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This paper reports a study coauthored with second-year undergraduate students that examines student experiences of undertaking real-life, client-set marketing assessments with an equality and inclusion remit. Students were set a marketing assessment with an explicit social justice focus, thereby prompting them to reflect on their own backgrounds and unconscious biases whilst addressing issues of societal injustice. This study explores the impact on students of closely engaging with this material and how the assessment, which involved them interviewing experts and developing actionable recommendations, altered their views and career plans. Data were generated via focus groups with students who undertook the assessment, supplemented by some alumni and client interviews. The findings are presented as a "3A" framework of Awareness, Application, and Action: first, the assessment raised "Awareness" of broader societal issues and fostered transformation in terms of personal views; second, students developed core skills and networks they could "Apply" in their future careers; and third, "Action" describes the way students felt empowered to make a positive difference to their client and wider society. The 3A model provides simple design principles that educators could implement if they want to introduce transformational experiences based on social justice issues into the marketing curriculum.

Aims: A discussion of methodological issues and social media recruitment to a feasibility study to investigate mHealth resources for asthma and pregnancy care., Background: Pregnant women with asthma are reported to be poorly supported according to an international research. We sought to establish if a mHealth intervention might be feasible and acceptable to them., Design: A Phase I or modelling study., Methods: A project team designed an intervention to address UK national guidelines for the management of asthma during pregnancy, using other resources already accessible on the web. This was made available on a project website optimized for mobile phone usage. Links were Tweeted and advertised on Facebook, asking participants to access the project website, which included links to the resources and before- and after-use questionnaires to establish baseline symptom data and participant views of the resources., Results: Despite 55,700 Twitter impressions in a 76-day period over winter 2016-2017, this recruitment strategy garnered 402 engagements but only seven respondents for questionnaire 1 and zero respondents for questionnaire 2., Conclusions: We could not recruit to this study despite believing that social media recruitment would be effective and we recommend that social media recruitment be used cautiously. Apparently, we did not sufficiently address the theoretical aspects of communications theory and were not clear enough about our key messages. Publication bias may exist about the non-publication of other failed telemedicine studies using social media; this goes largely unreported in some systematic reviews and may influence researchers' decision-making about social media recruitment., (© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Purpose: Prospective students are exposed to abundant choices, and they are eagerly searching for information to select the best universities for themselves. Likewise, prospectuses are regularly produced by universities to meet this information needs; the purpose of this paper is to examine the key marketing messages used in their prospectuses. Design/methodology/approach: The 2017 undergraduate prospectuses of 121 universities in the UK (out of the 134 members of University UK) were thematically analysed using NVivo10. Findings: Messages were predominantly about the location, the course, student experience, credibility and career progression. They are framed in an appealing way, filled with facts and figures, images of beautiful buildings and smiling students, testimonials of facilities and experiences that form a sense of compatibility and belonging. Research limitations/implications: This study provides insights for the higher educational institutions to enhance their future marketing communications strategies in terms of effectively differentiating one university from another by highlighting the predominantly used appeals among 121 prospectuses and the need for adopting a more consistent approach between the clearing period and non-clearing period in terms of designing the prospectuses. This study has considered only the print platform, and therefore future studies should also look at social media and university websites in the context of the integrated marketing communications. Practical implications: Accurate and coherent narratives should be provided, taking into consideration the diverse nature of target audience. Universities need to realise that they can be held responsible for the promises presented in their prospectuses. Using the city appeal by many universities may be challenging, as there is need to attract students not just to the city itself, but to the university's campus. Originality/value: Having a significantly larger sample than any other previous studies in this field, the empirical evidence provided in this paper is rich and in-depth, thanks to the size and age of the sample as well as the integrated and combined methodological approach. Five keys themes with sub-themes, descriptions and examples were provided, suitable for future research in higher education marketing.

When transitioning from a familiar learning culture to a United Kingdom higher education (HE) culture, international students face a number of academic, cultural, and linguistic challenges. This paper considers the obstacles that international students experience and critically analyzes the use of social media to aid the academic transition of a group of postgraduate international students. Specifically, it analyzed the use of Yammer to support peer collaboration and communication to enhance academic development of a group of Southeast Asian international students undertaking an MA at a UK university in the North of England. The student feedback suggested that social support networks were important for academic engagement and development. This paper recommends more training on the affordances of Yammer, additional online tutor presence, and more scaffolded activities.

Toppling the statue of the slave merchant Edward Colston in Bristol, removing the monuments of King Leopold II from public places in Belgium, Black Lives Matter protests, and mass demonstrations targeting remembrance of certain chapters of the history of the Global North -- these are some of the significant events that drew attention to the ongoing disputes around the legacy of colonialism during the summer of 2020. These developments form an integral part of the long-drawn-out process of decolonisation: decolonising the culture of the former mother countries. From museology through the natural sciences and linguistics to visual arts, vast areas of the academic, scientific, and cultural scene of the Global North are crucially affected by decolonizing tendencies, with the teaching of history arguably among the most disputed ones. This paper reviews the key decolonising aspirations of history teaching in the United Kingdom by studying the goals, messages, methods, and endeavours of three movements: "Why Is My Curriculum White?," "The Black Curriculum," and "Rhodes Must Fall Oxford," address different levels of education and urge the transformation of numerous aspects of history teaching (teacher training, curricula, teaching methodology, etc). Source materials examined include the work, teaching aids, and written, audio, or video content published on various social media platforms by these three organisations, as well as parliamentary papers and reports of public and non-governmental bodies.

