A reform of higher education in Sweden in 1993 led to stiffer competitive climate among educational institutions. The reform meant that educational institutions now had the opportunity to plan their curriculum autonomously. Prior to the reform educational planning was restricted to the Swedish government. The new rules spelled a greater opportunity for educational institutions to profile themselves based on their educational offerings. The higher degree of competition means that marketing becomes increasingly important when recruiting new students.

The aim of this Master thesis is to study the public libraries' function as a place for people to meet. Four major questions are taken up: + Do the public libraries have the function of a meeting place? + How important do the librarians and the visitors find the libraries possible function as a meeting place? Do they think that this function is important? + What differs the public libraries from other places in society when it comes to the function of a meeting place? + What differences are there between a larger and a smaller library when it comes to the function of a meeting place ? The basis of this study are interviews with employees at a province library in Jönköping and at a smaller library in Sjöbo in Borås municipality. Our study deals with the history of public libraries, its functions as a meeting place, its architecture, culture, and statistics concerning numbers of visitors and loans of books. The conclusions that are drawn are that the public libraries have qualifications to function as a meeting place even if that isn't always the case.

UGL-courses (Understanding Group and Leader), given in Sweden since the beginning of 1980, are a frequently used leadership course in all sectors of the working life. This essay purpose was to compare course members experienced benefit between two educational organizers. No earlier studies in the subject where to be found. The method chosen was quantitative. A questionnaire was sent to participants in Swedish Defence Forces and The Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees.

This study intends to examine teacher´s thoughts and perception of esthetic activities at preschools. I have chosen to restrict the esthetic area to the significance and function of clay to the teachers and children. On the basis of the belief that children can, and need access to a variety of ways to express themselves, we used the interviews to take part of teachers work and thoughts concerning clay, and the esthetic work. I have in this qualitative study addressed four questions: How do the teachers use clay in preschool activities? What do the teachers think about clay as a tool in the educational work at the preschool? Are the teachers working from the perception of children?s rights to express themselves in different ways and with the help of different tools? What function does clay fill for the children?I have interviewed eight teachers and taken part of both older and more recent theories around children and the creativity in esthetic contexts.

?Childs pedagogic material ? A qualitative study of child?s use of pedagogic materials available at five nursery schools and about their teachers thoughts about the display of the pedagogic material?In the nursery preschool the environment and the educational materials have always had a central place. That's why it has been chosen to study and observe five preschools and interview sex teachers, in an attempt to understand the teachers thought about the choice of material and the choices of material that the children used. The reason I do this is to see what the underlying idea about the materials the children use is, and why educators choose to make certain materials visible. The purpose of this study is to examine the educational materials that are used to stimulate children´s learning and examine what determines the choice of educational materials.

Aspects of computerized learning in terms of educational situations in kindergarten andschools where the teachers use software either made for children or for adults, is thesubject of this paper.The market for software produced in Sweden and intended for educatilonal situationswith small children is discussed and analysed by qualitative method. The software, theusers, the producers and other related groups are looked upon from an educationalperspective and a mode1 of this process is presented in the paper.The software is categorized and discussed according to area of use and underlying educationalperspectives. The educational situations in which the users are a part are discussedfrom an educational perspective and examples from use of software in kindergartenand schools are given. The images of their target group which the producers haveare categorized according to phenomenographical method. A proposal of a classificationsystem for software used in educational situations is made..

This qualitative study is done with the purpose of creating understanding for the theoretical democratic content in educational materials for Civic Education courses 1a1 and 1b during GY-11, so teachers create an intentional approach when using educational materials in their democratic education. This was motivated as important considering the reduction in obligatory Civic Education for the vocational programs. The study was conducted using a hermeneutic qualitative reading method where the educational materials, more specifically two series with one book for each course, was read with purpose of creating understanding for the democratic content according to ideal democratic models: deliberative democracy, participatory democracy and electoral democracy. A text voice analysis was also conducted using Bakhtins theory of dialogic and monologue text that contributed to the general result concerning the democratic content. The results show that the electoral democracy ideal is dominant in all educational materials, there is hence no striking difference between the democratic content in 1a1 and 1b educational materials.

