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The purpose of this paper is to consider some possible reasons for the relatively high rate in Wales of children looked after by local authorities.

Selected potential explanations for Wales having higher rates were tested against aggregate data from published 2021 Government statistics. Wales was compared with England and English regions for area deprivation, local authority spending, placements at home and kinship foster care. Descriptive statistics were produced, and linear regression was used where appropriate.

Wales has higher overall children looked-after rates and a bigger recent increase in these than any English region. Deprivation in Wales was higher than in most English regions. However, a smaller percentage of Welsh variation in local authority looked-after rates was explained by deprivation than was the case for England. Spending on preventative services has increased in recent years in Wales whilst decreasing in England, and there was not a clear relationship between spending on preventative services and the looked-after rate. Wales had a higher rate of care orders placed at home and more children per head of population in kinship foster care than any English region. Some of the explanations that have been suggested for Wales’s particularly high looked-after rates seem to be supported by the evidence from aggregate data and others do not. Practice variation is likely to also be an important part of the picture.

This is an original comparison of Wales, England and English regions using aggregate data. More fine-grained analysis is needed using individual-level data, multivariate analysis and qualitative methods.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness and pedagogical implications of integrating wikis into the curriculum and the subsequent learning outcomes of a group of Net‐Gens who enrolled in an International Marketing course. The research problem of the study is: “What are the learning outcomes and pedagogical implications arising from the use of wikis?”

A qualitative research methodology supported by the NVivo data analysis software was employed. A triangulated approach to collecting data was used. First, the content of the three student‐generated wikis and the written text of 30 student assignments were analysed by using Nvivo software to identify emerging themes pertaining to wiki‐based learning outcomes. Second, a critical incident method was employed where students were asked to describe two positive experiences and two negative experiences related to the wiki pedagogy. Third, in‐depth interviews were conducted with six members of the teaching panel of the course to further understand the pedagogical implications of wikis.

Consistent with previous studies, it was found that wikis promoted collaborative learning, organic discussions and independent thinking. Against previous studies, however, it was found that students adapted to wiki‐based pedagogy very well, and with little difficulty. There were differential levels of student engagement in wikis, and that occasionally wikis resulted in stagnated discussions, unless clearly aligned to the curriculum.

A well thought‐out alignment of wiki assessments with other learning activities has the potential to engage Net‐Gens. In order to keep students enthusiastically engaged in wiki discussions, it is important to embed wiki‐based activities into other learning activities. Understanding that there is a “spill over” effect from one learning activity to another is important.

The outcomes were especially beneficial to non‐English speaking background (NESB) students who are often inhibited in their responses in typical classroom settings.

While research has focussed on the use and functionality of wikis in curriculum design, there is a paucity of work on their pedagogical implications. This paper look sat the implications of a “wiki‐based pedagogy” which assumes an “emancipatory”, partially‐“constructivist” paradigm of learning, where teachers should be ready to ‘loosen the controls of the conventional teaching‐centred learning environment’.

In many Asian countries, education systems are competitive based on high-stakes examinations. Additionally, due to the traditional one-way teaching styles, classroom practices can be highly authoritarian. The issue in such education systems is the alienation of students. They do not learn about themselves; rather, they work toward and/or get distracted by securing their positions according to the standards set by other people and institutions. Many students are thus disengaged from learning and share one common reason for their disengagement: their sense of loss about the meaning of learning is unheeded and they have no opportunity to voice their opinions. Consequently, various sentiments are prevalent, even extremely negative ones, almost equivalent to mutual hostilities. This chapter conceptually discusses the importance of listening in school reform, with special reference to the cases initiated by Manabu Sato and his fellow school leaders, such as Toshiaki Ose and Masaaki Sato. Their approach is known as school as a learning community (SLC) or lesson study for learning community (LSLC); the latter is used herein. LSLC is now widely practiced in various countries in Asia, including China, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. LSLC aims to overcome the negative sentiments described above and establish communal relationships for mutual learning and well-being. To achieve this, teachers in the schools running LSLC always start listening to each other. This chapter discusses how listening transforms hostilities into trust.

The post-truth moment comes at a time of deference for epistemic authority, which has serious implications for democracy. If democracy implies an epistemology, attempting to live a democratic way of life implies a theory about the nature of knowledge among other theoretical aspects (e.g. political and ethical). At the time of ‘fluid modernity’, the post-truth politics of renouncing truth damages the foundations of democracy, for how could we proceed with a democratic way of life without truth as a common denominator for deliberation? While a defining feature of the post-truth era is its intrinsic relativism, Gellner (2013) warns this could lead to ‘cognitive nihilism’. Thus, it is imperative to (i) find our way back to reasonableness (based on both reason and emotions) based on a Freirean dialogic middle ground, instead of renouncing truth (that is any notion of truth), and (ii) critically discuss possibilities for various approaches to truth-seeking. While it is important to question the foundation and reasonableness of truth, two crucial issues arise: which theory of knowledge and whose theory of knowledge should be accepted as the epistemological basis of truth? Moreover, this chapter will argue that a more plausible notion of truth is neither one that is based on intrinsic objectivity nor intrinsic relativism, but one that is based on the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity; that is a relational (nor relative) and dialectic understanding of truth which does not rule out the existence of facts but questions the political constructs of facts. The final section of the chapter focuses on the application of the understanding of truth as a relational dialogical epistemology. While arguing for a dialogical theory of truth, the chapter also problematizes the predominant view of evidence-based research and policy and offers an in-depth discussion of how our understanding of the relational dialogical notion of truth can be utilized in the analysis of cases involving pro-active discrimination and affirmative action.

An ever-growing body of knowledge demonstrates the correlation among real-world phenomena and search query data issued on Google, as showed in the literature survey introduced in the following. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pipeline, implemented as a web service, which, starting with recent Google Trends, allows a decision maker to monitor Twitter’s sentiment regarding these trends, enabling users to choose geographic areas for their monitors. In addition to the positive/negative sentiments about Google Trends, the pipeline offers the ability to view, on the same dashboard, the emotions that Google Trends triggers in the Twitter population. Such a set of tools, allows, as a whole, monitoring real-time on Twitter the feelings about Google Trends that would otherwise only fall into search statistics, even if useful. As a whole, the pipeline has no claim of prediction over the trends it tracks. Instead, it aims to provide a user with guidance about Google Trends, which, as the scientific literature demonstrates, is related to many real-world phenomena (e.g. epidemiology, economy, political science).

The proposed experimental framework allows the integration of Google search query data and Twitter social data. As new trends emerge in Google searches, the pipeline interrogates Twitter to track, also geographically, the feelings and emotions of Twitter users about new trends. The core of the pipeline is represented by a sentiment analysis framework that make use of a Bayesian machine learning device exploiting deep natural language processing modules to assign emotions and sentiment orientations to a collection of tweets geolocalized on the microblogging platform. The pipeline is accessible as a web service for any user authorized with credentials.

The employment of the pipeline for three different monitoring task (i.e. consumer electronics, healthcare, and politics) shows the plausibility of the proposed approach in order to measure social media sentiments and emotions concerning the trends emerged on Google searches.

The proposed approach aims to bridge the gap among Google search query data and sentiments that emerge on Twitter about these trends.