Whilst the practitioner field around current student communications has developed in recent years, most published research still focuses either on prospective students, theoretical benefits of student communications or usage of individual channels of communication. This paper contributes to policy and practice by providing the first UK-wide look at current students' communications preferences and behaviours through a meta-analysis of 17 student communications surveys (total students surveyed 20,134). Results show that students expect their universities to utilise a range of channels (including email, social media and student portals) -- i.e. an integrated marketing theory approach. Most students feel that they receive the right level of information; however, overall satisfaction with communications has decreased in recent years. This paper provides recommendations for practice, as well as a template to improve consistency in future institutional student communications evaluations.

As UK cities and towns become increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse, researchers have tuned into how people inhabit multiculturalism. Ethnographic approaches have focused on the kind of togetherness that people generate as they go about their everyday lives, observing the affective textures of interactions and happenings of the here and now in granular detail. Missing from these accounts is what crowdsourced data might add to understandings of how multicultural places are experienced. What is vital about this kind of data is that it is 'big', involving a diversity of voices similarly intent on messaging their experiences, presenting opportunities to scale up the affect of encounters and to quantify what is difficult to qualify. This paper brings Digital Geographies into conversation with research on everyday multiculturalism to examine qualitatively and quantitatively how social media use folds into and expresses various practices of sociality and connection. Our paper involves Twitter, Nando's and the city of Leicester in the UK to challenge and advance ways of understanding everyday multiculturalism in an era of global migration and ethnically complex populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Novel survey methods are needed to tackle declining response rates. The 2020 National Maternity Survey included a randomised controlled trial (RCT) and social media survey to compare different combinations of sampling and data collection methods with respect to: response rate, respondent representativeness, prevalence estimates of maternity indicators and cost. Methods: A two-armed parallel RCT and concurrent social media survey were conducted. Women in the RCT were sampled from ONS birth registrations and randomised to either a paper or push-to-web survey. Women in the social media survey self-selected through online adverts. The primary outcome was response rate in the paper and push-to-web surveys. In all surveys, respondent representativeness was assessed by comparing distributions of sociodemographic characteristics in respondents with those of the target population. External validity of prevalence estimates of maternity indicators was assessed by comparing weighted survey estimates with estimates from national routine data. Cost was also compared across surveys. Results: The response rate was higher in the paper survey (n = 2,446) compared to the push-to-web survey (n = 2,165)(30.6% versus 27.1%, difference = 3.5%, 95%CI = 2.1–4.9, p < 0.0001). Compared to the target population, respondents in all surveys were less likely to be aged < 25 years, of Black or Minority ethnicity, born outside the UK, living in disadvantaged areas, living without a partner and primiparous. Women in the social media survey (n = 1,316) were less representative of the target population compared to women in the paper and push-to-web surveys. For some maternity indicators, weighted survey estimates were close to estimates from routine data, for other indicators there were discrepancies; no survey demonstrated consistently higher external validity than the other two surveys. Compared to the paper survey, the cost saving per respondent was £5.45 for the push-to-web survey and £22.42 for the social media survey. Conclusions: Push-to-web surveys may cost less than paper surveys but do not necessarily result in higher response rates. Social media surveys cost significantly less than paper and push-to-web surveys, but sample size may be limited by eligibility criteria and recruitment window and respondents may be less representative of the target population. However, reduced representativeness does not necessarily introduce more bias in weighted survey estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since social media is increasingly pervasive in modern society, this bibliometric study aims to investigate its educational applications. Using the Scopus database, the bibliometric method analyses publications published between 2010 and 2022. The research indicates that student participation and ease of access are the two main benefits of using social media in the classroom. However, it also spreads misinformation and poses privacy and security risks. Articles that discussed how social media could be used in the classroom were found and organised using a bibliometric analysis based on their subject matter, year of publication, and authors. The research shows that between 2001 and 2020, there was a rise in the number of papers discussing the use of social media in the classroom. In addition, the top five countries in terms of annual publication output include the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia/India, and Canada. To further explore the connections between relevant articles, a co-citation network analysis was performed. Therefore, there must be strict rules and policies for using social media in education to address privacy and security concerns and the spread of false information.

Introduction: To meet the ambition of the UK becoming the global leader in health technology, the future workforce needs to have a developed digital literacy. The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the move to online learning has also increased the requirement for a reinvention of traditional teaching methodologies (Sá & Serpa, 2020). Methodology: A systematic review was conducted using a mix of Boolean search terms in twelve education and health journal databases to discover the extent of current international research of digital literacy in health programmes. Papers were selected for their specificity to digital literacy in health education pre-registration professional programmes. Results: The initial search included 5359 papers, 3925 after duplicates removed, 134 remained after title review which were then input into Covidence for full reading, finally 47 papers being included for thematic analysis. This thematic analysis identified a number of key themes within these papers: digital literacy of the educator, digital literate workforce, technical skills limit adoption, information literacy, a curriculum requirement in education, institutional infrastructure or personal access, preparedness for entering academia, concerns over the use of digital skills, personalised digital literacy experience, increased communication skills with digital literacies, competency frameworks, COVID-19 and social media in education. Conclusion: This research identifies areas of good practice and areas that need to be considered in higher education programmes and by academics to ensure the digital literacy of the future healthcare workforce.

