do not have to be rewound after each hearing; besides, there must be several hundreds of record players for every tape‐cassette player and rewinder in British homes, although doubtless this position could eventually be reversed. By the time that occurs, however, we shall be in the midst of yet another communications revolution, as teleplayers and videotapes become a commercial proposition.

This paper presents the use of a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Nets (MLP-NN) for voice recognition dedicated to generating robot commands. Our main goal concerns the estimation of the minimal number of elements required for the learning process in order to ensure an acceptable success of the neural nets recognition. As the MLP requires references for the spoken words, we have provided these references by means of a supervised classifier based on the mean square error.

An experimental approach has been followed for the design of experiments enabling to determine the minimal elements in the sample for each voice command. Satisfactory results have been obtained leading to a better understanding of variability of the system functioning. Finally, we have noticed that the success rate of the MLP and the minimal number of elements used for the learning process depend on the spoken word structure and of the variability of the actual work situation (word length, noise, speaker, etc).