The Social Mediation of Economic Discourse

In the course of the nineteenth century, political economy shifted from a discourse printed in books and journals and directed primarily at ‘men of affairs’ to a stratified public discourse. Where argument had once appealed to ‘reason’, argument by authority now became more significant in the teaching and publications of academic economists. This chapter shows the media through which this transition was effected—clubs, societies, and associations, adult extension teaching, popular literature, the creation of examinations and professional qualifications, and, in some limited cases, certification for employment, plus the creation of specialised academic journals.

What Makes Learning Analytics Research Matter

The ongoing changes and challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated long-standing inequities in education, leading many to question basic assumptions about how learning can best benefit all students. Thirst for data about learning is at an all-time high, sometimes without commensurate attention to ensuring principles this community has long valued: privacy, transparency, openness, accountability, and fairness. How we navigate this dynamic context is critical for the future of learning analytics. Thinking about the issue through the lens of JLA publications over the last eight years, we highlight the important contributions of “problem-centric” rather than “tool-centric” research. We also value attention (proximal or distal) to the eventual goal of closing the loop, connecting the results of our analyses back to improve the learning from which they were drawn. Finally, we recognize the power of cycles of maturation: using information generated about real-world uses and impacts of a learning analytics tool to guide new iterations of data, analysis, and intervention design. A critical element of context for such work is that the learning problems we identify and choose to work on are never blank slates; they embed societal structures, reflect the influence of past technologies; and have previous enablers, barriers and social mediation acting on them. In that context, we must ask the hard questions: What parts of existing systems is our work challenging? What parts is it reinforcing? Do these effects, intentional or not, align with our values and beliefs? In the end what makes learning analytics matter is our ability to contribute to progress on both immediate and long-standing challenges in learning, not only improving current systems, but also considering alternatives for what is and what could be. This requires including stakeholder voices in tackling important problems of learning with rigorous analytic approaches to promote equitable learning across contexts. This journal provides a central space for the discussion of such issues, acting as a venue for the whole community to share research, practice, data and tools across the learning analytics cycle in pursuit of these goals.

Affective Scaffolding to Mediate the Use of Emergent Technology

Technology is reshaping the micro-ecologies of developing, becoming a part of it. It impacts and enables reconfiguration of social interaction in everyday situations. The study aims to bring a macro and micro discussion about close interconnection with complex technology and how these interactions have reciprocal implications between materiality and subjectivity. The broad research question is: How do we deal and interact with daily increasingly complex technology? A theoretical perspective is outlined about the subject and object relationship, focusing on new technology in the baby day living. One key point stressed in this paper is the affective scaffolding that could be a key point for social mediation with technology. To support the reflection, some illustrative examples are proposed from a naturalistic observation. In particular, the study focus on one 1-years old baby interacting with a smartphone and a robot toy. A final discussion is proposed to discuss the material and subjective dialectic interactions.

Achieving the 4IR University Library in Sub-Saharan Africa: Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

Aim: The paper examined the university library in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the preconditions for achieving and sustaining the same in Nigeria. 4IR is characterized by a level of automation, deployment of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence, internet connectivity and accessibility to the global information network, subscription to reputable online databases, quality and comprehensive collection in diverse formats, preponderance of digital natives among patrons, increased demand for seamless access to online resources and virtual operations, new library spaces (learning commons, research commons and makerspace), open scholarly communication, research data management, social mediation applications, digital curation and preservation. The challenges militating against effective crystallization of 4IR university libraries include: financial constraints, inadequate infrastructure, resistance to change, inadequate skills and competencies, security and intrusion issues, lack of exposure to international standards. Conclusions: The paper recommended the following as requisite panacea: leadership, demonstrating and justifying returns on investment, benchmarking practices, anti-intrusion and back-up systems, adequate power supply and bandwidth, endowment and corporate social responsibility, indigenous library management software, and capacity building initiatives.

Leveraging Social Media and Scholarly Discussion for Educator Empowerment

This paper shares insights from an international community of educators who have been using social media as a virtual space for a scholarly reading group: #edureading. The collection of educator narratives presented in this paper show how social networks on Twitter and Flipgrid were used as inclusive environments for teacher-led professional development. This paper is both a report of research involving five practitioners inquiring into their collective experience, and an exercise in building the scholarly capacity of the #edureading group. The accessibility of the social media platforms, as well as the collaborative, inquiry-based approach to scholarly reading, emerge as key themes in the educator narratives. The findings of this research emphasise that professional learning occurring in virtual spaces is open to social mediation using the norms of social networks, rather than the norms of workplaces, jurisdictions or education sectors, and that this can lead to a greater sense of empowerment for educators

The Afterlife of Breast Cancer: Exploring the Digital Performativity of Post-Treatment Patienthood

This article looks at the practices of digital performativity of bodies-in-remission on Instagram to detail the affective and temporal experience of post-treatment patienthood. To explore these performativities, I use the images and narratives of the post-treatment breast-cancer body to have a conversation about the vicarious ‘re-experience’ of the malady—now in abeyance—through the discursive register of fear and the clinical haunting of the everyday in trying to offset the side-effects of the treatment regimes. I further argue that these techno-digital enactments of post-treatment patienthood co-emerge through complex ‘intra-actions’ of and within entanglements of materialities, networks, discourses, affect, and multiple registers of techno-social mediation that shape and constrict them. Accordingly, this article is an effort to make sense of how people ‘memorise’ chronic illness and prolonged suffering—especially when it impacts key sources of their gender identity—through negotiations with the temporal-discursive processes of networked communications.