Advocates of digital education have increasingly recognized the need for young people to acquire digital media literacy. However, this idea is often seen in instrumental terms, and is rarely implemented in any coherent or comprehensive way. This paper suggests that we need to move beyond a binary view of digital media as offering risks and opportunities for young people, and the narrow ideas of digital skills and internet safety to which it gives rise. The article proposes that we should take a broader and more critical approach to the rise of 'digital capitalism', and to the ubiquity of digital media in everyday life. In this sense, the paper argues that the well-established conceptual framework and pedagogical strategies of media education can and should be extended to meet the new challenges posed by digital and social media. This article presents some reflections as an epigraph of the special issue "Digital learning: distraction or default for the future", whose final result has allowed us to group a set of critical research and analysis on the inclusion of digital technologies in educational contexts. The points of view presented in this epigraph are also developed in more detail in the book "The Media Education Manifesto" (Buckingham, 2019).

This paper inhabits the increasingly popular space of autoethnographic study. The piece is designed to critique and contextualise the process and usefulness of autoethnography as a way of making meaning. The study centres on how one highly experienced teacher and newly appointed teacher educator is using narrative writing to unpick and locate their skillset in a period of swift change and marked transition. One of the reasons for this choice is the freedom that autoethnography allows. Autoethnography is frequently dismissed as vague and self-indulgent as a method of social research. This paper will propose that autoethnography is a rigorous and powerful research method. It deploys some innovative methods of data collection, analysis and dissemination. The paper's discussion of the literature will naturally help interrogate debates around where autoethnography sits in the intellectual landscape related to qualitative research. The study found that using grounded theory as a research methodology helped arrive at potentially illuminating theories and self-knowledge. These were limited, however, by the underlying risk of indulgence, subjective autobiographical writing and participant bias. The paper also has potential value as a way of helping early career teachers explore critical incidents.

International students form an important element of most universities' internationalisation strategies, especially for research and the recruitment of high calibre PhD students (PGRs). Despite the numerous studies of PGRs' post-arrival experiences, there is a major dearth of research into their pre-arrival, application experiences. Given the worldwide competition for high calibre PGRs, along with impact posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and by Brexit for the UK, it is vital for universities to ensure that factors clearly under their control, such as the information on their websites and the way they communicate, are as informative and helpful as possible. In this article, we draw on social media data to examine the challenges and uncertainties that Korean PGR applicants experienced in navigating the process of applying to UK universities. The paper compares their confusions with information available on university websites and recommends a series of points that higher education institutions should check for. It also reveals and discusses issues associated with communication. While the data has been collected from Korean social media websites, we argue that our paper has broader relevance for the following reasons. First, the same fundamental intercultural issues--different educational systems and different background knowledge--apply to PGR applicants from other countries and so their queries are likely to be similar or comparable. Second, the insights gained from social media websites to facilitate the application process and thereby enhance recruitment can usefully be applied to other countries and levels of study, in a way that has rarely been done to date.

YouTube now has more searches than Google, indicating that video is a motivating and, potentially, powerful learning tool. This paper investigates how we can embrace video to support improvements in teacher education. It will draw on innovative approaches to teacher education, developed by the Open University UK, in order to explore in more depth the potential of video. It will use case studies from three continents, and draw on research from different sources, in order to highlight the successes and the challenges. Looking across the examples presented, the paper will describe models of teacher learning and video use, and demonstrate that video can add value to teacher development activities provided that appropriate support and mediation, consistent with the pedagogy that is being promoted, is in place. Sustainable Development Goal 4 emphasizes the importance of improving the quality of the experiences that children have in school. This requires new models for teacher education, and has become an urgent issue. Video could be a significant part of the solution.

