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The purpose of this paper is to review the findings from a study of teacher professional learning networks in Kenya. Specific areas of focus included network participation, network activities, network leadership, and professional impact on network members and their schools.

The research was grounded in the literature on education networks and teacher learning. The research employed a qualitative design and was implemented from September 2015–March 2017, including three two-week field trips to Kenya. Data included network records, 83 personal interviews, 4 focus group interviews, 19 observations of network meetings, and classroom observation of network and non-network teachers in 12 schools.

Network participation had positive effects on teachers’ sense of professionalism and commitment to teaching and on their attitudes toward ongoing professional learning and improvement in student learning. Teachers also highlighted network benefits for learning to use new teaching strategies and materials, responding to student misbehavior and misunderstanding, and lesson preparation.

Research constraints did not permit longitudinal investigation of network activities and outcomes.

The paper identifies challenges and potential focuses for strengthening the learning potential of network activities, network leadership, and the links between network activity and school improvement.

Prior research has investigated education networks mostly in North American and similar high income settings. This paper highlights the benefits and challenges for networks as a strategy for continuous teacher development in a low income low resource capacity context.

Consumers who share their suggestions with firms contribute valuable knowledge and both exhibit and reinforce positive customer engagement. Yet, the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm customer suggestion sharing remain understudied. This study aims to investigate how potential self, other customer and firm benefits motivate consumer suggestion sharing.

A critical incident pretest explores the domain and establishes ecological validity. Two scenario-based experimental studies test the proposed relationships in distinct service contexts.

Results support a prosocial (helpful) view of suggestion sharing – potential benefits to other customers motivate suggestion sharing. Potential benefits for the firm play two roles, namely, they indirectly motivate suggestion sharing by increasing consumers’ perceived outcome expectancy, illustrating a pragmatic mechanism, and they directly motivate suggestion sharing when service quality is high, illustrating a conditional, reciprocity-driven mechanism. When service quality is low, consumers are less likely to share firm-benefitting suggestions and more likely to share non-beneficial suggestions, highlighting a potential low service quality “trap” in which firms can become stuck.

Future research is needed to study the antecedents of attitude toward suggestion sharing and the effect of relationship strength on suggestion sharing.

Managerially, multiple paths are identified by which firms can motivate suggestion sharing. The low-service quality “trap” indicates that low-service quality firms should not rely on, and should perhaps even ignore, customer suggestions as a tool for improving their offerings.

By experimentally investigating the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm consumer suggestion sharing, this paper fills a gap in extant research and provides a foundation upon which future suggestion sharing research can build.

This paper aims to explore consumer behaviour on the popular anonymous social networking site (SNS) Yik Yak. It examines the reasons behind the turn to anonymous social networking and also considers the ways in which anonymity impacts consumers’ self-performances on SNS.

The study used a netnographic approach to explore Yik Yak across eight universities in Ireland and the UK. Data are based on observation and participation on the app. Screenshots on smart phones were the central method used to collect data. Data also included 12 in-depth interviews.

Young consumers are becoming fatigued by the negative effects of self-presentation on many SNS. By enabling consumers to engage in what they consider to be more authentic modes of being and interaction, Yik Yak provides respite from these pressures. Through the structures of its design, Yik Yak enables consumers to realise self-authentication in anonymised self-performances that engender a sense of virtue and social connection.

This research highlights the potential value of anonymous SNS in fostering supportive dialogue, concerning mental health amongst post-millennials.

By invoking a performative lens, this paper extends a novel theoretical approach to understandings of identity formation within consumer research. By highlighting anonymity as a dynamic process of socio-material enactments, the study reveals how consumers’ self-performances are brought into effect through the citation of various discursive arrangements, which promulgate distinct understandings of authenticity.

The purpose of this paper is to present the author's commentary on the special issue of Journal of Educational Administration entitled “Systemwide reform: examining districts under pressure”.

The major thesis of this commentary and reflection on the preceding papers is that there is a need to recognize that “school districts” as known in the USA are examples of a more general phenomenon of intermediary organizational entities in education systems in North America and elsewhere in the world and that there is a need to problematize, not take for granted, the form, purpose, and influence of these mediating layers of the school system on the quality and improvement of schools, and on the implementation of government policies that are intended to regulate and support education in schools.

This issue of the Journal of Educational Administration presents a series of papers that highlight different aspects and contemporary trends in school district practice and research – organizational characteristics associated with district effectiveness (see Trujillo this issue), how districts are responding to political and public demands for accountability (see Hamilton et al., this issue), the invention of school district authorities as portfolio managers of diverse school provider systems (see Marsh et al., this issue), and how social communication networks linking school and district staff interface with the use of evidence to support school improvement (see Finnigan and Daly, as well as Wohlstetter and Smith this issue).

