This article focuses on the "Relational Agency Framework" (RAF), an analytical tool developed for an Australian review and evaluation study of an early years' policy initiative. We explore Anne Edward's concepts of "relational expertise", "building common knowledge" and "relational agency" to explore how…

We evaluate the effectiveness in empirical migration research of the respondent-driven sampling (RDS) and the quota sampling with regard to four criteria: quality of the data; sociometric diversity of the sample; geographic coverage of the sample; and cost-effectiveness. We review two surveys of ex-USSR migrants, conducted simultaneously in the…

As participant recruitment and data collection over the Internet have become more common, numerous observers have expressed concern regarding the validity of research conducted in this fashion. One growing method of conducting research over the Internet involves recruiting participants and administering questionnaires over Facebook, the world's…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides an opportunity to produce high quality postsecondary indicators and, as available, publicly report them in ways that inform, engage, and empower communities. As first "required" in 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus law, almost every state has linked its K-12 and…

The intent of this report is to describe survey data that measure legislators' opinions (if any) on a focused set of items about K-12 education topics and educational choice policies, trusted sources of K-12 information, as well as views and attitudes toward their profession, time demands and constraints, and factors in developing priorities and…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are courses offered for free for any students with an internet connection. Many institutions now offer free MOOCs, including prestigious state universities and private schools. MOOCs are differentiated from ordinary online classes in several ways. Some MOOCs may have as many 50,000 students enrolled in a course…

The way in which societies around the globe are governed is changing towards more flexible and networked forms where the government is not the sole and main responsible actor in the organisation, funding, delivery and evaluation of public services. Analysing the new roles of philanthropic organisations, think tanks and business organisations is a…

Networks, such as social networks, are a universal solution for modeling complex problems in real time, especially in the Big Data community. While previous studies have attempted to enhance network processing algorithms, none have paved a path for the development of a persistent storage system. The proposed solution, GraphStore, provides an…

Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, or MMOs, present an increasingly popular digital media experience whereby identity emerges as players contribute materially to play but contributions are governed by affordances and constraints of the game. Unique to this medium is the player's ability to create and control a digital body--an…

In the last couple of years, a new aspect of online social networking has emerged, in which the strength of social network connections is based not on social ties but mutually shared interests. This dissertation studies these "curation-based" online social networks (CBN) and their suitability for the diffusion of electronic word-of-mouth…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the structure of the international migration system has remained stable through the recent turbulent changes in the world system. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology draws on the social network analysis framework--but with some noteworthy limitations stipulated by the specifics of…

For more than a decade, the debate over public school reform has created friction between teachers unions, administrators, school boards, parents, policymakers, and other stakeholders in public education and has fueled disagreements over how to improve the quality of teaching and learning for children. While many factors make consensus elusive…

Due to their high fault-tolerance, ease of installation and scalability to large networks, distributed algorithms have recently gained immense popularity in the sensor networks community, especially in computer vision. Multi-target tracking in a camera network is one of the fundamental problems in this domain. Distributed estimation algorithms…

Trust can be an important component of wireless sensor networks for believability of the produced data and historical value is a crucial asset in deciding trust of the data. A node's trust can change over time after its initial deployment due to various reasons such as energy loss, environmental conditions or exhausting sources. Provenance can…

Purpose: This paper highlights important lessons for co-innovation drawn from three ex-post case study innovation projects implemented within three sub-sectors of the primary industry sector in New Zealand. Design/methodology/approach: The characteristics that fostered co-innovation in each innovation project case study were identified from…