Postmodern imaginative constructivism for STSE understanding

The influences of science and technology on society and the environment (STSE) have been an integral component of the formal educational curricula for four decades, and yet industrialized countries frequently struggle to balance the benefits of science and technology with the social justice and environmental issues inherent to contemporary society. Canadian citizens often fail to connect scientific and technological understandings with the subtle and yet ubiquitous personal, political, cultural, environmental, and social consequences that result from these understandings. This phenomenological research will explore potential discourses of control within education and society that may preclude authentic, contextual, and meaningful understandings of science and technology relative to their significant consequences, and an imaginative adaptation of Egan's Ironic Understanding and McGinn's Foreground and Background Dimensions to imaginatively express an awareness of postmodern STSE understandings. This research is designed to explore student understandings of how the diverse and complex influences of science and technology affect students through postmodern, imaginative, and constructivist photography. Participants demonstrated a limited Ironic Understanding of STSE, a critical awareness of specific modernist influences, increased personal and affective connections to science and technology, and an awareness of the duality of STSE. Participants' photographic artifacts can be utilized to inform teaching and learning strategies in order to purposefully craft curriculum and lesson plan design for personalized and engaging learning opportunities that incorporate students' awareness of STSE

Mediation in literacy : language, technology, and modality.

The issue of difference in writing, both in terms of language diversity and modalities, has received increasing attention in the context of new developments in technologies, increasing global migration, and intensified intersections of cultural and linguistic practices accompanying these changes. Theories of language and modality are trying separately to develop ways to best respond to the challenges and opportunities brought about by these changes. Responding to scholars’ recent calls for bridging the gap between studies of multilingualism and those of multimodality, this dissertation offers an approach that, instead of separating the study of modality and languages, questions such a tendency to not only create dichotomies between these two, but also to assume the stability and discrete character of various modes and languages. I argue that dominant, additive models of multimodality and multilingualism deemphasize understandings of languages, modalities, and technologies as material social practices in a complex communicative ecology, thereby implying what Brian Street calls “an autonomous” model of multimodality and multilingualism. Going beyond the abstract notions of language and modality as stable and discrete, this dissertation urges us to see the material-social practice of language as always already multimodal, while also being part of the ecology of multimodal semiotic practices. This dissertation has been divided into five chapters. Chapter One introduces issues of multilingualism and multimodality and provides a brief theoretical background to analyze dominant assumptions about language and modality. Chapter Two interrogates social theories of agency and mediation, both humanist and anti-humanist and develops an alternative understanding of mediation based on cultural materialist theories of practice and new materialism. I discuss how theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, and Pennycook help us see seemingly isolated acts as parts of a nexus of sedimented practices, whereas Latour’s call to pay attention to non-human agents and mediation as translation makes us see how durability and change in practices do not depend only on human agents and social structures, but equally on the “missing masses.” Chapter Three and Chapter Four take up the theoretical insights from the previous chapters, arguing that major theories of multilingualism and multimodality retain some residues of monolingualism and monomodality either in assuming the discrete and stable character of languages and modes or in assuming individual users as stable and free-floating agents. In an attempt to overcome these monolingualist and monomodalist tendencies, these two chapters call for paying attention to the full panoply of (f)actors affecting semiotic negotiations of our students rather than romanticizing the agency of users in an attempt to debunk monolinugualist/monomodalist ideology. Chapter Five develops an alternative, integrated way of viewing translingual and transmodal relations. This chapter ends with a demonstration of how shifting our theoretical orientation challenges not only the norm of existing pedagogical practices of segregating codes (linguistic or other semiotic), but also revises some of the multilingual and multimodal pedagogies advocated in recent studies

Adding Why to What? Analyses of an Everyday Explanation

In XAI it is important to consider that, in contrast to explanations for professional audiences, one cannot assume common expertise when explaining for laypeople. But such explanations between humans vary greatly, making it difficult to research commonalities across explanations. We used the dual nature theory, a techno-philosophical approach, to cope with these challenges. According to it, one can explain, for example, an XAI's decision by addressing its dual nature: by focusing on the Architecture (e.g., the logic of its algorithms) or the Relevance (e.g., the severity of a decision, the implications of a recommendation). We investigated 20 game explanations using the theory as an analytical framework. We elaborate how we used the theory to quickly structure and compare explanations of technological artifacts. We supplemented results from analyzing the explanation contents with results from a video recall to explore how explainers justified their explanation. We found that explainers were focusing on the physical aspects of the game first (Architecture) and only later on aspects of the Relevance. Reasoning in the video recalls indicated that EX regarded the focus on the Architecture as important for structuring the explanation initially by explaining the basic components before focusing on more complex, intangible aspects. Shifting between addressing the two sides was justified by explanation goals, emerging misunderstandings, and the knowledge needs of the explainee. We discovered several commonalities that inspire future research questions which, if further generalizable, provide first ideas for the construction of synthetic explanations.Comment: Paper accepted and presented at XAI World Conference 2023, Lisbo

