Although the pedagogical advantages of online interactive learning are well known, much needs to be done in instructional design of applicable collaborative learning tasks that motivate sustained student participation and interaction. This study investigates the factors that encourage student interaction and collaboration in both process and product oriented computer mediated communication (CMC...

Group work has long been an effective approach to solving organizational problems and making high quality management decisions. This has been particularly true for information systems projects. This research effort attempts to define the constructs for group interaction as it pertains to small groups (i.e. 3-7 members). The subjects were students who were placed into groups and then assigned a ...

For a document, cohesiveness is a measure of how closely the concepts in it are related to each other. Previous studies in linguistics have shown that a high quality document is likely to be very cohesive. Similarly, since a web page is a type of document, a high quality web page is expected to be very cohesive as well. Using an ontology constructed from the Yahoo! directory and the web pages l...

The concept of ‘fear of crime’ has been the subject of substantive international interest and debate since the 1960s.1 This attention was particularly motivated by the recognition that it is a salient social problem in its own right, with a notable share of citizens across many countries expressing worry about crime.2 It further reflects concern with the complex and detrimental effects that fea...

The paper discusses recent developments of German fiscal federalism—especially the Länderfinanzausgleich, i.e. Germany’s unique system of horizontal equalization. A ruling by the Constitutional Court has cracked the status quo, and the parties involved (federation and states) have begun a process of bargaining on a new equalization system. This process is assessed against the background of rece...

The study is about the identity construction of Italian Extreme Right groups in different Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) environments. Rhetoric Psychology and Critical Discourse Analysis joint approaches are used to analyse two websites and two newsgroups of extreme right. The results confirm Billig’s hypothesis that such groups play a dual communication strategy in Computer Mediated Com...

Purpose – According to one influential set of arguments, the privatization of public pensions has been informed by neoliberalism, and has thus been an integral element of a broader program of welfare retrenchment, which is inconsistent with social cohesion. The paper aims to take issue with this negative characterization of pensions privatization. Design/methodology/approach – The argument is i...

SETH KAPLAN ABSTRACT Seth Kaplan describes how understanding the relationship between identities, institutions, social cohesion, and state legitimacy is vital to spurring economic and political development in fragile states. The international community needs to stop imposing inflexible formulas for development and to start helping weak countries build on their own people’s capacities for good g...

It has been claimed that conversations is the basic form of social organization (cf.Schegloff (1986) and it seems correct to say that conversation, or with a more general term dialogue (from the Greek dia logos through words), exhibits characteristics which are basic to social organization. It coordinates information and mutual understanding and it involves building social cohesion. This paper ...

In this paper we develop an artificial world model to investigate how environmental conditions affect opportunities for learning. We model grouping entities that learn what to eat in a 2D environment. We study diet development and focus on the social consequences of individual learning in relation to different environmental conditions. We find that homogeneous and patchy environments have oppos...