Days of our lives: Family experiences of digital technology use

© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. This paper describes findings from a workshop, with 11 parents of children under 12 years of age, that explored family experiences of digital technology use. We found that technology experiences within everyday family life are complicated and interlinked. We highlight four experiences that featured most prominently with our participants: apprehension, ambivalence, compromise and conflict. In addition, we discuss how family values govern these experiences and how families use digital technology. This work contributes to current understandings of how family values guide technology practices. These early findings suggest that deeper understandings of family values; how they are shared, negotiated and put into action, will help inform the design of future technologies that not only support families' practices and activities, but also their experiences and aspirations

e-NABLE: DIY-AT Production in a Multi-Stakeholder System

The e-NABLE community is a distributed collaborative volunteer effort to make upper-limb assistive technology devices available to end users. e-NABLE represents a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to traditional prosthetic care. In order to learn about the attitudes and challenges of stakeholders working in and around e-NABLE, we conducted interviews with 12 volunteers in the e-NABLE movement and 3 clinicians. We found that volunteers derive a rich set of benefits from this form of altruistic activity; that both volunteers and clinicians recognize that end users benefit from aesthetic customization and personal choice in device selection; and that volunteers and clinicians bring separate, but potentially complementary, skills to bear on the processes of device provision. Based on these findings, we outline potential ways for volunteers and clinicians to optimize their talents and knowledge around the end goal of increased positive patient outcomes

Growing up in Technoculture: The ontological and perceptual significance of media in the lives of infants and toddlers

It is well documented that young children understand media differently to older children and adults, yet despite years of debate surrounding the psycho-social impact that media may have on children and youth, very little remains known about how they intercede into infants’ and toddlers’ lived experiences. We cannot assume that media have no significance in the lives of infants and toddlers simply because they may not understand the content. The particularities of very young children’s experiences of, engagement with and understanding of media cannot be expected to necessarily relate solely, or even primarily, to the media content. As an alternative this thesis focuses on the relations between very young children and media in terms of their material and corporeal effects and in this respect how media interfaces, as part of infants’ and toddlers’ environments literally mediate very young children’s possibilities for perception and action within 21st century media saturated environments. By focusing on children from birth to three years of age and their contingent material, physical environments, this thesis presents a chronology of child-technology relations as mediated relations which is necessary to understand the effect of media (conventionally understood) on their lived experience. In adopting an interdisciplinary ecological approach which relies on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (1962), Donald W. Winnicott’s psychoanalysis (1957, 1960) and Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology (1995), this thesis revolves around four central concepts: embodiment, transitional objects, holding spaces and both James Gibson’s (1982) and Donald Norman’s (1990) affordances to offer a complex understanding of the significance of media as material objects in the lives of infants and toddlers. In doing so, it argues that media effect infants and toddlers in ways that are specific to the media themselves, the particular time and place in which they emerge and are used, and to babies’ and toddlers’ situatedness and capacity to act within the world

Toward a Theory of Consumer Interaction With Mobile Technology Devices

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the phenomenon of consumer interaction with mobile technology devices (MTDs). MTDs include electronic “gadgets” such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smartphones that are carried and used frequently by consumers. The emphasis in this dissertation was on developing an explanatory framework to account for everyday experiences of MTD consumption. In light of limited consumer research on the pervasive phenomenon, an inductive, theory-building approach was taken, employing the constant comparative methodology of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Glaser 1978). Data was gathered primarily through in-depth interviews with 20 participants who had extensive familiarity with the phenomenon. Convergence on a “core category” of Cultivating the Self explained the majority of variance in participants‟ social psychological processes while interacting with MTDs. By Cultivating the Self, consumers interact intimately with mobile technology devices in myriad ways over time, investing “psychic energy” (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981) into the products in order to actualize goals and therefore actualize themselves, all the while becoming closer to the devices, both figuratively and literally. The core category is comprised of three interrelated stages: Transitioning, Integrating and Bonding. By Transitioning to their devices, consumers undergo a fundamental and totalizing “ecological” change in their lives as they come to understand and assimilate interactions with MTDs. Through Integrating their devices, consumers select and align activities in their daily lives with capabilities that arise from interacting with their MTDs, “offloading” tasks to the products in a process that blurs the distinction between “personal” and “professional” lives. By Bonding, consumers make the products “their own” as they become increasingly proximate and intimate with their MTDs through customizing, personifying and interacting playfully with them. Extant theory was considered in extending properties of the core category, with special attention given to the ontological and epistemological differences between structuralist and interactionist paradigms underlying prior research on human-object relations. A symbolic interactionist view of human behavior was demonstrated as supporting emergent conceptualizations of the phenomenon. The interactionist approach and emergent theory developed through this dissertation provides support for the Service-Dominant Logic views currently evolving in contemporary marketing thought

Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums"

Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Giving voice to girls: A child-centric examination of the lived experiences of young girls aged 7-13 in their personal media contexts

Concerns arise regarding young girls’ relationships with media. This child-centric study elicits the voices of 14 young girls and the views of their parents and educators in one primary school. A mixed-research approach to data generation included interviews, questionnaires, magazine and music video analysis, and child-guided/documented home tours. Girls’ relationships with media are intimate, emotional, and meaningful, contrasting with cautious and less comfortable adult views. Recommendations for educators, parents, researchers and girls are provided