The simple thesis of this commentary is to argue that school districts function as an intermediate level of education governance, management, and support within national and state education systems, and that current research and discussion on the school district role in improving and sustaining the quality of education would be strengthened by broadening the scope of research and discussion to alternative kinds of intermediate level governance and support systems that exist in North America and in other regions of the world.

The purpose of this paper is to qualitatively describe an attempt to enhance curriculum design and delivery processes in universities through the development and introduction of new information systems and procedures.

The author examines the experiences of five out of the total 27 institutions involved in the UK JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programme as they attempted to implement campus-wide changes.

Common themes that emerged across all five projects were the interconnectedness of university systems, proliferation of alternative “feral” systems, a tendency for project remits to drift, resistance from other parts of the institution, planning imperatives, staff turnover and dependency failures. Conclusions are that cultural change underpins effective innovation and that cultural change is harder than technical innovation.

Change is best achieved through participatory, campus-wide approaches, although a “submarine” strategy may be necessary to deflect opposition. Stakeholders should be kept informed about benefits to them and it is important for projects to be responsive and adaptive and to recognize that participatory approaches may be institutionally risky. The paper concludes with practical recommendations for achieving lasting large-scale change in the higher education environment.

The JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programme was arguably the largest single co-ordinated Information and Communication Technology-based change management programme yet seen in the UK and the findings of this study provide insights into common barriers to effective change in universities and how to overcome them.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and demonstrate the relevance of a new conceptual framework for leading and managing the development of learning and teaching to e.learning strategy development.

After reviewing and discussing the research literature on e.learning in higher education institutions from 2000 to 2010 to identify the issues associated with leading and managing the development, implementation and evaluation of e.learning, the paper describes and makes an argument for how a new conceptual framework for leading and managing the development of learning and teaching in higher education, developed and reported elsewhere (Marshall et al.), might be used to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of e.learning strategy.

While subject to the limitations of all conceptual/analytical frameworks, it is argued that this new conceptual framework is able to first alert those with the responsibility for the development of e.learning to many of the critical issues identified in the research literature as being associated with its development, implementation and evaluation, and second, assist in conducting and developing the multi‐dimensional SWOT analyses and strategies necessary to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of e.learning.

This is the first paper to demonstrate the applicability of Marshall et al.'s new conceptual framework for leading and managing the development of learning and teaching to the development, implementation and evaluation of e.learning strategy.

The purpose of this chapter is to review how well walking interventions have increased and sustained walking, and to provide suggestions for improving future walking interventions. A scoping review was conducted of walking interventions for adults that emphasised walking as a primary intervention strategy and/or included a walking outcome measure. Interventions conducted at the individual, community, and policy levels between 1990 and 2015 were included, with greater emphasis on recent interventions. Walking tends to increase early in interventions and then gradually declines. Results suggest that increased walking, and environmental-change activities to support walking are more likely to be sustained when they are immediately followed by greater economic benefits/time-savings, social approval, and/or physical/emotional well-being. Adaptive interventions that adjust intervention procedures to match dynamically changing environmental circumstances also hold promise for sustaining increased walking. Interventions that incorporate automated technology, durable built environment changes, and civic engagement, may increase cost-efficiency. Variations in outcome measures, study duration, seasons, participant characteristics, and possible measurement reactivity preclude causal inferences about the differential effectiveness of specific intervention procedures for increasing and sustaining walking. This review synthesises the effects of diverse walking interventions on increasing and sustaining walking over a 25-year period. Suggestions are provided to guide future development of more effective, sustainable walking interventions at the population level.

This paper examines the gender differences of expenditure distribution within the last decade in Spain. In particular, the Lorenz dominance is tested using expenditure distributions as approximated by the Dagum model. The sensitivity of the results to some conceptual choices, such as the equivalence scale or the gender reference, is also analysed.

This paper addresses a gap in the analysis of the dynamic and challenging relationship between libraries, Web 2.0 and young adults, suggesting the relevance of a critical approach.

This paper represents an exploratory literature review with the objective of identifying a possible gap in the way the library and information science (LIS) community is addressing the concept of Web 2.0.

Findings indicate that the research produced in other fields, such as communication or computer science; the way young adults interrelate with new technologies; and the need for collaboration between practitioners and researchers justify and support the use of a critical perspective to analyze the suggested topic.

The call for a critical approach to technology is certainly not a novel suggestion in the LIS scholarship; however, its resurgence is extremely relevant for the LIS field because of the significant role that technology is playing in the daily life of the library and its users.