Purpose: Today social media capabilities have enabled businesses and enterprises to more collaboration, engagement and co-creation with their customers. So the current paper expands on this notion. The aim of this study is a bibliometric analysis to examine the trends of publications in the field of co-creation based on social media. Design/methodology/approach: To data collection of quantitative analysis, Scopus database was selected and the collected data were analyzed using Bibliometrix-package. The Web of Science also was selected to retrieve highly cited and hot papers for qualitative part of analysis besides top 10 Scopus highest citation per year documents on June 6, 2020. Findings: The results indicate insights into research trends pertaining to social media-based co-creation, as follows: starting jump to the publications occurred in this researches from the year 2008 and the growth trend is progressing in recent years; the stressful points are "co-design," "co-creation" and "value co-creation" and concepts such as "open innovation," "co-innovation" and "co-new product design" are new topics that guide future direction; the USA and UK are leaders in number of multiple and single publications; the most active and top journals that are better suited to achieving a high citation rate per year for a related paper were introduced. In addition, the top documents and highly cited papers were qualitatively analyzed on the basis of times cited per year. Research limitations/implications: The current study is not free of limitations. The database was limited to only Scopus. So the patterns and trends generated in the study may not be generalized to all social media-based co-creation research. Of course, the authors did not intend to ignore other contributions. It is mainly because of the number of documents retrieved from Scopus database and the coverage, Scopus was selected. Moreover, other types of research techniques such as correspondence analysis can be incorporated to generate additional meaningful insight. Originality/value: In this time of social media and user-generated content portals, co-creation through social media has become quite popular. So the main innovation of this study is providing a visual presentation of the trends and patterns in the evaluation of social media-based co-creation from the first document about the research area published till 2020. The results of this paper can shed light on the factors that strengthen the contribution of studies in a research area. Generally, the bibliometric items the authors analyzed essentially show the entire field picture and guide researchers toward understanding future trends to produce impactful studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we make a case for 'Little Data', which is real-time, self-collected, idiosyncratic datasets maintained by individuals about themselves on myriad topics. We develop and offer a methodology for combining these messy, highly personal insights, to make deductive observations about collective practices. In testing this approach, we use the case study of the 2020-21 stay-at-home orders imposed in the U.S.A., U.K., and Western Europe during the Coronavirus pandemic to operationalise and demonstrate the applicability of this method. Our main finding is to show that whilst stay-at-home orders did have a significant impact on habits during the COVID-19 pandemic, these changes were often counterintuitive, of an insightful nature on topics that would otherwise not be investigated, and always short-lived. Our main contribution is to present Little Data, despite and because of its fragmented and disparate nature, as a viable and useful tool to understand personal habits at finite junctures.

Widespread use of the Internet in 21st century society is not risk-free. This paper studies the comorbidity of some problematic uses of Internet with depression in order to assess their correlation. With that aim, a meta-analysis of 19 samples obtained from 13 different studies (n=33,458) was carried out. The subjects of these studies are adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 years ([mu]=15.68) from different cultures and continents (Europe, Euro-Asia, America and Asia). The effect size obtained from the use of a random-effects model (r=0.3, p<0.000) is significant, moderate and positive, thus confirming the relation between pathologic uses of the Internet and depression. Moreover, meta-regression test results showed that 9% of the variance (R2=0.09) is associated with the male gender, while age and culture are not significant variables. The variability rate of the studies is high (I2=87.085%), as a consequence of heterogeneity rather than publication bias, as Egger's regression test shows (1-tailed p-value=0.25; 2-tailed p-value=0.50, and [sigma]=1.57). Therefore, the need for specific interventions in secondary education dealing with this issue is evident to ensure that it does not extend into adult life.

This paper considers the social value of anonymity in online university student communities, through the presentation of research which tracked the final year of life of the social media application Yik Yak. Yik Yak was an anonymous, geosocial mobile application launched in 2013 which, at its peak in 2014, was used by around two million students in the US and UK. The research we report here is significant as a mixed method study tracing the final year of the life of this app in a large UK university between 2016 and 2017. The paper uses computational and ethnographic methods to understand what might be at stake in the loss of anonymity within university student communities in a datafied society. Countering the most common argument made against online anonymity -- its association with hate speech and victimisation -- the paper draws on recent conceptual work on the social value of anonymity to argue that anonymity online in this context had significant value for the communities that use it. This study of a now-lost social network constitutes a valuable portrait by which we might better understand our current predicament in relation to anonymity, its perceived value and its growing impossibility.

This paper reports on crossing borders virtually via an e-Tandem scheme and presents the findings of a study, in which students of English from an Austrian university were paired with students of German from the UK and the USA. Drawing on data from 19 in-depth interviews, the study aims to identify links between e-Tandem language learning and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014, 2016). A category-based qualitative text analysis (Kuckartz, 2014) revealed that a majority of the interviewees felt e-Tandem language learning contributed to their FLE. Furthermore, a range of reasons underlying students' perceived enjoyment of learning a language in Tandem emerged: having authentic conversations in the target language with L1 (first language) users (Dewaele, 2018), perceiving each other as cultural mediators and a difference from language classroom contexts on the level of power relations, which made students feel more at ease. Helping each other, receiving one-on-one feedback and perceiving improvement in their linguistic mastery were furthermore mentioned as factors they felt boosted their enjoyment and so was developing friendships with L1 users. According to the interviewees, these aspects specifically increased their interest and enjoyment in using and learning the language and their eudaimonic happiness. The findings demonstrate that e-Tandem language learning can be a resource to enhance perceived enjoyment in foreign language learners at tertiary level and they illustrate that social and private components of FLE seem to be interlinked.

The purpose of this study is to explore close friendships and intimacy practices of Malaysian students in the context of living abroad. Some of the new close friends, specifically co-national friends in the UK, are perceived as "family" although some of them have not yet acquired family-like qualities in their relationships. Due to the situation of living abroad, the students acquired the "familiarity as a family" relationship--a new concept introduced in this study to explain this complicated relationship, with co-national friends in the Malaysian community in the UK. A sense of belonging and homophily, and shared physical space and activities are two key factors that influenced these practices of intimacy, which will foreground the discussion in this paper.

