Management Research on Reciprocity: A Review of the Literature

Although reciprocity is fundamental to all social orders, management research offers few reviews of the concept’s theoretical origins and current applications. To help bridge this gap, we elucidate the dominant understandings of reciprocity, ask which areas of research emerge from them, and explore how they interconnect. Our bibliometric methodology detects four clusters of management research on reciprocity. Across these clusters, authors subscribe mainly to substantialist ontology, marginalize morally oriented motives consistent with relational ontology, and largely assume that benefit-oriented motives underlie reciprocity. We outline the advantages of a moral-oriented relationalist concept of reciprocity and discuss potential areas for its development in management research.

Homelessness, Social Work, Social Policy and the Print Media in Australian Cities

Homelessness is a significant social problem worldwide. This paper describes an Australian study that examined print media representations of homelessness and social work, social policy and social work responses to homelessness in three Australian cities. The research included a content analysis of seven Australian newspapers and semi-structured interviews with 39 social workers employed in the field of homelessness in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. The detailed results of these studies have been published separately elsewhere. This paper reports on how discourses in the print media, social policy and social work practice co-exist in constructing homelessness as a particular social problem, influencing social work responses to homelessness. The research found that individualism is central to many dominant discourses evident in the print media, social policy and social work practice, and that social work is practiced within unequal power relations embedded in organisational contexts.

Constructing a user experience user experience-based mobile learning environment

Mobile learning, in the past defined as learning with mobile devices, now refers to any type of learning-on-the-go or learning that takes advantage of mobile technologies. This new definition shifted its focus from the mobility of technology to the mobility of the learner (O'Malley and Stanton 2002; Sharples, Arnedillo-Sanchez et al. 2009). Placing emphasis on the mobile learner’s perspective requires studying “how the mobility of learners augmented by personal and public technology can contribute to the process of gaining new knowledge, skills, and experience” (Sharples, Arnedillo-Sanchez et al. 2009). The demands of an increasingly knowledge based society and the advances in mobile phone technology are combining to spur the growth of mobile learning. Around the world, mobile learning is predicted to be the future of online learning, and is slowly entering the mainstream education. However, for mobile learning to attain its full potential, it is essential to develop more advanced technologies that are tailored to the needs of this new learning environment. A research field that allows putting the development of such technologies onto a solid basis is user experience design, which addresses how to improve usability and therefore user acceptance of a system. Although there is no consensus definition of user experience, simply stated it focuses on how a person feels about using a product, system or service. It is generally agreed that user experience adds subjective attributes and social aspects to a space that has previously concerned itself mainly with ease-of-use. In addition, it can include users’ perceptions of usability and system efficiency. Recent advances in mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies further underline the importance of human-computer interaction and user experience (feelings, motivations, and values) with a system. Today, there are plenty of reports on the limitations of mobile technologies for learning (e.g., small screen size, slow connection), but there is a lack of research on user experience with mobile technologies. This dissertation will fill in this gap by a new approach in building a user experience-based mobile learning environment. The optimized user experience we suggest integrates three priorities, namely a) content, by improving the quality of delivered learning materials, b) the teaching and learning process, by enabling live and synchronous learning, and c) the learners themselves, by enabling a timely detection of their emotional state during mobile learning. In detail, the contributions of this thesis are as follows: • A video codec optimized for screencast videos which achieves an unprecedented compression rate while maintaining a very high video quality, and a novel UI layout for video lectures, which together enable truly mobile access to live lectures. • A new approach in HTTP-based multimedia delivery that exploits the characteristics of live lectures in a mobile context and enables a significantly improved user experience for mobile live lectures. • A non-invasive affective learning model based on multi-modal emotion detection with very high recognition rates, which enables real-time emotion detection and subsequent adaption of the learning environment on mobile devices. The technology resulting from the research presented in this thesis is in daily use at the School of Continuing Education of Shanghai Jiaotong University (SOCE), a blended-learning institution with 35.000 students.

Social-Software-Portfolios im Einsatz

Die Dissertationsschrift widmet sich der Erforschung des Online-Lernens mittels Weblogs unter Anwendung der E-Portfolio Methode als einer seit mehreren Jahren verstärkt aufkommenden Lern- und Präsentationsform im Bildungskontext. Über mehrere Lehrveranstaltungen des Studiengangs "Angewandte Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft" an der Technischen Universität Ilmenau hinweg wurden drei Fallstudien gebildet. Innerhalb dieser wurde das Führen von eigenen E-Portfolio Blogs durch Studierende über einen Zeitraum von etwa drei Jahren evaluiert. Als Evaluationsziel wurde anhand spezifischer Fragestellungen ermittelt, wie das damit einhergehende selbstgesteuert-konnektive Lernen zu entsprechendem Erfolg führen kann. Hierbei wurde insbesondere die Teildimension Medienkompetenz im Spannungsfeld von Lernaktivität, Wissenserwerb und Informations-/Wissensmanagement betrachtet sowie weitere intervenierende Variablen, wie zum Beispiel Aufwand oder Akzeptanz, berücksichtigt. Inhaltlich wurden zunächst begriffliche Grundlagen dargestellt, die Nutzung von E-Portfolios in Theorie und Praxis beschrieben, Medienkompetenz-Ansätze detailliert aufgezeigt sowie in den Kontext von E-Portfolios gebracht und schließlich eine umfangreiche Analyse des Forschungsstandes aufbereitet. Diese gingen mit Erkenntnissen aus einer qualitativen Vorstudie in Form von fünf leitfadengestützten Experteninterviews einher. Die darauf aufbauende Hauptstudie widmete sich anschließend der Erhebung und Auswertung quantitativer Daten anhand von Online-Befragungen mit den Studierenden zu fünf Zeitpunkten aus intra- und interindividueller Perspektive. Als markanteste empirische Erkenntnis der Arbeit kann festgehalten werden, dass es durch das selbstgesteuert-konnektive Lernen mit E-Portfolio Blogs zu einer nachhaltigen Förderung der Medienkompetenz kommt, die sich auch in signifikanten Zusammenhängen mit den anderen Teildimensionen und intervenierenden Variablen widerspiegelt. Darüber hinaus bieten sich aber auch Potenziale für eine steigende Lernaktivität, einen ansteigenden Wissenserwerb und ein verbessertes Informations-/Wissensmanagement, die es aber noch weiterführend zu erforschen gilt. Demgegenüber können allerdings der entstehende und kontinuierlich hohe Aufwand sowie die erforderliche (Eigen-) Motivation als entscheidende Herausforderungen dieser Lernmethode identifiziert werden.

Cut Out By The Middle Man: The Free Speech Implications Of Social Network Blocking and Banning In The EU

This article examines social network users’ legal defences against content removal under the EU and ECHR frameworks, and their implications for the effective exercise of free speech online. A review of the Terms of Use and content moderation policies of two major social network services, Facebook and Twitter, shows that end users are unlikely to have a contractual defence against content removal. Under the EU and ECHR frameworks, they may demand the observance of free speech principles in state-issued blocking orders and their implementation by intermediaries, but cannot invoke this ‘fair balance’ test against the voluntary removal decisions by the social network service. Drawing on practical examples, this article explores the threat to free speech created by this lack of accountability: Firstly, a shift from legislative regulation and formal injunctions to public-private collaborations allows state authorities to influence these ostensibly voluntary policies, thereby circumventing constitutional safeguards. Secondly, even absent state interference, the commercial incentives of social media cannot be guaranteed to coincide with democratic ideals. In light of the blurring of public and private functions in the regulation of social media expression, this article calls for the increased accountability of the social media services towards end users regarding the observance of free speech principles