The riddle of things: Activity theory and actor‐network theory as approaches to studying innovations

This article compares cultural‐historical activity theory (AT) and actor‐network theory (ANT) as approaches to studying technical innovations. The concept of nature and society production in the ANT and the concept of activity in the AT have much in common as attempts to transcend the dualism between subject and object, nature and society. The symmetrical (ANT) and the dialectical (AT) interpretations of the concept of mediation are compared. It is suggested that the historically developed, artifact‐mediated structure of human activity is instrumental in studying interaction and coevolution of social and material entities. Three limitations of the concept of generalized symmetry, or symmetrical mediation, become evident when the concept is used in empirical studies of innovation: First, it does not supply any criteria for defining the nature and scope of actors in a heterogeneous network. Second, it leads to an asymmetrical, Machiavellian analysis of innovation in which the contribution of designers, users, and nonhuman entities remains marginal. Third, it does not provide any explanation for the intentionality and competence of humans. It is suggested that these problems can be solved if the innovation network is studied as a network of activity systems. Nonhuman entities are included in the analysis as historically developed arrays of tools and raw materials of the activity systems. This approach is elaborated by analyzing an unsuccessful innovation process, the production of ethanol from wood through the use of cellulose‐degrading enzymes. It is suggested that instead of applying the symmetrical semiotic language proposed by ANT in the analysis, a dialogue that utilizes the historically developed resources and languages of different thought communities is needed.     

Learning to Create Enquiry-based Blended Learning Designs: Resources to Develop Interdisciplinary Education

Interdisciplinary teaching and learning in social work education can improve service user outcomes by promoting collaborative working between professionals. Educators must ensure that students are given opportunities to gain the skills, knowledge and experiences required for collaborative working. Blended learning can overcome barriers of time and place to create spaces for interdisciplinary students to engage in interactive and collaborative learning experiences. Little has been written in social work education outlining how educators can gain the competences required to develop blended learning designs. This paper provides access to a set of resources aimed at guiding educators through the complex processes of creating interdisciplinary enquiry-based blended learning (EBBL) designs. The context, ethos and rationale for the development of these resources are outlined along with an evaluation that suggests they were successful in guiding an interdisciplinary group of educators through the complex processes of creating interdisciplinary EBBL designs.     

Re-engineering the multiple choice question exam for social work

The aim of this study is to devise a multiple choice question (MCQ) exam that provides students with opportunities to engage in a deep approach to learning. Multiple choice assessment is largely unused in social work degree courses in the UK because of associations with techniques such as guessing and rote learning, which do not correspond with deep approaches to learning. Strategies used to enhance opportunities for a deep approach to learning within the MCQ exam used in this study included certainty-based marking (CBM), enhancing the use of formative feedback and giving students responsibility for devising the MCQs. Results show that students use similar levels of deep learning when they completed a MCQ exam compared to those students who completed an essay exam. The deep learning approach for the MCQ exam was, however, less when compared to a different module that used an essay assignment. There is an increasing pressure on Higher Education to provide more robust assessment practices, and findings in this study suggest it may be time for social work tutors to reconsider the role of the MCQ format within the existing range of assessment tools.     

Talking about Work: I used to talk about nothing else, I was excited and it got a bit too much for my parents

People with learning difficulties who had access to day services were invited to talk about their work placement or employment. Focus groups were used to gather information on type of work placement opportunities and the participants' experiences. The majority liked their job as it offered purposeful activity and opportunities to meet people. Many individuals wished to increase the number of hours worked, but several were relatively dissatisfied with their wages and negative interactions with workmates. The study identified that in spite of high motivation to work many individuals were unclear about their future occupational prospects. They did not have many opportunities to systematically explore and discuss their work related interests, range of placement options and how they could be accessed. Participants had not been involved in the search for their current placements. These omissions could result in increased reliance on day centres even for skilled individuals who might otherwise be employed in community settings.     

