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Context: This study investigates the perspective of vocational educators on the possibility of adopting augmented reality (AR) and hypervideo (HV) technologies to support their teaching practice. Vocational education and training (VET) is particularly concerned with the learning of resources (knowledge, skills and attitudes) that are immediately transposable into conduct and procedures in the workplace. AR and HV can provide means to answer this requirement, but both technological solutions are still not so diffused in VET. The purpose of this study is to inquire into the perception of educators on the main advantages and disadvantages of using AR and HV to support teaching-and-learning. Methods: A semi-structured interview protocol has been proposed to 73 teachers, intercompany trainers and in-company trainers in 10 professions (at least two per category within each profession). The interview was organized in two main steps: A need analysis, in which the most important and difficult operative skills are identified for the interviewee's profession; and a discussion of advantages and disadvantages of AR and HV. Content analysis was applied to the interview transcriptions. Results: The results show that the main advantages reported in the literature for the two technologies - such as the ability to switch between 2D and 3D and carry out simulations - are also found in the VET context by educators. For HV the main technical advantages (such as the use of active points, and non-linear navigation of video content) were autonomously recognised, while the potential of the instrument to support reflection has not been clearly identified. Conclusions: AR and HV are considered as tools able to support apprentices' procedural learning especially with regard to the operational skills which were judged by the educators to be most relevant for VET.

The aim of our project is to explore the role performance of journalists. Journalistshave ideals in form of role conceptions: They see themselves, for instance, either as neutral disseminators, investigators, analysts, promoters or entertainers. However, they are likely to make compromises in their everyday work due to personal, financial, political or other restrictions. As a consequence of these restrictions, role conceptions do not necessarily unfold in media content. Thus, in order to investigate role performance, we connect journalists' output back to their role conceptions. Therefore a content analysis of newspapers has been performed, based on operationalization models
recently developed in journalism studies, in order to reveal references to particular role conceptions in news content. At the same time a standardized online survey has been conducted among the authors of the analyzed articles in order to investigate their own conceptions of their professional role and of their level of autonomy. This combination of methods allows comparisons between the role conceptions as seen by the journalists and the conceptions which are traceable in their articles, i.e. in their role performance.

The project concentrates on journalists and their work in Switzerland but is part of a bigger international project (see http://www.journalisticperformance.org). Researchers in 20 other countries around the globe are in the process of conducting equivalent analyses of their national print media, using the same codebook and questionnaire. Findings from the Swiss study can thus be discussed along with the results from the other participating countries in publications dealing with the international comparison of journalistic role performance. The special situation of Switzerland as a multilingual and multicultural country offers the opportunity for more in-depth analyses about common grounds and differences of journalistic role performance in different cultural entities within the same political system.

Based on a content analysis of 22 newspapers from the United States, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Greece (N = 10,512), this study addresses the overlapping nature of professional role performance in the news. The authors analyze the interaction and co-occurrence of the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, civic, and infotainment roles. The results show three main types of role co-occurrence—interventionist-watchdog, watchdog-civic, and interventionist-infotainment—from which intermediate roles emerge. The findings also shed light on the influence of organizational structures, journalistic routines, and local contexts on the interaction of different roles in professional practice.