This paper reports on the results of a survey of faculty members at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in Los Angeles, California regarding their understanding of and familiarity with the concept of fake news. With very few studies published on the attitudes of teaching faculty at universities, this study is a unique approach to the issues facing educators, knowledge creators, and information specialists. The paper examines the origins of the term "fake news", the factors contributing to its current prevalence, and proposes a new definition. It also reports upon the attitudes that teaching faculty hold, and how they define fake news within their specific disciplines. Though nearly all surveyed faculty felt fake news was an important topic that impacted them professionally, the researchers also find that faculty across all disciplines and ranks, ages, and gender, hold widely differing conceptions of fake news. This lack of consensus may have future implications for students in particular and higher education in general and are worth exploring further.
The concept of incrementalism has been widely cited over the past three decades, yet it has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical inquiry. As a result, the highly promising incrementalist framework has contributed surprisingly little to improving our understanding of how decision-making processes can better adapt to humans' cognitive limitations. One indicator of the lack of progress is that policy scholars have never made a sustained attempt to explain how practitioners can become better incrementalists. To see whether the concept's original formulation may be obscuring the way to further progress, we summarize and appraise four enduring criticisms of inerementalism: its alleged lack of goal orientation, conservatism, limited range of applicability, and negative stance toward analysis. While questioning the validity of the critics' claims, we nevertheless propose a way to reframe the incrementalist endeavor, with the intention of stimulating both its critics and defenders to get on with the task of learning more about how individuals, organizations, and societies "can proceed relatively intelligently despite the fact that humans rarely have a good understanding of complex social problems and policy options.The concept of incrementalism, developed by Charles E. Lindblom, has been one of the most widely cited ideas in the policy sciences. In the three decades since its inception, however, the concept has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical researchJ Curiously, it has failed to stimulate scholars either 'to articulate other strategies that avoid the impossible aspiration to synopsis [or] to give a more precise formulation to disjointed incrementalism as one such strategy' (Lindblom, 1979: 525). Nor is it clear that incrementalist ideas have been very helpful to practitioners.The fame achieved by incrementalism suggests that the concept captures important elements in political and organizational life; but its deeper implications apparently have not been understood well enough for other scholars to actively work with it. We conjecture that the unfulfilled promise of incrementalism could be due in part to the way the concept was originally framed, and that it may be possible to refocus the concept to make it more generative for future research on policy making.Toward that end, this paper briefly summarizes the main facets of the concept of incrementalism, reviews the primary criticisms advanced against the decision strategy, and appraises the validity of the criticisms, z We find that the criticisms of incrementalism by and large are invalid. But because the misunderstandings are widespread and enduring, and because the failure to develop this line of scholarship is so striking, we suggest that it makes sense to
This article reports on a study of error rates found in the metadata records of texts scanned by the Google Books digitization project. A review of the author, title, publisher, and publication year metadata elements for 400 randomly selected Google Books records was undertaken. The results show 36% of sampled books in the digitization project contained metadata errors. This error rate is higher than one would expect to find in a typical library online catalog.
Purpose – This study aims to examine Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Open Journal Systems (OJS) for its overall web accessibility and compliance with the Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility and Compliance Act, also known as Section 508. Design/methodology/approach – Twenty-one individual web pages in the CSUN test instance of PKP’s OJS version 2.4.0 used in three back-end journal development user roles were examined using three web-accessibility tools (WAVE, Fangs, Functional Accessibility Evaluator). Errors in accessibility were then logged and mapped to specific Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) criteria. Findings – In all, 202 accessibility errors were reported across the 21 OJS pages selected for testing. Because of this, the OJS cannot be efficiently utilized by assistive technologies and therefore does not pass the minimal level of acceptability as described in the WCAG 2.0. However, the authors found that the types of errors reported in this study could be simply and effectively remedied. Research limitations/implications – Further studies will need to corroborate, on a larger scale, the problems of accessibility found in the specific pages. Only three user roles were examined; other roles will need to be analyzed for their own problems with accessibility. Finally, although specific errors were noted, most can be easily fixed. Practical implications – There is an important need for accessible software design. In the case of CSUN, one of the campus partners will be better served by improving the web accessibility of the authors’ online open access journals. Originality/value – Although many studies and analyses of Section 508 compliance of front-facing web resources have been conducted, very few appear to address the back-end of such tools. This is the first to examine what problems in accessibility journal users with disabilities might encounter as OJS system administrators, journal managers or journal editors.
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