Background: Liver disease is an increasing cause of morbidity and mortality in the United Kingdom and can be challenging to live with in the advanced stages. There has been little research exploring the healthcare experiences of UK individuals with decompensated disease when the liver cannot carry out its functions properly. A PhD research project was developed with people who have liver disease to explore care experiences in decompensated advanced liver disease. Public involvement (PI) is an essential aspect of meaningful health research, and this paper reports on the progression of our PI approach in this ongoing study. Objective: To embed PI throughout the research project to ensure that the study is meaningful to individuals with liver disease and the people who support them. Methods: The research adopts a Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology to develop a theory of care experience. Various PI approaches were considered in developing the PI strategy for this qualitative study. Initially, Embedded consultation was the preferred model, which has evolved to include aspects of collaboration and coproduction. A PI group was set up to oversee the project through the national public engagement website VOICE, and reflections on PI from three members of the group are included in this paper to illuminate the PI process. Results: Six individuals with liver disease and three carers from across the United Kingdom are part of an ongoing PI group. Their role includes commenting on the findings of the systematic literature review for this project and contributing to decisions about recruitment, data collection and data analysis. Additionally, they had a direct impact on changing the focus of the research. The PI group will continue involvement until the completion of the project. Conclusion: Successfully embedding PI into doctoral research, as demonstrated in this project, requires commitment, planning and dedication to reciprocal working for the benefit of PI contributors as well as the research. This approach could be adopted by other postgraduate researchers. Patient or Public Contribution: This project is overseen by the PI group, whose contribution is described throughout, including reflections from three PI group members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical account of the representation of immigration in the Brexit corpus-- a collective corpus of 108,452,923 words compiled mostly from blogs, tweets, and daily news related to Brexit debate. The study follows the methodological synergy approach proposed by Baker et al. (2008), a heuristic methodological approach that combines methods of discourse analysis and corpus-assisted statistical tools including keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis. Drawing on this methodological synergy approach, the investigation yields significant findings contextualized within the socio-economic-political context of the European Union (EU) leave referendum to trace how the issue of immigration is represented in the discourses of the Remain and Leave campaigns. The frequency results show that immigration is one of the most salient topics in the Brexit corpus. Concordance analysis of the word "immigrants" and collocation investigation of the word "immigration" reveal opposing attitudes toward immigration in the EU referendum debate. The analysis uncovers negative attitudes toward the uncontrolled flow of immigrants from other EU countries and public concerns about immigrants' negative impacts on wages, education, and health services. Other findings reveal positive attitudes toward immigrants emphasizing their positive contributions to the UK economy. The study concludes with an argument of the significant association between the political and socio-economic ideologies of a particular society and the language communicated in its media.

This paper examines the relationship between school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ideology of intensive mothering through analysis of posts on lockdown learning in an online mothering community. It is argued that although the school closures seemed to constitute an endorsement and normalisation of intensive mothering ideology [Hays (1996). "The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood." New Haven: Yale University Press] by the machinery of government, and increased the pressure upon many women, some mothers resisted these expectations in this online forum. The online community served as a space in which intensive mothering expectations were articulated [Lehner-Mear (2020). "Good Mother, Bad Mother? Maternal Identities and Cyber-Agency in the Primary School Homework Debate." "Gender and Education" 33 (3): 285-305] but also offered an arena for cyber-agency, enabling women to express negative emotions, and normalising the rejection of expert constructions of mothering.

In this paper, we consider educational populism on social media in England and Australia. In both contexts, academics are positioned as a key constituent of an unjust elite with previously voiceless teachers (UK) and students (Australia) framed as the 'just people'. While populism often speaks to nations and nationalism, as 'the people' against an 'unjust elite' or 'other', micropopulism concerns a particular community against an elite. Although educational micropopulism has been catalysed by social media, there is an underlying political project growing from the New Right coalition of economic liberals and social conservatives. New Right 2.0, a contemporary reformulation of New Right, has an agenda that goes beyond promoting free-market hegemony to promoting civic capitalism and exploits a hybridised media environment to set a policy agenda through provoking polarisation. While there are similarities in New Right 2.0 strategies in England and Australia, the key difference is the way in which micropopulism has emerged and how it plays a role in the hybridised media ecology. We develop a theoretical account of the phenomena of educational micropopulism and offer an understanding of contemporary forms of populism that reflect the sub-national as well as international dimensions of micropopulist.

This paper investigates a small-scale project concerned with establishing and sustaining an e-partnership between international students in the UK and engineering students in Palestine. It focuses on the value of peer teaching and learning as an attempt to ensure a greater balance between knowledge and language on a UK pre-sessional English language course, by involving more able peers from a Gazan student body. At the same time, it was hoped that such an arrangement would enable the Gazan students to develop a range of transferable skills, of use in accessing employment at a distance. The article initially outlines the wider context to the Project, discussing the issues related to instituting peer learning/teaching schemes in an HE setting. At its centre though is the presentation and evaluation of a constructive feedback course, whose design and delivery aimed at facilitating the development of skills needed to perform as a peer mentor. It demonstrates students' attitudes towards feedback and the strategies they use when asked to provide their peers with content feedback in an e-partnership. In this way, it provides food for thought to educators interested in developing similar cross-border schemes. Though the potential issues that emerge in terms of First World/Global South imbalance are very considerable, the paper suggests that telecollaboration projects of this nature may help overseas students start interrogating discipline-specific literacies, thus preventing the decontextualisation of the learner, including those unable to pay to study at a prestigious HE institution.

