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This article analyzes a classroom project that integrated desktop documentary making with an educational foundations course in order to foster empathetic development in pre-service teachers toward unfamiliar cultural groups. The project required each tertiary student in the course to create a desktop documentary about the school experience of a cultural group with which they did not immediately identify with. The findings indicate that half of the students in this project displayed empathetic development with regard to their chosen topics, using their encounters with imagery and stories to link their world with that which was unfamiliar. Additionally, as a result of the compositional process, several students became advocates for their assigned cultural group, carrying this sentiment with them as they progressed to become teachers. Implications of this study, including possible approaches toward improving this project’s effectiveness in achieving its aims, are discussed.

We describe a special education teacher and a history teacher who, together, gave specific learning disabled (SLD) and emotionally disabled (ED) students the opportunity to make historical documentaries in a self-contained special education classroom. Students were diverse in race, gender and disability. Findings indicated documentary making yielded positive outcomes for students as well as for the teachers. By selectively appropriating desktop documentary making technology, teachers engaged students in a technology-based project. Documentary making also opened opportunities for teachers’ close interaction with students, while still managing a potentially disruptive classroom. Students, who struggled with reading and writing, completed an engaging, lengthy, complex history project and exercised historical thinking skills. This study has implications for using documentary making technologies for engaging and refining students’ historical thinking skills.

Dorothea Lange was one of the first US documentary photographers, and she was empowered by the belief that seeing the effects of injustice, in photographs, could elicit social and political reform. She famously documented the plight of Dust Bowl migrants during the US. Great Depression and harsh difficulties endured by incarcerated Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Lange’s photographs brought suppressed issues of class and race to the surface, depicting those impacted by national tragedies into recognizable, honorable, determined individuals. By showing Americans how suffering and injustice look in real life, she stimulated empathy and compassion. This inquiry is not particularly about the Great Depression or Japanese Internment, though disciplinary concept lessons would certainly support students’ prior knowledge. This lesson focuses students’ attention on broader ideas regarding social justice and how social and political documentary photography transform people’s views about distressing problems, even today. Supporting questions are: How can deep analysis of photographs affect our thoughts and emotions about social issues? What is empathy? How can social documentary photography affect people’s emotions? Supporting questions guide students to answer the greater compelling question, How can visuals, such as photographs, impact social change? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This is an inquiry lesson plan based on a National Council for the Social Studies Notable Trade book for Young People award winner, Dorothea’s Eyes, written by Barb Rosenstock.

The paper is a lesson plan, which incorporates students’ analyses of primary sources and other research methods to engage the learner in understanding how Dorothea Lange helped change perspectives regarding the need for social and political reform. Though the story is historic, similar social justice topics still persist, worldwide, today.

Through inquiry and research, students begin to learn how social and political documentary photography began in the USA, and students create their own social documentaries. Though the US Great Depression and Japanese Internment are highly relevant within this lesson, the overall, greater message is about class, race, suffering and how to inspire empathy.

This study aims to seek to demonstrate how explicit teaching of SFL metalinguistic and multimodal “grammars” enhanced 8-9-year-old children’s deeper understanding and production of multimodal texts through critique of the construction of mini-documentaries about animals: the information, language of narration, composition of scenes and resources to engage the viewer. It also seeks to demonstrate how a knowledge of metalinguistic and multimodal “grammars” contributes to students achieving both content knowledge and understanding of the resources of semiotic modes.

A design-based approach was used with the teacher and author working closely together to implement a unit of work on mini-documentaries, including explicit teaching of the metalanguage of information reports, mini-documentary narration (aka script) and multimodal resources deployed to scaffold students’ creating their own mini-documentaries.

The students’ mini-documentaries demonstrate how knowledge of SFL written and multimodal SFL-informed “grammars” assisted students to learn how meaning was created through selection of resources from the written, visual, sound and gestural modes and apply this knowledge to creating multimodal texts demonstrating their understandings of the topic and how to make meaning in a multimodal mini-documentary.

The research is limited to the outcomes from one group of students in one class. Generalisation to other contexts is not possible. Further studies are required to support the results from this research.

The linguistic and multimodal SFL-informed grammars can be applied by educators to critique multimodal texts in a range of mediums and scaffold students’ production of multimodal texts. They can also inform assessment criteria and expand students’ conception of what is literate practice.