Developing intercultural competence of teachers of English as a foreign language through an international project

This paper reports an international project which took place at Nicolaus Copernicus University, where students and teachers from four European universities met for a two-week summer school. The main objective was to develop intercultural competence of teachers of English as a foreign language and their ability to demonstrate this skill during an English lesson. The paper depicts the tools implemented in the project and shows how they affected the learning outcomes by presenting the students’ and teachers’ perspectives.     

Acknowledging and transcending ‘failure’: lifeworld possibilities and system constraints

In this article, we interrogate the concept of methodological ‘failures’ as they arise during fieldwork, in the process of collecting empirical data. We highlight how the techniques of validity horizon matrices and power analysis can be used as methodological tools to illustrate moments in the fieldwork process where these ‘failures’ occur and to illustrate what makes them ‘failures’ rather than just opportunities for learning. Drawing on examples from our own research, we use validity horizon matrices to suggest that ‘failures’ largely occur as a result of disagreements about backgrounded, implicit normative claims. We distinguish between ‘failures’ where communicative possibilities exist for negotiating norms and those where systemic constraints make critique impossible, though we acknowledge that in practice opportunities for negotiating power are limited.     

Exploring the Educational Experience of a Social Work Student with a Disability: A Narrative

Social work educators seem to have mixed feelings about the development of open and distance learning in Britain and the USA. Open and distance learning has tended to be marginalised. It has been compared unfavourably to campus based programmes, but there has been a lack of research on this topic in the United Kingdom. However, research in the USA indicates that open and distance learning social work students have a high degree of satisfaction with teaching and learning approaches compared with those on campus based programmes, while student outcomes and level of achievement have been at least comparable to those on ‘traditional’ programmes.

Some criticisms of open and distance learning in the UK are examined. These include narrow, mass produced, ‘assembly line’, mechanistic, isolating, individualistic approaches. Advantages of open and distance learning in the UK are considered, such as well organised teaching packs, flexibility and individual choice in pace, time and place of learning with especially good learning opportunities for mature women with family commitments. Improvements are advocated, centred around developing more opportunities to rehearse and develop practice skills, encouraging more divergent, critical thinkers operating from a more pluralistic knowledge base and the empowerment of students in collectives.     

MAKING THE CASE ONLINE: HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL MULTIMEDIA

New media technologies provide opportunities to expand academic curriculum offerings and enhance student learning. Yet web-based and online learning tools should not be just repurposed text and information, or videotaped faculty lectures. Instead, the web calls for the inclusion of sound, text and visuals for learning tools that provide a media-rich environment. This allows faculty to create multidimensional experiences that cater to different learning styles and provide opportunities for problem solving. Drawing on my production experiences at HBS, as well as my own experience teaching visual anthropology and creating films, videos, photographs and web products, I discuss the teaching opportunities that new technologies and media can provide.     

You are where you live: Methodological challenges to measuring children’s exposure to hazards

Many of the challenges that affect children living in poverty are directly related to the neighborhoods in which they live. Places that inhibit healthy living and those that expose children to environmental pollution tend to more heavily affect children in poverty. This environmental injustice is a natural concern of the fields of urban planning, geography, and children’s health. Yet many decisions that affect opportunities for healthy living are made without a full understanding of how neighborhood context influences such opportunities. In this brief, we paint inequalities in child health outcomes as a spatial problem, review some of the geospatial tools used by urban planners and geographers, discuss common reasons for misclassification or misrepresentation of spatially explicit problems, and propose more suitable methods for measuring opportunities and exposures germane to the field of child poverty. Throughout, we emphasize the need for evidence-driven, spatially grounded responses to child poverty issues with a spatial dimension.     

Consequences,opportunities, and Arrovian impossibility theorems with consequentialist domains

We examine the possibility of Arrovian social choice when alternatives consist of outcomes and opportunity sets from which they are chosen. Consequentialism is a choice attitude towards outcomes and opportunities for choice and prioritizes outcomes rather than opportunities for choice. We first propose a sufficient condition for a restricted domain on which Arrow’s impossibility theorem holds. A domain such that there exists a similarity of choice attitudes within consequentialism satisfies the proposed domain condition. We observe that a diversity of choice attitudes within consequentialism is crucial to resolve an Arrovian impossibility, but this resolution is restricted in plausibility.     

