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This chapter will consider curriculum making in lower secondary education in Ireland. Building on the concept of curriculum as a social practice involving multiple actors across different contexts and involving intersecting domains of influence from the supra, to the nano, we characterizethe landscape of lower secondary education in Ireland as an “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003). An assemblage is any number of elements that are engaged in a process of arranging, organising, fitting together and a process of knowledge making. We discuss the emerging properties that have begun to evolve through the inter-connections of the assemblage as they engage in the process of reform by structuring the findings through the lens of how the semiotic, material and social flows worked simultaneously to open up or close down the process. Curriculum ideology, concepts, language and communication are examples of the semiotic flow. The material flow is the content of the domains, such as the actors, the physical structures, documents and artefacts. Relationships, pedagogy, and collaborative practice are involved in the social flow of the assemblage. The research underpinning this chapter mapped the agency of the actors in their capacity to make curriculum as these three flows worked simultaneously during a process of assemblage wide curriculum reform of lower secondary education in Ireland. The analysis and discussion gives rise to a number of insights into processes of curriculum making and into the complexities of system-wide reform.

Comparable worth is a theory that has been hailed as the issue of the 90's. Lee Finney, feminist and labour activist from Contra Costa County, asserted in 1986, “It may not be the issue of the eighties. But it's the issue of the nineties. Comparable worth is here to stay”[2, p.202]. Comparable worth has also been referred to as being overblown [3,p.121] and looney [2, p.52]. With so many diverse comments, an analysis of the current and future status of comparable worth is controversial.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

The findings provide information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

Understanding the relationship between performance and trust in virtual teams is receiving significant attention due to “connected” virtual team contexts becoming more prevalent. This paper reports on new findings relating to the dynamics of trust and performance in virtual team contexts. The study aims to explore the evolution of trust and its mediating role in determining the performance of virtual teams, as well as to investigate if and how performance itself affected trust.

The study is based on a longitudinal quantitative survey of 71 international virtual student teams working in four universities in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia.

In line with swift trust and social norms theory, the authors found that relatively high levels of initial trust did not change over the period of the teams’ projects in general, but in teams where feedback on performance was negative, both trust and trustworthiness declined significantly. Trust had a small mediating effect between group performances in two consecutive measurement points, meaning that past performance had an impact on trust, which in turn impacted the teams’ next performance. However, no mediating effect was present between individual and team performance.

The authors conclude that managing virtual teams should concentrate on team actions and achieving and recognising small quick wins at least as much as dealing with trust, specifically. Negative performance feedback should not deteriorate members’ perception of benevolence and integrity in the team.

The paper distinguishes the dynamics of two trust components and tests new models with these as partial mediators in determining virtual team performance. Importantly, the authors challenge the notion that emotional component of trust, perceived trustworthiness, is less relevant in virtual teams.

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of children in an emergent Irish consumer culture and advertising from 1848-1921. In particular, the significance of children's gender and reading materials in the process of consumption will be evaluated.

An analysis of primary sources, literature and secondary sources substantiates this research.

By evaluating advertisements, magazines, school textbooks and children's literature from the 1848-1921 period, this article argues that Irish children were encouraged to engage with an emergent consumer culture through reading. This article also evaluates the importance of gender in considering children as consumers and it focuses upon a number of critically neglected Victorian, Irish, female authors who discussed the interface between advertising, consumption and the Irish child.

This article is an original contribution to new areas of research about Irish consumerism and advertising history. Substantial archival research has been carried out which appraises the historical significance of advertisements, ephemera and critically neglected children's fiction.