While traditionally the viva voce examination had a central role in student assessment it fell out of favour as higher education expanded. This paper describes the development of a digital video viva examination to promote a more authentic and lower stakes method of assessment for students in their final under-graduate module. The paper presents a case study using a module from pre-registration nursing but the approach could be useful for other practice based and vocational disciplines in the health sciences, social work and business management and law. The paper describes the challenges of developing a truly authentic assessment when faced with academic requirements of the programme. The problems of video assessment include broadband speeds and file sharing are discussed. The authors were able to develop a lower stakes assessment with students on average recording and re-recording their viva submission 3.41 times and rehearsing it 3.67 times.

The emergence of new technologies has changed the way people communicate. Social media have allowed businesses to connect with customers and to market their products more efficiently. However, these platforms also allow customers to share information and opinions with the company and fellow customers, diverting from previous online service encounters which only allowed the interaction between the service provider and the customer. This new digital space of communication is in need of research. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to analyze how customer (dis)affiliation is discursively realized on Facebook. To do so, a corpus of comments published by customers on the Facebook page of a British grocery chain was compiled. The data were analyzed drawing on Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005). The findings show that customers used a varied range of Appraisal resources to evaluate the company and express (dis)affiliation with it and fellow customers.

Social networking is a digital phenomenon embraced by billions worldwide. Use of online social platforms has the potential to generate a number of benefits including to well-being from enhanced social connectedness and social capital accumulation, but is also associated with several negative behaviours and impacts. Employing a life-course perspective, this paper explores social networking use and its relationship with measures of subjective well-being. Large-scale UK panel data from wave 3 (2011-12) and 6 (2014-15) of Understanding Society reveals that social network users are on average younger, aged under 25, but that rising use is reported across the life-course including into old age. Probit, multinomial logistic, and ANCOVA and change-score estimations reveal that membership, and greater use, of social networks is associated with higher levels of overall life satisfaction. However, heavy use of social networking sites has negative impacts, reflected in reductions in subjective well-being. Socio-economic disadvantage may drive these impacts among young (in education), unemployed and economically inactive heavy SNS users., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019.)

Concerns about mental health difficulties in young people, mid-adolescent girls in particular, are on the rise. Many explanations ranging from peer pressure and bullying, to social media and gender inequality, have been offered for the rise in mental health problems. This study utilised data from the Millennium Cohort Study (Wave 6) to examine 14-year-olds' mental health and wellbeing in relation to familial and peer interactions, gender, socio-economic factors and social media use. Across measures of mental health and wellbeing, the findings showed that girls fared much worse than boys, particularly in experiencing negative feelings and low self-concept and life satisfaction and in self-harming. Teenage girls appeared to have become the new 'high risk' group. The findings from this study have implications for young people's mental health and wellbeing especially as seen through the lens of income and gender inequality. Given the current political concerns about young people's mental health, this study is hoped to contribute to an informed debate about individual wellbeing within a broader social milieu.

This paper documents the creation, implementation and analysis of a survey instrument designed to reveal patterns of use and attitudes towards the value of social media by UK teachers. The study was motivated to discover which teachers use social media professionally, how they use it (both personally and professionally) and attitudes to social media as a professional tool (for their students' and their own professional use). The instrument was created from verbal data from two focus group discussions regarding the use of social media in education. Attitude statements were included verbatim when practical. This instrument was placed online and practising teachers invited to complete it (n?=?216). Exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical clustering identified 9 factors from 54 attitude statements and 5 distinct teacher groups. The rich data allowed each group to be carefully defined, providing potentially invaluable information to school leaders when developing social media projects to recognize and accommodate the full range of teacher concerns and experience. The paper also addresses methodological concerns regarding instrument creation, dealing with missing data and the impact of missing data on subsequent analysis.

This paper explores the significance of designing online learning led by the principle of direct and meaningful participant engagement. It considers the notion of kindness as a crucial value contributing to pedagogy and the development of meaningful learning relationships. The paper challenges the "delivery" approach to online learning, suggesting that the flexible and explicit design of engagement opportunities from a sociocultural perspective is a more meaningful and human approach to learning online. The paper clarifies the term Digitally Mediated Learning (DML) to establish connections to important pedagogic positions. The research approach is based around a qualitative professional reflective enquiry. It considers the experiences of learners on a Masters in Education online module and concludes that design, engagement nurturing, community cohesion and kindness can become crucial aspects of successful DML, if institutions learn to value the life projects of others more fully.

Three exemplars are presented of social technologies deployed in educational contexts: wikis; a photo-sharing environment; and a social bookmarking tool. Students were found to engage with the technologies selectively, sometimes rejecting them, in the light of their prior conceptions of education. Some students (a minority in all the studies) were unsympathetic to the educational philosophy underpinning the technology's adoption. The paper demonstrates, through an examination of in-context use, the importance of sociocultural factors in relation to education, and the non-deterministic nature of educational technology. The academic study of technology has increasingly called into question the deterministic views which are so pervasive in popular discourse and among policy-makers. Instead, sociocultural factors play a crucial role in shaping and defining technology and educational technology is no exception, as the examples in the paper show. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications of the examples for the use of social technologies in education.

