Student perspectives on mentoring in a science outreach project

Abstract

The focus of this paper is an examination of mentorship relationships developed as a result of six students’ participation in a local community science centre sponsored through an NSERC/CRYSTAL project. Each year, a number of students participate in after‐school activities sponsored by the community science centre. Much of this work involves a one‐to‐one approach, with a middle years or high school student working with a professor partner. The professor acts as a mentor to the student, facilitating learning in a manner not always feasible within a school setting with large class sizes. For some students this research may be the basis of a science fair project; for others if is simply a study based on individual interest. Mentored students were interviewed about the nature of that mentorship, with the goal of describing the experience from the students’ perspective. Questions focused on the student's experience of working with a mentor, including how the mentorship relationship was formed, what the importance of the voluntary nature of mentoring was, what the benefits and challenges of working with a mentor were, how the mentorship relationship affected the level of content knowledge the student gained, and what effect the mentoring relationship had on the student's continuing interest in science. The mentorship program offers students the opportunity to work within a developing community of practice.     

The influence of ethnicity on organizational commitment and merit pay of IT workers: the role of leader support

Projections of looming shortages in the supply of skilled IT workers, along with high employee replacement costs, make employee attraction, retention and support a pressing concern for organizations. One potential remedy for these shortages is to focus more attention on historically underrepresented groups. We explore ways organizations can support ethnic minority IT professionals to enhance their career success. Integrating affective, cognitive and social perspectives through affective events theory and social exchange theory, our objective is to explore the implications of ethnic minority status for the relationship between leader support (i.e., mentoring and leader–member exchange (LMX)) and subjective and objective indicators of career success (i.e., organizational commitment and merit pay) among IT workers. To test the model, we conducted a field study of 289 IT workers in a Fortune 500 company. Our results showed that LMX influenced organizational commitment for ethnic minorities, while career mentoring and LMX influenced organizational commitment for majorities. Psychosocial mentoring influenced merit pay for ethnic minorities, while neither LMX nor mentoring influenced merit pay for majorities. Our study contributes to the literature on IT personnel issues by exploring how and why these leader support mechanisms enhance organizational commitment and merit pay for IT workers. Moreover, we demonstrate that ethnicity is an important consideration for researchers studying organizational commitment, merit pay, mentoring and LMX. Our findings suggest that managers can boost organizational commitment among IT workers by focusing on LMX and career mentoring. Moreover, they may want to place particular emphasis on psychosocial mentoring and interventions to enhance LMX for their ethnic minority IT workers.     

NETWORKING WITH A HUMAN FACE Mentoring as a Career Strategy

Mentoring has been around for ages, often masquerading as the management club or the fast track. Among successful business unit managers, mentoring is a well-understood practice, and it's a career development strategy today's IS professional would be wise to consider.     

NETWORKING WITH A HUMAN FACE Mentoring as a Career Strategy

Abstract

Mentoring has been around for ages, often masquerading as the management club or the fast track. Among successful business unit managers, mentoring is a well-understood practice, and it's a career development strategy today's IS professional would be wise to consider.     

Forming relationship commitments to online communities: The role of social motivations

Although administrators of online communities (OCs) may focus on improving their OCs through upgrading technology and enhancing the usability of their OCs to attract additional users, the level of OC participation may be associated with social motives. The purpose of this study is to understand how social motivations (that is, network externalities and social norms) affect members committed to OCs. This study tests the hypotheses on data collected from 396 undergraduate students. Data analyses show that network externalities and social norms directly influence social interaction ties, which subsequently results in commitment toward a community. Social norms also directly influence relationship commitments to a community. The results provide insights into how social motivations lead to commitment to an OC, reminding OC administrators to encourage member commitment to the OC from the perspective of social motivations.     

Automating map production of the 1981 Census data for Brighton and Hove,England

In 1981 a full census was held in England and Wales. This paper describes how the census data was mapped for two adjacent urban areas in south east England, namely Brighton and Hove. The techniques used to transform nearly 3.2 million numbers relating to the 580 statistical areas used in the census for our area of study, into a coherent set of choropleth shaded maps and using a decile class system, are discussed and demonstrated.     

LIBRARIES,SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND DISTANCE LEARNERS: BLOG IT,TAG IT,SHARE IT!