Newspaper headlines as a tool for linguistic modeling of police image

The article considers the issue of linguistic modeling of the image of the police in the newspa[1]per discourse, in newspaper headlines in particular. This article is relevant and determined by the need to study the representation of reality in the media discourse and its linguistic manifestation. In addition, the media have recently paid close attention to the coverage of the activities of social institutions, especially with regard to law enforcement agencies. The authors describe the characteristics of the mass media discourse as one of the tools for implementing public power, organizing the activities of political and social institutions, and forming an image. The paper considers the specific features and functions of the newspaper discourse, and also considers the newspaper headline, which acts as a pragmatic component of a newspaper article contributing to the creation of information and social mediation between addressees and addressers in order to exert a regulatory influence on public opinion. The article focuses on the structural, semantic and stylistic analysis of the newspaper headlines that represent information about law enforcement agencies’ activities in Russia and the United States. The authors divide the publications into neutral (“Arguments and Facts”, “USA Today”, “Wall Street Journal”), pro-government (“Newspaper. Ru”, “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” and “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, “Associated Press”) and opposition newspapers (“Novaya Gazeta”, “Kommersant”, “The New York Times”, “Washington Post”). In total, 60 newspaper headlines were analyzed for the period from September to December 2020. The results show that the texts of newspaper reports perform informative and pragmatic functions, and the newspaper headline is the key to understanding the author’s position and intentions. Lexical, grammatical, and stylistic differences in the headlines of Russian and American newspapers devoted to the activities of law enforcement agencies were identified, as well as language techniques for exerting speech influence on the reader and linguistic modeling of the police image.

Social Functioning as a Mediator between Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Emotional Problems in Adolescents

Adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are at risk for increased feelings of anxiety and depression compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. However, the underlying pathways involved in this relationship are unclear. In this initial study of the ‘social mediation hypothesis’, we examine social functioning as a mediator of emotional problems in a cross-sectional sample of adolescents with DLD and age- and sex-matched controls. Preliminary data from twenty-six participants with DLD and 27 participants with typical language development (TLD, 11–17 years) were compared on self- and parent-reported measures of social functioning and emotional outcomes. There was little evidence of group differences in self-reported social functioning and emotional outcomes, but parent-report of SDQ Peer Problems and Emotional Problems in the DLD group was significantly higher than in the TLD group. Parent-reported peer problems mediated parent-reported emotional problems, accounting for 69% of the relationship between DLD status and emotional problems. Parents of adolescents with DLD, but not adolescents themselves, report significantly higher peer and emotional problems compared to TLD peers. The hypotheses generated from these novel data suggest further investigation into adolescents’ perceptions of socioemotional difficulties and friendships should be examined.

A CRIANÇA QUE ESCUTA NA PROFESSORA QUE GINGA:

O artigo analisa a trajetória de uma professora negra na periferia de uma capital do sul do Brasil e tem como objetivo explicitar como valores e memórias de uma certa formação étnico-racial podem influir no processo de “tornar-se professora”. O estudo se baseia em uma entrevista direta, realizada durante a atividade de uma disciplina de um curso de pós-graduação e tem como instrumental teórico-metodologico a autobiografia, concebida como uma ‘tipologia das mediações sociais” (NÓDOA e FINGER, 1988), construída a partir de “saberes distintos” (TARDIF, 2002). Recorremos, ainda, aos conceitos de Conscientização em FREIRE (1979) e outras referências em J. CANDAU e M.C. PASSEGI. PALAVRAS-CHAVE Autobiografia, Saberes, Práticas. THE CHILD’S LISTENING TO THE TEACHER’S GINGA STYLE: the knowledge mobilization of a black educator from the outskirts of Porto Alegre on "becoming a teacher" ABSTRACT This article analyzes the pathway of a black teacher from a capital city in South Brazil and aims to explain how memories and values of a certain ethnic- racial education may influence the “becoming a teacher” process. The study, carried out during a postgraduate course activity, is based on a direct interview and its theoretical and methodological tool is autobiography, which was conceived as “typology of social mediation”(NÓDOA e FINGER,1988) and built from “distinct knowledge”(TARDIF, 2002). We have yet used the Critical Consciousness approach by Freire (1979) and other references in. Candau and M.C. PASSEGI. KEYWORDS Autobiography, Knowledge, Practices.

Organized Online Learning of Students in Universities and Schools: Didactics and Methodology

This article discusses the urgent aspects of online learning didactics. They are comprised of, for instance, organization and methods of organized learning, main principles of actions aimed at practical orientation; their objective is combination of the methods of distance learning, formation of efficient skills of students with social mediation, analysis of reasons of errors and their correction, pursuance of success in relevant areas. Organized online learning also provides opportunity for students to use all advantages of digital technologies: flexibility, individual distribution of learning duration, compatibility with other forms of occupation. In addition to digital know-how, organization of learning and independent work of distant students can develop self-discipline, sustainability of acquired skills. Students can use various digital sources of information available under various conditions in addition to that organized under the management of distance learning teacher.