This study examines how journalists and technologists are re-imagining the construction of networked, dynamic spaces for online news discussion through a qualitative study of 126 idea submissions to a popular news innovation contest. We consider these submissions in the light of the concept of the public sphere, with a specific focus on how these submissions might address shortcomings identifie...

Polycentric governance systems feature numerous decision-making venues (“forums”) where policy actors repeatedly interact to address a subset of problems. Previous studies find that forums dedicate greater time and cognitive resources tend be perceived as more effective. Drawing on behavioral game theory the Ecology Games, we argue improvements afforded any one forum vis-à-vis intensive partici...

The cell phone is one of the potential Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in agricultural development especially in developing countries like Bangladesh. Thus, this paper deals with the farmers’ communication with the agricultural extension agents using mobile phone. The study was conducted in Mymensingh District in Bangladesh. Data were collected from a sample of 110 farmers while b...

The purpose of research was analyzing educational needs of corn farmer's regarding biological control Bracon parasitoid of corn Caradrina in Dezful Township, Khouzestan province, Iran. The method of research was correlative descriptive. A random sample of Dezful township corn farmers of Khouzestan province, Iran (n=350) were selected for participation in the study. A questionnaire was developed...

Discussion boards provide instructors a unique opportunity to extend their classrooms into cyberspace. This article offers some observations about student behavior in these online forums and practical suggestions for the instructor, including the creation of rules and structure for the online environment, factors influencing student participation, and strategies for facilitating discussion. Cri...

This paper describes QCRI’s participation in SemEval-2015 Task 3 “Answer Selection in Community Question Answering”, which targeted real-life Web forums, and was offered in both Arabic and English. We apply a supervised machine learning approach considering a manifold of features including among others word n-grams, text similarity, sentiment analysis, the presence of specific words, and the co...

This research identifies the gratifications sought by the Net-generation when producing user-generated content (UGC) on the internet. Members of the Net-generation want to vent negative feelings, show affection to their friends and relatives, be involved in others’ lives, and fulfill their need to be recognized. These gratifications, to a large degree, were found to be significantly associated ...

Democratic participation has increasingly become a natural resource management policy approach for governments around the world. Yet, its effective application across stakeholder groups remains a challenge. With original survey data from Mexico, a country with extensive common property forestland, we assess the effect of incorporating both local representation and outside technical expertise on...

This study investigates the effectiveness of different online language teaching practices by comparing participation four groups learners and teachers in two tasks asynchronous discussion forums. The are carried out context an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) B2 course at Catalan university. Teacher posts to forums analysed qualitatively with aim identifying types teacher posts; we then run ...