Business schools have the responsibility of preparing students for work in multicultural organisations and global markets. This paper examines a situated learning experience for undergraduates through a virtual collaboration between a UK university and a Brazilian university. This facilitated remote communication using social media and smart devices, allowing students from both institutions to enhance their cross-cultural management competencies. A qualitative approach was used for the research, drawing on the reflections of the tutors from both institutions and feedback received from students in the UK and Brazil. This paper provides empirical observations regarding the use of this innovative pedagogic approach, generating discussion of the implications for teaching, thus contributing to the literature on international collaborations in cross-cultural management education.

This paper reports the complete process for and findings resulting from an individual-led research project entitled "An Investigation into Perceptions of Facebook-use in Higher Education." The aim of the research project was primarily to investigate current perceptions of using Facebook as a means for interaction between students and lecturers at university level. Findings are based on data collected from two sample populations (students and lecturers) using qualitative research methodology. Tentative findings suggest that students in particular find using Facebook for this purpose to be most appealing and would embrace such initiative in the future, whereas lecturers seem split in opinion on the matter, which is in line with previous research on social media use in higher education.

During the last three years, numerous research papers have been reported which use social media data to explore several issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bibliometric methods in this work are used to analyze 1427 peer-reviewed documents from the last three years extracted from the Web of Science database. The results of this study show that there was high growth in publications in open access journals with an annual rate reaching 19.3% and they also identify the top cited journals and research papers. The thematic analysis of papers shows that research topics related to social media for surveillance and monitoring of public attitudes and perceptions, mental health, misinformation, and fake news are important and well-developed, whereas topics related to distance-learning education with social media are emerging. The results also show that the USA, China, and the UK have published many papers and received a high number of citations because of their strong international collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of social media and its permeation into all aspects of social life has in turn led to its adoption and use by academics in their professional lives. Social media, and social networking sites in particular, require profiles and cultivation of an online identity. An individual may use a range of online platforms, and existing models of online academic identity have only examined a limited number of platforms. This study draws upon previous literature to test a model of academic online identity, across a wider range of platforms and participants. This paper presents the results of a survey-based study, which asked academic about the information shared and perceived audiences at a range of platforms and was completed by 198 participants. The findings support the idea that online academic identity aligns with a continuum between personal and professional concepts of identity. In examining the information shared through different sites, three main identity fragments were identified, which enabled the way that academic identity is refracted through different platforms to be further characterised.

The paper explores how postgraduate students make course selection decisions in the digital era. An exploratory study with seven postgraduate student focus groups (UK, EU and International) gained a detailed insight into this important change. The availability of information, from an increased use of digital media had a significant impact on Higher Education postgraduate decision-making. The results found a circular decision-making approach with evidence of rational and emotional decisions where students do not always commence with a wide choice set. Online forums, Word-of-Mouth/electronic Word-of-Mouth from past/existing students, family and friends are important influencers, as students considered postgraduate study from one month to four years prior to starting a course. We identified 5 different application pattern categories, together with highlighting the importance of evaluating the students' pre-purchase experience during the application process. The research highlights the need for universities to continually engage during the decision-making process and to evaluate pre-purchase experiences.

Students embody themselves within social media platforms and (re)craft their identities within social media platforms. These interfaces enable students to think critically regarding human geographic issues online and raise awareness of their positionalities in using ever-changing technology. This paper analyses how social media research can be developed into pedagogy, in relation to research that uses WhatsApp and Twitter as research methods to explore issues around identity within Eurovision Song Contest fandom. It argues that higher education institutions need to be continuously aware of the increasing need for digital integration into undergraduate geography teaching, fieldwork and pedagogy.

Purpose: As the use of social networking and social media technologies (SNT) has become pandemic amongst young people (Tess, 2013; Falahah and Rosmala, 2012) there has been an increasing drive amongst educators and researchers to explore the ways in which SNT may be utilised within the classroom (Junco, 2012). Whilst there is therefore an increasing amount of literature available in relation to the use of SNT within the classroom it does not appear that there has been sufficient research considering the manner in which SNT results in the development of a complex, invisible and organic social network amongst students. When these networks exist outside of the classroom they may allow informal learning and peer support to occur. The purpose of this paper is to investigate these issues. Additionally this paper seeks to determine if the use of Facebook by students may provide an indication of the likelihood of student success on their course. Design/methodology/approach: This paper utilises an empirical approach to explore the nature of these invisible networks and the degree to which the use of SNT by students outside of the classroom may provide support for student learning in relation to informal learning and social interaction. This study explores the use of Facebook through the use of a case study of one cohort of 90 creative arts students who undertook a one-year Foundation in Art and Design course within a specialist arts college in the UK. This research utilises the technique of social network analysis (SNA) in order to visualise the type of interactions that occur within the online network and the strength of these interactions (Dawson, 2008). Findings: Results demonstrate that within this case study the creative arts student group created a complex and interrelated network of connections through Facebook with some students clearly placed at the centre of the network and others on the periphery. It is also demonstrated that those students who are more central within the network are more likely to remain on the course and achieve their qualification. Originality/value: This paper demonstrates that SNA provides a useful and insightful way in which to visualise what would otherwise be an invisible network of connections made by students outside of the classroom. Furthermore this paper will provide an insight for teachers and researchers into the benefits of the use of SNT within education, which will have practical implications for the future use of SNT in teaching and learning.