This paper describes a recent project funded by the University of London to explore how social software or Web 2.0 technologies can enhance the use of libraries by distance learners. LASSIE (Libraries And Social Software In Education) involves a team of librarians, learning technologists and archivists. The project first conducted an extensive literature review, which is available online. The literature review provides an overview of key social software and explores the current implementation of these tools by libraries. It also considers the key issues in supporting distance learners’ use of libraries and whether social software might provide solutions. The literature review was followed by several case studies to explore specific types of social software in practice. These included the use of social bookmarking for sharing resources, social software and online reading lists, blogging in the library community, the use of social networking sites and podcasting for information literacy support. LASSIE will be completed in December 2007 and a final report with results from the case studies and an updated literature review will be made available from the project website. One of the successes of the project has been to establish a project blog, which provides the project team with an opportunity to reflect on progress, but also to gather opinions from others in the field.     

Is social capital effective for online learning?

The popularity of online social networking has heightened academic interest in social capital. However, few studies have investigated the role of social capital in online learning. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of data from online MIS classes, we find that online learning facilitates social capital formation mostly in terms of the dimensions of community, trust, collective action and cooperation, communication, and sociability and inclusion, depending on the media-based human interaction forms of online learning employed. Structural equation modeling confirms a causal effect of social capital on student satisfaction. Social capital is also found to positively affect learning outcomes as measured by students’ group project scores but not class scores. The study's contribution to the literature and practice are discussed.     

Mentoring object-oriented projects

In mentoring, an experienced person (the mentor) undertakes to guide a less experienced person (the “mentee”) in the same or similar field. Mentoring can effectively bring an organization up to speed with new technology. What loosely distinguishes mentoring from training is that the latter is something often associated with a classroom. With mentoring, the learning happens on the job: a mentor educates by continuously hand-holding the mentee on the latter's tasks. Of course, in any real situation the education process must involve a judicious and inseparable mix of training and mentoring, with the same person often performing both roles. You can apply mentoring to people in your organization or even in a customer organization; the article focuses on the former. Mentors are particularly crucial for an organization learning object orientation. The author presents lessons learned from his experiences as a mentor on object oriented application development projects. He attempts to generalize his observations and present them as succinct, shop-usable advice, not just for the mentor but for the mentee as well     

E-Mentoring for All

Electronic mentoring appears to have great potential for youth with special needs since it is an accessible communication medium that provides an opportunity to exchange practical information and support and to experience an accepting relationship with less prejudice. To date, few electronic mentoring intervention programs have been designed especially to support the psychological needs of youth with special needs. This paper presents the results of a study that evaluated an electronic mentoring intervention program designed to provide social and emotional support for protégés with disabilities by mentors who also have disabilities. Using a primarily qualitative research design, the study characterized the electronic mentoring process and its contributions to this population. The findings provided support for the potential of electronic mentoring for personal development and empowerment of youth with special needs. Furthermore, the findings supported the usability and utility of the e-mentoring intervention based on a conceptual framework that characterized an electronic support process for people with special needs. Implications for implementing feasible electronic mentoring programs are discussed.     

Looking at both sides of relationship dynamics in virtual communities: A social exchange theoretical lens

This study draws on social exchange theory to investigate the relationship dynamics of the member–community dyad in virtual community settings. Using a longitudinal design and multiple measurement sources, the findings indicate that social and task communication styles have unique effects on members’ community commitment velocity, which in turn influences member gratitude and entitlement behaviors. A moderated path analysis demonstrates that the effects of social and task communication styles on community commitment velocity are both positively moderated by attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. It also reveals that members’ level of popularity augments the influence of community commitment velocity on member entitlement behavior.     

Viewpoint: effectiveness of focused mentoring to improve requirements engineering industrial practice

Requirements engineering practice in industry is often encumbered by practical limits of time, resource, and attention. In our environment, most requirements authors have had no formal training in the practice, yet are expected to produce high-quality specifications that drive subsequent work. Authors are often unaware of different techniques for requirements specification and are rarely equipped to navigate all of the techniques and tools that are potentially available to them, to the extent that they are even aware of the various options. A small cadre of coaches, providing focused, just-in-time mentoring of authors in a handful of basic techniques can increase the proficiency of these authors, who in turn produce higher-quality requirements specifications. From this foundation, authors may be able to later adopt additional techniques to further improve the quality and maturity of their work, thus resulting in improved work products built on the basis of those specifications.     

Using Social Visualization to Motivate Social Production

In this paper we argue that social visualization can motivate contributors to social production projects, such as Wikipedia and open source development. As evidence, we present CodeSaw, a social visualization of open source software development that we studied with real open source communities. CodeSaw mines open source archives to visualize group dynamics that currently lie buried in textual databases. Furthermore, CodeSaw becomes an active social space itself by supporting comments directly inside the visualization. To demonstrate CodeSaw, we apply it to a popular open source project, showing how the visualization reveals group dynamics and individual roles. The paper concludes by presenting evidence that CodeSaw, and social visualization more generally, can motivate contributors to social production projects if the visualization leaves the laboratory and makes it to the community visualized.      