Knowledge of a linguistic and multimodal metalanguage can provide students with the tools to enhance their critical language awareness and critical multimodal awareness.

Following an outline of the organizational context of terminology work in the Commission, this paper considers the various types of computer application used, ranging from mainframe terminology databases (Eurodicautom) through documentary databases and wordprocessing software to specialized PC applications, with particular attention to current developments. An attempt is made to explain the factors leading to the development of an in‐house terminology management tool for a networked PC environment and the features of the package developed are reviewed. Consideration is also given to the lessons which others might draw from the Commission's experience.

The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which self-tracking data have meaning and value in and after the life of the creator, including how such data could become part of the larger historical record, curated in an institutional archive. In doing so, the article expands upon existing shared interests among researchers working in the areas of self-tracking, human–computer interaction and archival science.

A total of 18 people who had self-tracked for six months or more were recruited for the study. Participants completed a survey which gathered demographic data and characteristics vis-à-vis their self-tracking behavior. In-person semi-structured interviews were then conducted to ascertain the beliefs of the participants regarding the long-term use and value of personal quantified-self data.

The findings reveal the value that people place on self-tracking data, their thoughts on proper modes for accessing their archive once it moves from the private to the public space, and how to provide fidelity within the system such that their experiences are represented while also enabling meaning making on the part of subsequent users of the archive.

Today’s quantified-self data are generally embedded in systems that create a pipeline from the individual source to that of the corporate warehouse, bent on absorbing and extracting insight from a totality of big data. This article posits that new opportunities for knowing and for design can be revealed when a public interest rationale is appended to rich personalized collections of small data.

Since every community of practice generates, seeks, retrieves and uses information resources and sources related to the cognitive structure being researched or studied and the tasks being performed, the need arises to undertake studies focused on real user communities, which in the case of this paper is the group of translators. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

In this arena of application, it is important to remember that translators are not only information users, but also information processors and producers. Thus, their documentary competence has to evolve in three dimensions: the informational, the methodological and the strategic. The conceptual model proposed in the paper is based on information literacy (INFOLIT) standards and also the authors' knowledge of translation practice and the competencies it demands, where INFOLIT plays a starring role. This paper is part of a broader research currently in progress, whose main goal is to provide translators and interpreters with a solid instruction in information literacy.

The paper introduces a model for information literacy specifically intended to develop the information competence of this community of users, it reveals that the model is a gathering of skills, competences, knowledge and values, and it is based on the cooperation between the authors' expert knowledge of information science and professional translation practice.

This paper puts forward the first proposal for information literacy applied to translation training.

Presented at the SCANUL‐ECS Conference held in Kenya 23‐26 July 1998. Examines the opportunities of information technology (IT) in improving access, transfer and use of agricultural information in the rural areas of Kenya. This paper has used the term “information technology” to include CD‐ROM, computer networks, desktop publishing, interactive video, packet radio, expert systems, geographical information systems and satellite communications. The methodology adopted by the study was the use of case studies of the organisations and institutions that use IT in disseminating agricultural information to the rural population in Kenya. The study was limited to agricultural information. The information technologies examined include CD‐ROM, computer networks, video and desktop publishing. Highlights the advantages and limitations of IT in disseminating information in the rural areas of Kenya. Among the factors that make IT relevant for rural development are vast storage, fast and inexpensive communication channels, links between different media, easy and enjoyable use at comparatively and steadily declining costs. Concludes that for IT to have more impact on rural development, it should be needs driven, rather than technology driven. This can only be achieved if the needs of the users are placed at the centre and appropriate technologies adopted.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Police and Crime Panels (PCPs) within the new constitutional arrangements for governing police forces in England and Wales.

Desktop research of the web pages of PCPs, combined with documentary analysis of reports of panel meetings and a literature review of relevant academic materials.

During the first year of their operation the role of the PCP in the new constitutional arrangements for governing police forces in England and Wales has been widely criticised. This paper explores reasons that may impinge on the effectiveness of these local bodies to scrutinise how Police and Crime Commissioners discharge their statutory functions. In particular, it draws attention to the limited powers of the panel, the contradictions of the “critical/friend” model of scrutiny, the extent of political alignment between “the scrutinisers” and “the scrutinee”, and the ability of the latter to constrain the scrutiny function of the former.

This paper is the first to explore the scrutiny role of PCPs in the context of the research evidence regarding the development and use of scrutiny within the local government context.