Search results

Social Media and Development

The goal of this study is to identify the perspectives that development NGOs attribute to organisational social media, and furthermore elaborate on an appropriate categorisation of these perspectives for social media use by development NGOs. How social media is used in the area of development, where the use goes far beyond the private sector purpose of publicity and converting a sale, is a key issue for NGOs. Fourteen development NGOs from the Netherlands that are actively using social media were selected for this study. Interviews were conducted to collect data from the decision makers and practitioners in these organisations. The grounded theory method combined with a multiple case study was applied for data analysis. The resulting preliminary framework presents us with four emerging perspectives, namely Technological, Individual, Collective and Contextual perspectives attributed to organisational social media use. We theorise that there are relationships between these four perspectives. This paper suggests that the understanding of (organisational) social media use among development NGOs can be better understood by identifying these perspectives and their inter-relationships. The implications of these findings for the literature on affordances and organisational social media use in the context of development and NGOs are discussed. Recommended Citation Sheombar, Anand; Urquhart, Cathy; Kayas, Oliver; and Ndhlovu, Tidings, "Social Media and Development: Understanding NGO practices and perceptions" (2018). GlobDev 2018. 3. https://aisel.aisnet.org/globdev2018/3

Taking fingerprints

An ecological dynamics approach to ACL injury risk research

Research of non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury risk aims to identify modifiable risk factors that are linked to the mechanisms of injury. Information from these studies is then used in the development of injury prevention programmes. However, ACL injury risk research often leans towards methods with three limitations: 1) a poor preservation of the athlete-environment relationship that limits the generalisability of results, 2) the use of a strictly biomechanical approach to injury causation that is incomplete for the description of injury mechanisms, 3) and a reductionist analysis that neglects profound information regarding human movement. This current opinion proposes three principles from an ecological dynamics perspective that address these limitations. First, it is argued that, to improve the generalisability of findings, research requires a well-preserved athlete-environment relationship. Second, the merit of including behaviour and the playing situation in the model of injury causation is presented. Third, this paper advocates that research benefits from conducting non-reductionist analysis (i.e., more holistic) that provides profound information regarding human movement. Together, these principles facilitate an ecological dynamics approach to injury risk research that helps to expand our understanding of injury mechanisms and thus contributes to the development of preventative measures.

The Hackable City

This open access book presents a selection of the best contributions to the Digital Cities 9 Workshop held in Limerick in 2015, combining a number of the latest academic insights into new collaborative modes of city making that are firmly rooted in empirical findings about the actual practices of citizens, designers and policy makers. It explores the affordances of new media technologies for empowering citizens in the process of city making, relating examples of bottom-up or participatory practices to reflections about the changing roles of professional practitioners in the processes, as well as issues of governance and institutional policymaking.

Lecturers as curators of crossmedia resources: a literature review

In today’s era of content abundance, a huge amount of resources is available digitally, from research articles to news items and from online courses to YouTube videos. As a result, lecturers in higher education have an endless supply of crossmedia materials that they can present to students as learning materials. This presents lecturers with the challenge of selecting those materials in such a way that they match the course topic and prior knowledge and proficiency level of the students. Additionally, they need to consider how to structure resources and how to make connections between them in order to support students’ learning (Kallenberg, et al., 2009). It is often recognized (e.g. Anderson, 2015; Siemens, 2008) that this task is remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums, who expertly make selections and organize and contextualize artefacts (Bhaskar, 2016). Considering those similarities, surprisingly little is known about how lecturers conduct this task. This study investigates how lecturers in Dutch higher professional education select, structure and present crossmedia resources for educational purposes, from the perspective of curation. This paper aims to provide an overview of relevant research regarding “lecturers as curators” in the context of higher education. It will share the outcomes of a literature review, for which articles were identified in three databases (ERIC, Web of Science (WoS) and Catalogue Plus), using the search word “curation” combined with filters for the field of (higher) education. Only articles published in English in peer reviewed journals, institutional research reports and conference proceedings prior to November 2018 were selected. This led to a selection of 64 articles that focused on curation within higher education. Of these, 17 focused on curation of learning materials done by lecturers. Findings show that there is relatively little research into lecturers’ curational processes. Although most articles identify the notion of curation as a useful approach in teaching, they fail to describe overarching processes or criteria for succesful curation. Five of the reviewed studies describe curational practices by specific groups of lecturers, teaching a specific subject such as maths or music. Seven other studies focus on the outcome of lecturers’ curation processes, describing the curated collections that are the result of it. Additionally, two articles present a conceptual model of educational curation; namely Wolff & Mulholland’s (2013) Curational Inquiry Learning Cycle and Deschaine & Sharma’s (2015) 5C Model. Both models approach the process of curation as a sequential multistep model, in which steps cannot be seen independently: meaning is added with every step of the process. Although they use different terminology, steps such as collecting, selecting, organising, and presenting resources are identified. However, both models have not been tested empirically. The authors acknowledge the importance of this, by stressing that more research into the topic is necessary. The proposed paper will present a complete overview of the findings, summarize the two models, and indicate how these models can be a starting point for further empirical research.

“Nano” regeneration

This article provides a nano (hyperlocal) view of climate change mitigation by viewing regenerative organizing through the eyes (as well as bodies and senses, etc.) of the households engaged in community-based energy projects. By showing what humans make up for in the largely absent relationship between nature and technology in these projects, we envision an incremental extension of the literature on community-based energy. The radically different contribution we aim to make is a tripartite imbrication that brings in natural agency alongside the human and the technical but specifies precisely how nano (smaller than micro) embodied practices afford mis- and realignments. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026619886841 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/