Action Research: Applied Research, Intervention Research, Collaborative Research, Practitioner Research, or Praxis Research?

This article relates common ways of conceptualising action research as “intervention”, “collaboration”, “interactive research”, “applied research”, and “practitioner research” to a number of different ways of knowing, extracted from the works of Aristotle. The purpose is not to disavow any of these practices but to expand the philosophical, methodological, and theoretical horizon to contain the Aristotelian concept of praxis. It is claimed that praxis knowing needs to be comprehended in order to realize the full, radical potential in action research providing real “added value” in relation to more conventional social research approaches. Praxis knowing radically challenges the divisions of labour between knower-researchers and the known-researched. Thereby it also challenges both the epistemologies and institutionalisations dominating both conventional research and conventional ways of conceptualising action research

Online Deliberation Lived Experiences of Kānaka Maoli Women.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

An OSA-CBM Multi-Agent Vehicle Health Management Architecture for Self-Health Awareness

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) systems on modern aircraft or autonomous unmanned vehicles should provide diagnostic and prognostic capabilities with lower support costs and amount of data traffic. When mission objectives cannot be reached for the control system since unanticipated operating conditions exists, namely a failure, the mission plan must be revised or altered according to the health monitoring system assessment. Representation of the system health knowledge must facilitate interaction with the control system to compensate for subsystem degradation. Several generic architectures have been described for the implementation of health monitoring systems and their integration with the control system. In particular, the Open System Architecture - Condition-Based Maintenance (OSA-CBM) approach is considered in this work as initial point, and it is evolved in the sense of self-health awareness, by defining an appropriated multi-agent smart health management architecture based on smart device models, communication agents and a distributed control system. A case study about its application on fuel-cells as auxiliary power generator will demonstrate the integration.Postprint (published version

Using Computational Agents to Design Participatory Social Simulations

In social science, the role of stakeholders is increasing in the development and use of simulation models. Their participation in the design of agent-based models (ABMs) has widely been considered as an efficient solution to the validation of this particular type of model. Traditionally, "agents" (as basic model elements) have not been concerned with stakeholders directly but via designers or role-playing games (RPGs). In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap by introducing computational or software agents, implemented from an initial ABM, into a new kind of RPG, mediated by computers, so that these agents can interact with stakeholders. This interaction can help not only to elicit stakeholders' informal knowledge or unpredicted behaviours, but also to control stakeholders' focus during the games. We therefore formalize a general participatory design method using software agents, and illustrate it by describing our experience in a project aimed at developing agent-based social simulations in the field of air traffic management.Participatory Social Simulations, Agent-Based Social Simulations, Computational Agents, Role-Playing Games, Artificial Maieutics, User-Centered Design

Cooperative-Competitive Healthcare Service Negotiation

Service negotiation is a complex activity, especially in complex domains such as healthcare. The provision of healthcare services typically involves the coordination of several professionals with different skills and locations. There is usually negotiation between health- care service providers as different services have specific constraints, variables, and features (scheduling, waiting lists, availability of resources, etc.), which may conflict with each other. While automating the negotiation processes by using software can improve the e±ciency and quality of healthcare services, most of the existing negotiation automations are positional bargaining in nature, and are not suitable for complex scenarios in healthcare services. This paper proposes a cooperative-competitive negotiation model that enables negotiating parties to share their knowledge and work toward optimal solutions. In this model, patients and healthcare providers work together to develop a patient-centered treatment plan. We further automate the new negotiation model with software agents

Moral Imagination in Theory and Practice

A review of the literature in several domains reveals that moral imagination plays a role in how we deliberate about moral issues and what motivates us to act in a moral way. This study begins by outlining an operational definition of moral imagination based largely on Dewey’s model of dramatic rehearsal (Dewey, 1922), along with an explication of the role of image schemas, metaphor, empathy, and narrative in moral imagination (Johnson, 1993) and an examination of how moral imagination develops through the lifespan. A review of the research of the components of moral imagination is included, especially in the literature of moral development, problem solving, and creativity, as well as a proposal of an avenue of research to advance the understanding of this vital and complex human capacity. The study continues with an investigation of a curriculum designed to foster the cognitive processing of empathic emotions stimulated by viewing film clips from Hollywood-produced films. The curriculum stimulates moral imagination by offering situations in which participants can place themselves and then discuss possible moral outcomes. The curriculum is thought to aid in the development of moral expertise by exposing participants to a perspective-taking script from childhood (Hoffman, 2000) and making that script chronically accessible to the participant (Lapsley & Narvaez, in press). Three hundred sixty-six students (grades third through eighth) enrolled in after-school programs in two rural Georgia counties were randomly assigned to either an intervention or control group. The content of the intervention was delivered in a 3-week period in one county and in a 9-week period in the other. Results indicate that the longer intervention produced more gains in moral theme recognition (MTI; Narvaez, Gleason, Mitchell, & Bentley, 1999) compared to the shorter intervention. Participants in the shorter intervention demonstrated an attraction to moral theme statements reflecting higher stages of moral reasoning after the intervention than before compared to a control group from the same county. While further study is warranted, it appears the curriculum initiated a transition to higher stage reasoning in some of the participants