The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of an Instructor Effectiveness Course designed specifically to retain adjunct faculty and improve their overall success in teaching. The study also investigated the "online" and "face-to-face" groups of the Instructor Effectiveness Course and compared faculty who take this course to those who do not in order to detect any significant differences. Differences were measured through students' class grade point averages, (GPA's), and course completion rates for the three groups of faculty, as well as through the faculty performance on student evaluations. This mixed method, causal/comparative study looked at the adjunct faculty members who have taken the Instructor Effectiveness Course at a large southern community college compared to those who have not taken the course. This large southern community college employs approximately 1,400 adjunct faculty members. Four hundred of these adjunct faculty members have completed the Instructor Effectiveness Course offered at the college. For the past couple of years, the course has been offered both face-to-face and online. These adjunct faculty members teach both in the associate of arts (A.A.) programs, as well as the associate of science (A.S.) programs. The adjunct faculty members were divided into four groups: by those with less than one year of teaching experience, those with one year of teaching experience, those with two years of teaching experience, and those with three years of teaching experience. The adjunct faculty members were also divided by those teaching A.S. courses and those teaching A.A. courses, and by those teaching night and day classes. The adjunct faculty members with prior teaching experience who have been exempted from taking the course were not included in the study. The adjunct faculty members who had never taken the Instructor Effectiveness Course had significantly higher class GPA's than those who had taken the course onlin e or face-to-face. Student evaluations showed that adjunct faculty members who had completed the online version of the Instructor Effectiveness Course had a higher weighted average for all questions than those who had not taken the course. This study had three major objectives. The first was to investigate adjunct faculty members' retention rates. The second was to investigate students' success as measured by GPA and course completion. The third was to investigate adjunct faculty members' success as measured by students' evaluations. The research questions, hypotheses, participants, instrumentation, data collection, and data analysis have been provided in this chapter. The participants have been identified, and the rationale for their selection was described. The community college used as the research institution has been identified.

Knowledge is the critical success factor for organizations to compete in the contemporary business world. Organizations that can make full use of their collective expertise and knowledge are likely to be more innovative, efficient and effective in the marketplace. With the development of advanced information and communication technology, organizations are undertaking various knowledge management initiatives to augment traditional ways of knowledge transfer. This dissertation intended to understand how various factors influence knowledge workers' knowledge sourcing behavior in the multimodal knowledge network. More specifically, our research question is: How do task characteristics, knowledge characteristics and individual characteristics influence knowledge workers' channel preferences during their knowledge sourcing activities?We built a knowledge sourcing preference model which predicts knowledge workers' preferences among various knowledge channels. We identified eight important antecedents from a wide spectrum of task characteristics, knowledge characteristics, and individual characteristics. We also identified three representative knowledge sourcing channels: face-to-face communication with colleagues, knowledge repositories, and discussion forums. We developed eight hypotheses on how each of the antecedent influence channel preferences.We tested our hypotheses through a survey we conducted in an international information technology company. Out of the eight hypotheses, the hypotheses on the influences from knowledge codifiability, knowledge volatility, extroversion/introversion dimension of the personality, and reciprocation wariness are supported. The hypotheses on the influences from task interdependency and task urgency are partially supported. The hypotheses on the influences from task routineness and expertise are not supported.This study furthers our understanding of knowledge workers' knowledge sourcing behavior in a multimodal knowledge network. The results of this study help organizations understand the advantages and disadvantages of various sourcing channels under certain circumstance of tasks, knowledge, and individuals. With this understanding, organizations will be able to have reasonable expectations on the utilization of knowledge transfer approaches, and to improve the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer initiatives. This will enable the organizations to cultivate environments or design systems to develop the types of channels to accommodate the preferences of knowledge workers with various combinations of tasks, knowledge and individual characteristics.

No description available.

The purpose of this investigation is to further an understanding of the spiral of silence theory as it functions within both face-to-face (FtF) and computer-mediated contexts. Computer-mediated communication (CMC is often touted for being an empowering medium as it affords its users anonymity. This finding could have an impact on whether the spiral of silence occurs within CMC. Previous studies have relied upon hypothetical scenarios and have established weak support for the theory. Despite this study’s utilization of a within-subjects experimental design, however, no significant differences in minority opinion holders’ fear of isolation were found. Similarly, no significant relationship was found between minority opinion holders’ attention paid to news and fear of isolation. In regards to both majority and minority opinion holders, no significant differences in perceptions of opinions expressed in either condition were found. Reasons for such unexpected findings, as well as strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to explore how elderly people in Gävle cope with their life by using of Internet and what are their perceived benefits and barriers of the use of Internet. Qualitative methods were used with face-to-face interviews and email correspondence to gather the data. Six elderly people participated in this study. Coping theory was used to analyse the results. The results were divided into three parts. They were describing the use of Internet, benefits and barriers of using the Internet and reasons behind using the Internet and coping. Benefits include connectedness, gratification, usefulness, and active learning experience. Barriers include limitation, distrust and frustration. This paper used the coping theory to try to describe how these persons adjust the way of thinking and the way of behaving and how they use these strategies to cope with the daily life. It was found that Internet for elderly people is becoming more important nowadays and also it is significant to know how they think about the Internet.

