1,720,959 research outputs found
Geography learners’ awareness and lived experiences of their local environment: A case of Namibia
Full text linkThis paper examines the awareness and lived experiences of 28 secondary-level school learners in Namibia to explore their observations and experiences in their local environments. It investigates the factors influencing their ability and/or willingness to make observations. The research employed open-ended, semi-structured interviews and drawings to collect data from Grade 11 learners in five different locations. The data was analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis and the theme related to exposure to environments is explored. The study draws on theories of place and informal learning, highlighting the role of everyday experiences in shaping individuals’ understanding of their surroundings. All the participants showed that they are aware of what makes the environment in which they live different to others by describing the geographical concepts present in their local environment. However, the findings show that participants’ ability or willingness to make observations can be hindered or reduced by factors such as a lack of interest and familiarity with their local environment and a preoccupied mind. The study highlights the value of understanding learners’ perspectives from their own lifeworlds and sheds light on the contribution of the local environment to geographical awareness
Using Flipgrid for teaching practice: Pre-service student teachers’ reflections and lessons learnt
Full text linkOwing to the COVID-19 pandemic, South African universities have, like other universities worldwide, been faced with the transition from face-to-face classes to online teaching. Teaching practice (TP) coordinators (university lecturers responsible for the work-integrated learning component of teacher training programmes) found themselves having to improvise and innovate to meet this sudden pedagogical change by revisiting conventional TP models and approaches and finding new ways to give student teachers valid and constructive alternatives to face-to-face classes when these were suspended (Carrillo and Flores, 2020; Hojeij and Baroudi, 2021; Sepulveda-Escobar and Morrison, 2020). From the perspective of pre-service student teachers at a South African university, this case study reviews the effectiveness of ‘Flipgrid’, a social-learning video platform, which was successfully integrated into a third-year TP module. One of its greatest strengths proves to be its ability to provide pre-service student teachers with the opportunity to gain confidence in their teaching abilities
The value of using Flip in teaching practice: pre-service teachers’ experiences
Full text linkJournal article published in African Perspectives of Research in Teaching and Learning Journal Issue 1, Volume 9, 2025Studies have shown that Flip (previously known as Flipgrid) positively affects teaching and learning in the education sphere. This paper aims to articulate the value of Flip in the context of teaching practice. Over three weeks, pre-service teachers in their third year of study at university were required to submit videos of their lesson presentations. During this time, more than 3700 video submissions were made. As part of their final portfolio, the pre-service teachers reflected on two prompts: what they enjoyed and what they did not enjoy about submitting the videos. These reflections were subsequently analysed. The findings indicate that students respond positively to the use of Flip, which enhances their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge. The results further reveal that Flip improves time management skills, equips students to teach in an online environment, and fosters collaboration with peers to refine lesson quality. The reflections presented in this paper provide insights into pre-service teachers’ experiences with Flip and offer suggestions for improving its use as a virtual classroom tool. The authors recommend that faculties of education globally incorporate video recording into teaching practice to strengthen pre-service teachers’ teaching capabilities
Namibian secondary-level school learners’ lived experiences of Physical Geography
Full text linkIn Namibian schools, structured and organised outdoor learning opportunities are not accessible to everyone or equally distributed. All Namibian learners do, however, have access to lived experiences outside of school and are exposed to different everyday environments. Learners’ lived experiences are not always recognised by teachers as a potential and relevant geographical resource for teaching and learning. The aim of this research was to analyse the reported geographical lived experiences of secondary school learners from Namibia to establish the role of their lived experiences in the acquisition of geographical consciousness. In total, 28 Grade 11 learners from five Namibian government secondary schools in Otavi, Rundu, Keetmanshoop, Walvis Bay and Windhoek were involved in the research. Attention was paid to whether and how exposure to lived experiences led to the visualisation and awareness of geographical place, space, concepts, and processes. The findings revealed that each participant’s lived experiences and the interpretations of their lived experiences are unique
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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