Daughters of the lesser god: Dalit women's education in postcolonial Pune

'Daughters of the Lesser God: Dalit Women's Education in Postcolonial Pune' examines the nexus between caste, gender and state pedagogical practices in relationship to Dalit (exuntouchable) women ofPune (India). Based on interviews with three generations of Dalit women, it examines the ways in which they have experienced and made use of their formal education in schools and colleges. It traces their lives as they have over the generations migrated from rural areas to the cities, and from city slums to, in some cases, middle-class neighbourhoods. The women belong to two Dalit communities - the Mahars and the Matangs - who are traditionally rivals and competitors. It is argued that the education system discriminates against Dalit women in ways that mirror their socio-economic and religious disabilities. Dalits valourise institutes of formal education for escaping their historical and contemporary degeneration. They look upon education as a primary means of gaining employment, and of advancing economically and socially. Nonetheless, the process of education frequently subjects Dalit girls to humiliating experiences that smothers the hopes of many. These are described and analysed in detail, revealing how the caste system subjects Dalit in general, and Dalit women in particular, to the· 'physical and mental violence' of constant indignities and humiliations. Although the recently burgeoning writing by Dalits has a lot to say on the experience of Dalit men, Dalit women are largely neglected in this literature - something that this thesis seeks to rectify. The thesis also interrogates the ways in which culture is deployed and represented, showing how the process of subjectivation works to produce not merely forms of domination but also complicity and dissent. In recent years, increasing numbers of Dalit women have found ways of resisting the prevalent hegemony, and the research pinpoints the ways in which some have managed to use the education system to their advantage. Wider questions are raised about the ways that the Dalits, and specifically Dalit women, create spaces and sites for their own self-assertion and betterment, and how they engage with modernity in other ways. The dissertation is concerned with contributing to and furthering the dialogue on gendering education and caste. Dalit lives are built on a long history of suffering, anxiety, desire, and struggle, and the creative visions of social justice put forward by Dalits can continue to inspire and shape the consciousness of local and transnational participants in their battles against oppressive and exploitative systems

The e-Volving Picturebook: Examining the Impact of New e-Media/Technologies On Its Form, Content and Function (And on the Child Reader)

The technology of the codex book and the habit of reading appear to be under attack currently for a variety of reasons explored in the Introduction of this Dissertation. One natural response to attack is a resulting effort to adapt in a bid to survive. Noël Carroll, leading American philosopher in the contemporary philosophy of art, touches on this concept in his discussion of the evolution of a new medium in his article, “Medium Specificity Arguments and Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video, and Photography,” from his Cambridge University Press 1996 text, Theorizing the Moving Image. Carroll proposes that any new medium undergoes phases of development (and I include new technology under that umbrella)). After examining Carroll’s theory this Dissertation attempts to apply it to the Children’s Picturebook Field, exploring the hypothesis that the published children’s narrative does evolve, has already evolved historically in response to other mediums/technologies, and is currently “e-volving” in response to emerging “e-media.” This discussion examines ways new media (particularly emerging e-media) affect the published children’s narrative form, content, and function (with primary focus on the picturebook form), and includes some examination of the response of the child reader to those changes. Chapter One explores the formation of the question, its value, and reviews available literature. Chapter Two compares the effects of an older sub-genre, the paper-engineered picturebook, with those of emerging e-picturebooks. Chapter Three compares the Twentieth Century Artist’s Book to picturebooks created by select past and current picturebook creators. Chapter Four first considers the shifting cultural mindset of Western Culture from a linear, word-based outlook to the non-linear, more visual approach fostered by the World Wide Web and supporting “screen” technologies; then identifies and examines current changes in form, content and function of the designed picturebooks that are developing “on the page” within the constraints of the codex book format. The Dissertation concludes with a review of Leonard Shlain’s 1998 text, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, using it as a departure point for final observations regarding unique strengths of the children’s picturebook as a learning tool for young children

Teacher’s implementation of construction play in early childhood learning environments

Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2023.Historically, the concept of play has been at the centre of early childhood programmes. Early childhood educators have observed and emphasised that young children bring energy and enthusiasm to their play, which seem to drive development and form an inseparable part of a child’s development. This study determined how construction play occurs in different preschools and learning environments - looking at indoor and outdoor learning environments. I focused on six preschools in different socio-economic settings, in the Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa. I looked at how regularly construction play occurs, what form of construction play the children engage in, what the learning environment looks like, and whether the teachers have enough knowledge, understanding and practical application. I also investigated if teachers know and understand how to implement construction play and if they know how to use this form of play in different learning environments. In conclusion, I investigated whether construction play is beneficial and how teachers can better implement this form of play in different learning environments. For my data generation, I used semi-structured interviews, structured narratives, observations and photo voice to gather data related to preschool teachers' perspectives on the importance of exposing young children to construction play and whether they are mindful of the benefits of construction play, such as for cognitive and problem-solving skill development. The process I used to document this information was: voice recordings of the interviews, which were transcribed for data analysis purposes; structured narratives, which are the teachers' stories about construction play written with given guidelines, visual representations of the learning environment, children engaging in construction play and the teachers engaging with the children and classroom observations. The findings are thoroughly explained in Chapter 5, where the findings show that this form of play develops the young child in a holistic way. The literature and research findings agree that the teachers’ background plays a role in their implementation of this form of play. There is further agreement between the literature and research findings that it can be beneficial to pair construction materials with other resources and toys. Construction play is a well-loved form of play with an abundance of developmental properties and aspects.Early Childhood EducationMEdUnrestricte