Tools for Collaboration: Using and Designing Tools in Interorganizational Economic-Crime Investigation

Economic-crime investigation in Finland is in transition from hierarchically organized, sequential collaboration between authorities toward parallel, interorganizational collaboration. This article describes the tools used and developed for managing the new collaborative economic-crime-investigation process. The challenge is to find interoganizational investigative tools that are flexible enough to shift between vertical use within and horizontal use across organizations. Local construction is often needed in collaborative networks, otherwise the tool never meets the needs of the divergent users. A good tool is sensitive enough to adapt to local settings, and robust enough to be transferable to other contexts. In this article, I give empirical examples of how the challenge is met in the economic-crime investigation cases followed from 1999 to 2002. The findings suggest that the standardization of tools does not take place merely from the top-down, and that something new is emerging: collaborative standardization of local innovations.     

A fundamental rethink of practice learning in social work education

A common response to the need to place increasing numbers of social work students in field education or practice learning placements has been to broaden the range of organisations in which placements are sought. While this strategy has provided many beneficial learning opportunities for students, it has not been sufficient in tackling ongoing difficulties in locating work-integrated learning opportunities for social work students. We argue that new approaches to finding placement opportunities will require a fundamental rethink as to how student placements are understood. This paper introduces an innovative project which started with a consideration of learning opportunities and built a structure to facilitate these, rather than rely on organisational availability to host students on placements.     

Service Learning and The Compass Trail

Students used a compass trail to show how they could perform service to their school. When students performed service learning, they completed a real task that was needed for a grateful audience conjoined with academic content in the lesson. Students worked on the school grounds and used content from their regular curriculum while looking for real-life connections to academic applications. Students became involved in real projects that they found meaningful while making contributions to the community. Students learned about geographic tools and used those tools to accomplish their service projects. The students realized that the experience was real from their preparations, through the execution of the project, and the formative evaluation.     

Intentional youth programs: taking theory to practice

Early adolescents benefit most from program opportunities where they can be actively engaged in their own learning and development and where there is a good fit between their developmental needs and the intentional learning opportunities provided by the program. The theoretical framework presented here suggests that the two most important features of an engaging youth program are an intentional ethos of youth development and an intentional strategy to design and implement developmentally appropriate learning experiences. Practical examples from research and community practice are used to illustrate program strategies for early adolescents that emphasize intentional thought, decisions, and actions every step of the way.     

Using the Tool-Kit of Discourse in the Activity of Learning and Teaching

Teaching and learning are largely conducted through talk, yet the relationship between the talk and the activity goals it is intended to achieve is rarely problematized or treated as a matter for conscious choice. In this paper, I describe a tool for the analysis of classroom talk, developed in the context of teacher-researcher collaboration, which draws upon activity theory and systemic linguistics. Three main units of analysis are proposed: episodes of talk, which are the chief interactional means by which actions are operationalized; the sequences from which such episodes are constructed; and, minimally, the moves through which each sequence is negotiated. The concept of mini-genre is then used to distinguish different patterns of sequential organization. In the second part of the paper, I contrast episodes from two different activities, showing how different choices of follow-up moves create significantly different kinds of opportunity for student engagement and learning. In conclusion, I suggest that, by recording and analyzing episodes of talk from their classrooms, teachers can become conscious of the options they select; then, if they see fit, they can, by changing the discursive operations deployed, bring about a change in the activities themselves and so change the nature of the classroom community.     