Genres of Inquiry in Design Science Research: Applying Search Conference to Contemporary Information Systems Security Theory

This dissertation investigates the core subject of knowledge in design-science research (DSR). In contrast to natural and social sciences that are more explanatory in nature, design-science research is concerned with solving complex practical problems that are ill-defined or of a “wicked” nature. At the same time, as in any research activity, design-science research is also concerned with the production of knowledge. In the process of design-science research, the researcher must act as both designer and scientist. Design knowledge is distinct from scientific knowledge, however, and must be evaluated against a different set of criteria. Since the DSR process is iterative the scope of DSR knowledge can evolve, abstracting general (nomothetic) knowledge from situated (idiographic) artifacts or, alternately, applying abstract knowledge to situated settings. General knowledge is different from situated knowledge and must be evaluated accordingly. In the current design-science literature, situated (idiographic) knowledge is associated with design, and abstract (nomothetic) knowledge is associated with science. This dissertation proposes that design can be abstract and that science can be situated in scope. The purpose of the dissertation is to identify the problems with the current conceptualization of contributions in DSR, offer an alternative view of the design-science paradigm as one having multiple genres of inquiry, provide the criteria for framing and evaluating design-science contributions, and describe how this will help address some of the current debate and clarify the current discourse. The dissertation is structured in three parts. Part I employs a theoretical argument to develop a framework for these genres of inquiry in design-science research and demonstrates how the evaluation criteria for design-science research studies change as the research moves from one genre to another. Part II is an empirical study that uses a search conference method to apply the bindpoint model (Baskerville and Lee 2013), an explanatory design theory to the problem of information security risk resulting from consumerization and BYOD (bring your own device). Part III reflects on the learning from the theoretical and the practical discourse and provides the contributions and opportunities for future research. This dissertation contributes to the design-science field by providing a more nuanced understanding of the contributions and evaluation criteria of design-science research. It contributes to the Information Systems (IS) security field by providing a design theory for managing BYOD security. Lastly, it contributes to Information Systems research methods by introducing the search conference method as a viable approach for theorizing and for evaluating design-science contributions

Understanding The Use and Impact of Social Media Features on The Educational Experiences of Higher-Education Students in Blended and Distance-Learning Environments

Students are increasingly expecting social media to be a component of their educational experiences both outside and inside of the classroom. The phenomenon of interest in this dissertation is understanding how the educational experiences of students are affected when social media are incorporated into online and blended course activities. Qualitative case studies are undertaken toward this end from a Human-Computer Interaction perspective by proposing 4 research questions: (1) How does the use of social media in blended-learning courses impact students\u27 educational experience? (2) How does the use of social media in online courses impact students\u27 educational experience? (3) How do specific features of social media impact student experiences inside the physical classroom? (4) How do specific features of social media impact student experiences outside of the physical classroom? This work is rooted in the theoretical foundations of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to conceptualize educational experience as defined by the intersection of social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) is also integrated here to conceptualize social media features as technical objects defined through the relationship of functional affordances and symbolic expressions between students and social media. The findings are based on a total of 9 case studies (5 within a blended context and 4 within an online context) bound by students in Masters-level library science classes at Syracuse University. The results suggest that social presence is clearly the most salient type of presence in social media within blended course contexts, while cognitive and social presences are relatively salient in social media within online course contexts. Two main categories of affordances, timeliness and information curation, emerged as pertinent to students\u27 educational experiences in blended courses; while both of these, plus multimedia engagement, were identified as relevant to online courses. Technical objects (general features of social media) were identified which facilitate these affordances, and implications based on these are provided in respect to practice (for educators and information technology designers) and theory

How national curricula affect the design and transfer of a teaching-learning sequence between two educational systems: Case studies from Greece and Italy.

This empirical study investigates the main features of curricula and contexts that favor or hinder the process of transfer of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) from the designers’ original situation to a host one. The specific research questions addressed were (RQ1) what were the changes made during the process of transfer in the new context? (RQ2) What were the similarities or differences between the national curricula and contexts that influenced the process of transfer? To answer our research questions, we chose two TLSs, one about optical properties of materials, the other about thermal conductivity, originally designed by two groups of researchers and experienced teachers in Italy and Greece, respectively. The transfer process was analyzed using the “adaptation and reinvention” model, originally developed for the management knowledge research field, while the construct of “institutional distance” was used to describe the influence of country-specific aspects on the transfer process. Data collected included background documents that describe the principles underlying the TLSs design, the decisions and changes made to the original TLSs by the hosting group, and reports on the TLS implementation in classroom practice in the original and in the host context. Content analysis was used to analyze data. Results show that the similarities between the two national curricula and interactions between the involved groups acted mainly as facilitators of the transfer process