Contested affordances: teachers and students negotiating the classroom integration of mobile technology

ABSTRACT

This paper extends an emerging approach emphasizing contextual variation in the affordances of digital technologies and new media through an empirical application focused on relational dynamics of power and resistance. Specifically, I focus on the case of student and teacher negotiations over smartphones and social media in the classroom ? a case where actors on either side of a power relationship assign conflicting meanings to the same technology. Interviews were conducted with 37 students and 19 teachers at a public high school with a technology policy designating students’ personally-owned smartphones as educational devices. As the affordance of contextual mobility allowed students to access shared online social spaces within the classroom, smartphones threatened the cultural logic of separation bounding the social from the educational. With their sense of control threatened, teachers sought to re-constitute separation through strategies of restriction and differentiation. Viewing online-offline integration as a taken-for-granted part of social life, students used strategies of adaptive resistance to combat school policies and maximize technology use. However, students also worked to re-constitute separation through peer cultural norms limiting the in-school consequences of online peer social interactions. Underneath the contestation between restriction and resistance, both teachers and students worked to set conditions on the affordance of contextual mobility.     

Bridging the Intergenerational Gap: Reflections for the Field

In this paper, the authors describe the first year of a project and the process undertaken to implement intergenerational (IG) programs in two sites: a continuing care retirement community and an early care and education center, which are located geographically close to one another in a small Midwestern town in the United States. The authors discuss the application and results based on the management framework for IG programming articulated by Jarrot and colleagues (2006) and its utility for planning and implementing IG programming in both sites. Reflections about the planning and implementation and outcomes of IG programs are also included.     

The communication of control in an international company: Methods of investigation

This article describes the methodology developed for the objective analysis of communication, in terms of its control content, in one international company. The research project examined detailed aspects of control and communication practices in the firm with some comparative material from other companies. This article is intended as a contribution both to the understanding of a complex communication system, and to the measurement of control in an international group of companies. For reasons of space an account of the mechanics of the analysis has been omitted.     

Distinguishing how elite newspapers and A-list blogs cover crises: Insights for managing crises online

Through a content analysis of 887 blog posts and online newspaper articles about five political crises, this study helps crisis managers negotiate the blogosphere by answering a fundamental question: How, if at all, do blogs and newspapers cover crises differently? Significantly, the study extends existing knowledge by examining both structural and content attributes that distinguish how blogs and newspapers cover crises.     

与地质灾害有关的政策——发达国家的经验教训

发达国家具有在政策和立法框架内对付灾害的长期经验,然而,评价发达国家经验教训的重要一点是,这些经验教训应在受灾地区或国家的文化、法律和政治框架内加以借鉴.     

Exploratory Factor Analysis and Psychometric Properties of the Sexual Coercion Inventory

The purpose of the present study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Sexual Coercion Inventory (SCI; Waldner, Vaden-Goad, & Sikka, 1999), revised by the authors (SCI-R). Overall, 514 high school and college students from a Midwestern state completed the SCI-R. To complete the SCI-R, high school participants completed paper-pencil surveys with those younger than 18 obtaining parental consent; college students older than 18 completed computer-based and paper-pencil surveys. Exploratory factor analysis and reliability analyses were conducted to examine the validity of score interpretation and reliability of scores for the measure. Results suggested that a 13-item multidimensional measure consisting of two factors, Manipulation and Substance Use and Aggression, provided the best parsimony and theoretical fit. Examination of convergent and discriminant validity of scores provided additional psychometric support for the revised SCI-R, specifically pertaining to other measures of sexual victimization. The SCI-R may be a useful tool for researchers to explore manipulation tactics in more depth while also assessing and differentiating between victimization that meets legal definitions of rape and non-criminal sexual victimization.