Culturally responsive online design: learning at intercultural intersections

Abstract

This article presents evidence-based guidelines to inform culturally responsive online learning design in higher education. Intercultural understanding is now a recognised core learning outcome in a large majority of Canadian public universities; however, supporting design methodology is underdeveloped, especially in online contexts. Our search for valid intercultural learning design criteria began with two questions: What is the research evidence for learning design practices that support intercultural learning? In what ways do current course design rubrics address intercultural learning? For answers, first we explored recent literature reviews, articles, books, professional discourse on cultural aspects of learning, and the related internationalisation and Indigenous literatures on formal learning. Next, we examined three course design rubrics commonly used in Canada to identify practice supports and gaps in relation to the literature. Various research-indicated supports are present in these rubrics; however, major gaps include critical and holistic pedagogies, explicit intercultural learning outcomes, and intentional diversity group work. The proposed guidelines synthesise key research-indicated supports for intercultural learning and show how they can be integrated in core online course design components. The guidelines present a base for online design methodology to support intercultural learning and enable formative evaluation of pedagogy, learning activity and assessment applications.     

Dietetics majors' weight-reduction beliefs, behaviors, and information sources

One hundred twenty-eight female dietetics majors aspiring to be registered dietitians were surveyed to identify and assess their reasons for wanting to lose weight and the weight-loss techniques and information sources they used and would recommend to clients. Fisher's exact tests were used to analyze behavioral data, and binomial tests to determine whether proportions of students achieving their desired weight-loss outcomes were significantly greater than 50%. Most dieters wanted to lose weight to improve their appearance and increase their self-esteem. Sound weight-loss techniques that were used and recommended include increased exercise, low-fat foods and snacks, and portion control. Accurate information sources used and recommended included food labels and college nutrition courses. Unsound weight-loss techniques and potentially inaccurate information sources were also used and would be recommended by a few students. Findings suggest a need for more learning opportunities focusing on enhancement of self-esteem and weight management.     

Globalizing social movement theory: The case of eugenics

Transnational social movements are affected not only by national-level factors, but also by factors that operate at the global level. This article develops two conceptual tools for analyzing global factors: international political opportunity and global culture. The conduciveness of both factors appears to be important in understanding eugenics activity, which this article examines as a transnational social movement. The lack of international political opportunity before World War I and the hostile climate of global culture after World War II hindered eugenic mobilization during these periods, while the emergence of opportunities and cultural conduciveness during the Interwar period was associated with movement growth and effectiveness.     

Analyzing Roll-Call Voting Tools for Content

Abstract

The roll-call voting tools most frequently used by legislative scholars are not equally useful for all. Roll-call votes selected for traditional measurement tools systematically exclude issues determined to be important to women legislators. Those who study women in politics are unable to employ roll-call voting tools with the assurance that they are using valid measures for their research. After analyzing the content of widely used voting tools and discovering that votes from controversial bills of interest to women were often excluded, I outline suggestions for employing alternative methodological approaches. Further, I add to a growing criticism of roll-call voting statistics by identifying another limitation to their use.     

Sleep disturbances and suicide—New battles for veterans of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: A retrospective review

In this article, we systematically reviewed 116 veterans’ medical records to explore the mitigating factors in sleep disturbance, polytrauma clinical triad (PCT), and suicide. We discovered that a particular nonaction (i.e., no standardized completion of sleep-disturbance screenings) had strong implications for resulting suicides among veterans with reported sleep disturbances, PCT, and suicidal ideations. This study provides strong propositions for the further study of this veteran cohort—Operations Enduring Freedom (OEF), Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and New Dawn (OND)—with regard to the impact of sleep disturbance on PCT and its relationship with suicide symptoms, ideation, and completion. The purpose of this study was to examine the outcomes of sleep disturbances on complex relationships among the three primary diagnoses—posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and chronic pain—that establish the PCT cluster. We identified that those diagnosed with sleep disturbances had increased suicidal ideations and rates of completed suicides. We analyzed these factors in veterans returning from the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We hypothesized that (a) clinicians were not completing sleep-disturbance screenings as a standard practice for the OEF/OIF/OND veterans diagnosed with PCT who reported sleep disturbance concerns within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; (b) if no sleep-disturbance screening instruments were used by clinicians, veterans would be at a greater risk of suicide completion.