This paper examines the temporal and ethical affordances of commercial social media platforms, such as Twitter, as tools for engaging in social research and knowledge exchange. Drawing on activity that took place during the "New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research" seminar series, the article reports on using Twitter and other social media platforms to document, share and archive 'data' from a series of research events. It also experiments with new modes of research writing, using fragments of 'data' from Twitter to distil research knowledge and ideas, whilst also capturing the pace and form of this live method of social documentation and knowledge exchange. Bringing together conversations within digital sociology about how to 'do' time in digital research, with methodological debates among qualitative longitudinal researchers about how to research social and biographical continuity and change, the paper argues that the presentist focus in digital research is far from inevitable. Attending to time in digital media demands that we are alert to questions of authorship, audience and co-production, recognizing the labour of research and the provenance of research knowledge, 'data' and ideas.

Purpose: The paper offers commissioners and practitioners insights into how a gender and culturally sensitive Covid-19 vaccination clinic was set up in a local area that was experiencing lower uptake rates. Design/methodology/approach: This paper seeks to examine and share a city-wide approach to improve vaccine uptake in a large metropolitan city in the UK. Findings: In mitigating inequalities and ensuring underserved populations have access to the Covid-19 vaccine, there is a need to work with communities to develop vaccine clinics that provide a local, convenient and trusted offer that meets the needs of residents. Originality/value: Developing a local Covid vaccine offer that meets cultural needs focusing on an area of low uptake in a large metropolitan city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary changes in the domain of knowledge production are usually seen as posing significant challenges to 'the University'. This paper argues against the framing of the university as an ideal-type, and considers epistemic gains from treating universities as assemblages (e.g. DeLanda, M. 2016. "Assemblage Theory." Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) of different functions, actors and relations. It contrasts this with the concept of 'unbundling', using two recent cases of controversies around academics' engagement on social media to show how, rather than having clearly delineated limits, social entities become 'territorialised' through boundary disputes. The conclusion extends this discussion to the production of knowledge about social objects in general.

This paper explores the impact of social media upon journalism education from two perspectives: both from the pedagogical changes Web 2.0 and mobile devices enable, and within the context of the changes in journalism that social media use are driving. A participatory action research approach was adopted, beginning with the establishment of a lecturer community of practice focusing upon exploring pedagogical change enabled by mobile social media while allowing the project to develop within a series of reflective interventions within the course. These interventions included the use of Twitter, blogging, QR Codes, and Facebook as part of authentic scenarios throughout the course. Drawing on this experience, the paper presents an emergent framework for a response to social media within journalism education, illustrating the positive impact of integrating the use of mobile social media on student engagement, collaboration and contextualising theory within authentic learning environments.

This paper investigates the potential of mobile learning for creativity in and out of school with a focus on media production. In doing so it attempts to move beyond binary choices around the nature of creativity (e.g., individual vs social) and the role of technologies for creative learning. To this end, it presents the literature on how creativity has been conceptualized, especially in education, and provides the theoretical underpinnings that supported the study by referring to the Vygotskyan perspective of creativity as a transformative process of culture and the self. It then moves to a description of three experiences addressing young people and entailing the creation of digital artifacts through mobile devices. It also presents some results, exploring learners' and teachers' perspectives and showing how mobile devices serve as cultural resources that young people use for meaning making and transforming themselves. The paper concludes with some recommendations for future research.

The article offers information on the marketing research in emerging markets conference organized by the Indian Institute of Management in Noida, India on January 10-11, 2014. The event features various papers on topics including emerging economies, innovative research methods and marketing strategy innovations. It provides a preview of various awards from the journal "International Journal of Market Research" including the Young Research Writer, MRS Silver Medal & Innovation in Research Methods and the Collaborative awards. It also offers an overview of the papers within the issue on topics including behavioural economics, positioning strategies for political parties in Great Britain and the relationship between market research and social media.

This paper investigates the implementation and use of an internal organisational blog by several departments in the HR division in a large public sector financial organisation in the UK. This qualitative study adopts a case study approach and examines the experiences of staff using the blog to explore whether it can facilitate organisational learning. The thinking and decisions that informed the pilot study are also investigated. Initial findings indicate that implementing an internal organisational blog does not revolve around the technology itself, but the work required to inform and educate staff about the idea of using a blog for working purposes. This paper has practical implications for the practitioner community with reference to organisational management informing them of issues to consider prior to implementing new technology in team environments. The paper also examines approaches towards maintaining technology initiatives (in this case blogs) once they are up and running. The unique focus of this paper is that it explores blog use from the perspective of individuals who have never used them before as opposed to a department that is already familiar with the technology.