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Inspired by the Oxford Children's Corpus, we have developed a prototype corpus of Arabic texts written and/or selected for children. Our Arabic Children's Corpus of 2950 documents and nearly 2 million words has been collected manually from the web during a 3-month project. It is of high quality, and contains a range of different children's genres based on sources located, including classic tales from The Arabian Nights, and popular fictional characters such as Goha. We anticipate that the current and subsequent versions of our corpus will lead to interesting studies in text classification, language use, and ideology in children's texts.

An Action Research study was undertaken in a medium-sized Constabulary in the UK. The study commenced in 2016 and was completed in 2018. All participants were front-line officers recruited by the Constabulary. The number of officers attending each session was limited to five or six police officers.

As police forces are information intensive organisations, the use of advanced Information Systems in policing has led to the transformation of the social and the organisational life in forces. Nevertheless, the results of a pilot study conducted after four years of the roll out of mobile Kelvin devices in a medium-sized Constabulary in the UK have revealed officers’ resistance to using the full range of functionalities offered by these devices. The Kelvin devices’ initial training did not accommodate for differences in officers’ IT skills, experiences, roles, work contexts and police culture (ensuring the existence of a good-fit between all these factors). Hence, officers were unable to efficiently appropriate the Kelvin devices’ functionalities in different contexts and to various tasks. Therefore, guided by the data collected from the pilot study, a Fit and Appropriation Model for training (FAMT) is posited. FAMT aims to rectify the causes of officers’ resistance by not only creating a learning environment that bridges the gap in technical knowledge and skills but also enables learners to use their work experiences to link technology features to various tasks and contexts. The impact of using FAMT on the learning process sheds light on the key deteriminants of delivering effective technology training in organisations. The findings of the study delineate fundamental super-user’ characteristics and police culture aspects that can influence the learning process during training. Furthermore, the study highlights the significant role of providing IT support during technology training. This role should not be underestimated by mangers as it impacts profoundly on the effectiveness of female learners’ technology sense-making. Besides, incorporating collaborative training methods into FAMT have enhanced learners’ ability to extend the use of features to different contexts. Therefore, using FAMT has been perceived by officers as an effective training method that facilitates a personalised technology training and extends their knowledge about useful features in their Kelvin devices.