Situated Innovation of e-Social Science: Integrating Infrastructure, Collaboration, and Knowledge in Developing e-Social Science

This article explores the relationships between academic knowledge and the practice of research in the construction of new computer-supported research tools for e-social science. The article draws on a U.K. e-social science pilot demonstrator project, "Collaborative Analysis of Offenders' Personal and Area-based Social Exclusion," that explores the relative impact of individual and neighborhood effects on geographical crime patterns. Three main dimensions of e-social science are addressed by the project: (1) identification of new social research foci, (2) adapting research processes, and (3) developing Grid-related research tools. The integration of these dimensions shows that research-driven and user-led development of computer-mediated research using the Grid can produce relevant and innovative tools for the social sciences.     

Social fMRI: Investigating and shaping social mechanisms in the real world

We introduce the Friends and Family study, a longitudinal living laboratory in a residential community. In this study, we employ a ubiquitous computing approach, Social Functional Mechanism-design and Relationship Imaging, or Social fMRI, that combines extremely rich data collection with the ability to conduct targeted experimental interventions with study populations. We present our mobile-phone-based social and behavioral sensing system, deployed in the wild for over 15 months. Finally, we present three investigations performed during the study, looking into the connection between individuals’ social behavior and their financial status, network effects in decision making, and a novel intervention aimed at increasing physical activity in the subject population. Results demonstrate the value of social factors for choice, motivation, and adherence, and enable quantifying the contribution of different incentive mechanisms.     

Delineating the dimensions of social support on social networking sites and their effects: A comparative model

Social networking sites (SNSs) allow users to connect with each other by overcoming geographical and temporal boundaries and thus empower people to search for social support from online. Social support has been considered a key social value that online users can obtain from SNSs. However, few studies have systematically investigated social support in such a context. Motivated to address this gap, we have developed an advanced and theoretical framework to delineate social support on SNSs by clearly revealing the dimensions of online social support on SNSs and examining their effects on users' commitment and SNS continuance. Further, we introduce gender as a key moderator and explain in theory how differently men and women perceive the importance of the dimensions in evaluating online social support over SNSs. Our research results indicate that the identified three dimensions (informational support, emotional support, and network management) are important components of the online social support on SNSs, which is positively associated with commitment and continuance. In addition, the weight of each dimension in the evaluation of online social support varies by gender. This study is among the very first to explore online social support in the context of SNS and its effects, and has rich theoretical and practical implications.     

How social media usage affects employees’ job satisfaction and turnover intention: An empirical study in China

Social media are frequently used in enterprises for both work-related and non-work-related (social) purposes. Drawing on the organizational commitment theory, we developed a research model to explore how different purposes of social media usage affect employees’ job satisfaction and turnover intention in the Chinese context. Online and offline surveys were conducted in China, generating 298 valid responses for analysis. The results suggest that the following: (1) work-related and social-related social media usage positively affects employees’ organizational commitment through their organizational engagement; (2) social media usage improves job satisfaction and reduces employees’ turnover intention through improving their engagement and organizational commitment; and (3) in the process of social media usage influencing employees’ job satisfaction and turnover intention, employees of different genders show significant differences.     

融合拓扑势的社交网络层次化社区发现算法

社交网络的社区结构呈现层次性。针对传统凝聚式层次化社区发现算法效率不高以及生成的层次谱图复杂的问题，提出一种融合拓扑势的层次化社区发现算法，利用拓扑势场呈现的自然峰谷结构揭示社交网络社区间的层次关系。该算法搜索局部极大势值节点，并根据局部极大势值节点完成社区的初始划分；根据局部极大势值节点间的距离对初始社区进行迭代合并，直到所有社区被合并为一个社区。在真实社交网络和人工网络上的实验结果表明，该算法能够高效地发现社区的层次结构，生成的层次谱图简单直观。     

The effectiveness of a one-year online mentoring program for girls in STEM

Although the performance of girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is continually improving and is no longer below that of boys in most domains, girls' interests in STEM and participation rates are still too low. Online mentoring may help ameliorate this situation. To test this assumption, a one-year personal mentoring program for eleven to eighteen-year-old female college-preparatory students was evaluated. Mentee and mentor communicate with one another and with other program participants via email, online chat, and forums. To measure program effectiveness, we randomly assigned participants (N = 312) to either a treatment group (N = 208) or a waiting-list control group (N = 104). We collected questionnaire data at three points in time. In comparison to the waiting-list group, the treatment-group participants showed greater levels of desirable short-term and long-term developments. Our findings indicate various advantages for online mentoring for promoting girls' interests in STEM.