This thesis is a case study of the search function on the University of Uppsala?s web site. The search function in this study was chosen since it exists on a large and complex web site and there were apparent lacks in the old version of the search function. The thesis highlights some of the problems that can appear in the development of a search function on a local site. One interesting find is that one of the most difficult issues is organizational and not technical.

AbstractTitle: Interactive marketing and Internet - A study of Radi Medical Systems? educational site (Interaktiv marknadsföring och Internet - En studie utifrån Radi Medical Systems webbplats för kundutbildning)Number of pages: 43 (including enclosures 47)Author: Daniel PalmgrenTutor: Mats LindCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Spring 2008University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala UniversityPurpose/Aim: The aim of this thesis is to examine if Radi Medical Systems? educational site has the potential to create value for the company?s customers, and by that promote improved customer relations. Questions asked are: What kinds of visions does the company have for the site? Which services are offered to the customers through the site? How do the customers experience these sInervices?Material/Method: Information from interviews with representatives from Radi Medical Systems and their customers, observations of the webpage and information from an internal Radi document concerning the educational site has been collected and analyzed through the use of a theoretical framework, in order to provide an understanding for the questions asked. The visions were discussed and analyzed by general concepts of interactive marketing and Internet.

AbstractThe purpose of our study is to reach an understanding of the situation of unaccompanied refugee minors in school. Thus the study aims to investigate what sort of possibilities and limits they encounter when going through their school education. We have chosen a qualitative method and conducted interviews with four persons between the ages of 18 and 21 years.The result of the study shows that unaccompanied refugee minors experience numerous limitations and lesser possibilities than other students, which prevents their educational and social development. The limitations partly depend on the school personnels lack of knowledge about this target group, and partly on the difficulty of dealing with a new culture which is different from the students original culture.  An important conclusion that our study has shown is that the educational system has a great impact on how well the students manage to function in the new society later on.  Therefore it is of great importance that the teachers have access to competence development , since this is of substantial importance for the  unaccompanied refugee minors development and socialization. .

This Master?s thesis investigates user education at high school libraries. The aim of this study is to examine user education and the educational approach that librarian?s experience in their teaching. The method used for the study is qualitative interviews with seven high school librarians.

This examination paper is about educational drama and is implemented from a participant oriented perspective. The main purpose of this study is to find out what conceptions and experiences the children actualize when participating in educational drama exercises. The reason why I choose to write about this subject was because of my own fascination and experiences of participating in drama exercises. On account of my further profession as a teacher, I want this study to take direction in school.The theoretical frame in this examination consists of literature that describes educational drama as a subject. I also present and discuss some earlier research in this area.

The aim of this study is to establish an understanding of how the concept educational materials can be interpreted, as well as to investigate how teachers describe their use of educational materials. The focus of this study is the subject ?Sign Language for the hearing?, at the upper secondary level. We, the authors of this essay, both have a great personal interest in this language. Swedish Sign Language is the sign language mainly used in Sweden.

This essay is built upon the subject of drama. Its purpose was to examine if drama was a good and important educational method to/for children, and if drama is enhancing childrens self-esteem and self-confidence. By reviewing the results from literature and interviews, my intention was to compare the results, in order to find out what the views of the literature and respondents on drama was.I used qualitative interviewing, to find out what the teachers had to say about drama, and I used literature that was relevant to the purpose of the essay. I took a deeper look at the meaning of educational drama and pedagogical drama was, and also the meaning of self-esteem and self-confidence, in order to connect it with the results from the literature and the interviews.  After studying the literature and the interviews, I could see coherence, and therefore compile a result.  Both literature and the interviewed teachers considers drama to be a good and important method within the educational school and that drama positively has got a strengthening effect on childrens self-esteem and self-confidence.

The purpose of this paper has been to study how users experiences and behaviors are influenced by a "like" function, when publication of images in social media with the photo app Instagram as the selected base. In this study respondents has been part of a study regarding their experiences and behavior related to "like" function in Instagram. The results of the question form have then been analyzed to find patterns in their behavior and to exemplify/reinforce different type of user-behavior found in related scientific articles.The study has shown that the behavior of Instagram users is affected by the "like" function, when they believes that the function is a status marker that raises the interest for certain users by the number of likes. Through my results, I have been able to amplify and illustrate several theories of Goffman, Buckingham and Gripsrud which are presented in the report..