The role of local Chinese media has become more important as the size of the Chinese community in New Zealand has increased rapidly in recent years. The function of local Chinese media could be like a bridge connecting the Chinese community and the mainstream society. This was an exploratory study which examined the current situation of local Chinese media to determine such issues as to whether they are the main source of information for the Chinese community, what if any difficulties they are facing and how they may develop in the future. A general research was conducted for the local Chinese media in Auckland, which covers brief introductions for some local Chinese newspapers, radio, websites, and the sole Chinese television company-World TV. Meanwhile, the researcher collected 102 questionnaires and conducted 10 in-depth interviews from the local Chinese residents and the staff working in local Chinese media companies. The findings of research suggest that most local Chinese residents utilize Chinese language media as a tool to collect daily information either from local society or their original countries. The local Chinese media not only provides information for the local community, but also has social value as a means for self-representation of the Chinese community in New Zealand and better adaptation to the mainstream society. On the other hand, the funding shortage as well as the tough competition became the obstacles for the future development for the local Chinese media. The results of this research may point to what the government’s role should be.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-46).

Social networks have been used to understand how information flows through an organization as well as identifying individuals that appear to have control over this information flow. Such individuals are identified as being central nodes in a graph representation of the social network and have high "betweenness" values. Rather than looking at graphs derived from email, on-line forums, or telephone connections, we consider sequences of bipartite graphs that represent face-to-face meetings between individuals, and define a new metric to identify the information elite individuals. We show that, in our simulations, individuals that attend many meetings with many different people do not always have high betweenness values, even though they seem to be the ones that control the information flow. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

abstract: Effectively educating students with autism is a necessary element in providing all students with a free and appropriate public education, and as the number of students diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder continues to increase in both public and private educational settings, providing successful and satisfactory professional development opportunities in the area of autism is becoming increasingly essential. This study explored the experiences of twenty-three educators in a suburban southwest K-12 public school district, as they participated in a fifteen-hour professional development course in an online or face-to-face format, and collaboratively problem-solved their challenges in educating students with autism. Qualitative data was collected from participants' weekly written reflections and comments from a pre- and post-survey on attitudes, to determine quality of and satisfaction with collaboration in relation to course format. Results indicated that the online format produced higher-quality collaboration when it came to presenting one's own situation(s) to the group, finding group discussions helpful, having enough time to collaborate, providing feedback/suggestions to group members, and perceiving suggestions for one's own situation as helpful (as evidenced by the number of suggestions that participants said they would likely implement). The face-to-face format produced higher-quality collaboration when it came to in-depth problem-solving regarding a situation, implementing suggestions for one's own situation, and relating course content to collaborative activities. Participants' attitudes about using technology as a means of collaboration showed little change overall from pre- to post-survey. Though slight increases in positive attitudes concerning technology were found in various areas, many participants still thought highly of a face-to-face format for collaborative purposes, even after participating in the online professional development course. Findings may be of use to educational institutions developing online or face-to-face professional development opportunities in the area of autism. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2011

L'objet de recherche aborde la professionnalisation de formateurs, tout particulièrement ceux qui exercent dans le champ de la formation en Travail social. L'enjeu est d'interroger le travail relationnel de formateur en présentiel, son rôle spécifique, sa pertinence et son actualité à travers la dimension corporelle de son activité, l'usage qu'il peut faire de gestes. Cet impensé de la formation en Travail social, celui de la place du corps et des gestes comme réintroduisant la part du sensible dans l'activité de communication est le thème central de ce travail. Une approche phénoménologique de l'activité est utilisée dans le cadre de cette recherche, l'offre de présence étant le concept d'intelligibilité qui a été construit et mobilisé par le chercheur pour comprendre la façon dont le formateur s'y prend quand il s'exprime devant un auditoire selon le type d'd'intervention et l'auditoire. La méthodologie s'est appuyée sur deux types d'entretien (semi-directifs et de confrontation à l'activité filmée) puis sur les observations du chercheur à partir des films, in fine une analyse croisée des différents résultats. Le fait de réintroduire le corps, de redonner aux gestes "leur épaisseur symbolique" permet de faire ressortir la spécificité du présentiel. / This thesis deals with professionalization of trainers, especially those working in the field of social work training. Its perspective provides a focus which is seldom approach when it comes to professionalization. The stake is to calle in question the communication activity of the trainers when they are in presence of students, the place of the body and gestures as reintroducing sensibility into the communication. That is the key theme of this work. The phenomenology as a theoretical Anchor, showing a phenomenology of activity has been privileged. Offering face-to-face is the concept of intelligibility which has been built to understand how the trainer set about it according to the type of intervention and the type of audience. The methodology is based on two types of interviews (semi structured interviews and interviews namely of confrontation in face of films), then the researcher's observations from films, in fine a crossed analysis of the different results. Reintroducing body language into the activity, giving the gestures back their "symbolic thickness" allowed to justify the specificity of face-to-face activity and give it a fuure with other perspectives.