Chrysi Rapanta

The LinkedIn Endorsement Game: Why and How Professionals Attribute Skills to Others:

The phenomenon of endorsing people for their professional skills on LinkedIn is more and more evident, and it grows along with the expansion of this broadly used professional networking website. This article focuses on the ease with which people endorse others and also accept endorsements and the potential impact of this action on people’s knowledge authority profile. An online survey was answered by 120 professionals from all over the world. The findings reveal some considerations regarding the interrelation between the act of endorsement and how personal, rather than epistemic, its criteria are. Implications for recruiters and educators are discussed.

Mobile or Not? Assessing the Instructional Value of Mobile Learning

Our aim was to explore the influence of mobile learning on students’ acquisition of conceptual knowledge of business communication, as well as on the development of their communication skills. We compared the performance of three groups of students according to the pedagogical approach that we used with them: a mobile learning group, a conventional group, and a control group. Our findings suggest that a mobile learning intervention leads to an improvement in student performance in a formal assessment and that it will also have a positive impact on learning outcomes.

Identifying Paralogisms in Two Ethnically Different Contexts at University Level

Abstract Although educational researchers have long tried to answer the question ‘Who reasons well?’, little has been done in regards to the influence of culture on argumentative reasoning quality. Among the factors that have been related with the construction of valid arguments, counterarguments and rebuttals by adults are: explicit argument training, task instructions and prior knowledge. No clear evidence exists regarding the influence of the ethnical background on the flaws or fallacies of reasoning. The present study applies the recent theory of paraschemes as a tool to identify university students’ paralogisms in a common argument-mapping task on everyday issues in two different cultural contexts: one European (Spain) and one Middle Eastern (United Arab Emirates). Our analysis showed that the influence of ethnical background was not statistically significant regarding the type and amount of paralogisms committed. On the contrary, the participants’ study major, being business or education, was shown to influence the production of argument fallacies. Implications of these findings for higher education are discussed.

“Going Mobile” in Business Communication at an Arabian Gulf University

In this article, we describe a project in which undergraduate business seniors at a university in the Arabian Gulf created or evaluated the chapters of an iBook as part of their final course in business communication. Students were surveyed throughout the project, and they also participated in a focus group discussion at the end. The aim was to evaluate their experience with learning from a peer-generated iBook and to identify any motivating factors behind it. The study showed that incorporating mobile learning into the business communication classroom was highly meaningful for the students involved for a range of different reasons.

Are You Ready to Collaborate? An Adaptive Measurement of Students’ Arguing Skills Before Expecting Them to Learn Together

This paper describes a novel instrument of assessing adolescent and adult students’ perception of arguments structure, nature, and quality as a method of adapting teaching and designing of argumentation tasks to learners’ epistemic knowledge of argumentation. The author’s goal is to present the steps of the validation of the instrument discussing validity and reliability issues, and to discuss potential uses of the instrument as a way to diagnose students’ status of argument quality perception before engaging them in collaborative tasks.