Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions

This is the first report from research commissioned by Becta into Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4. This report describes findings from an additional literature review of the then current landscape concerning learner use of Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for teachers, schools, local authorities and policy makers

A Phenomenological Exploration of Adaptation in a Polycontextual Work Environment

The rise of new ways of working through the use of information and communication technology brings about new phenomena that are powerful in the effects that they have on people. The potency of phenomenology lies in its philosophical simplicity and it provides the researcher with the ability to study the essence of an observable but scarcely understood phenomena: How do people perform effectively and efficiently in a geographically and temporally dispersed work environment? Collective action across multiple time zones continues to challenge both academics and practioners. This study provides a unique view of how globally dispersed participants achieve collective action. It throws light into how the creation of shared understanding is tempered by differences in time zones and how participants adapt through their choice of media, work practices and communication. Following an analysis of a case studied using phenomenology, this paper concludes with a model of adaptation in polycontextual work environments

Consensus making in requirements negotiation : the communication perspective

When developing an Information System (IS), organizational goals of various stakeholders are commonly in direct conflict. Furthermore, individuals often rank their private objectives well over their management\u27s directions. Recognising and reconciling all these diverse goals, and reaching agreement among the stakeholders, are prerequisite to establishing project cooperation and collaboration. This paper focuses, in particular, on the negotiation and consensus making during requirements elicitation - the earliest stages of the IS development process. As requirements elicitation involves rich communication between project stakeholders, we therefore explore negotiation and consensus making from the communication perspective. The resulting model assists our understanding of the communication factors that influence the consensus process during requirements negotiation.<br /

Personalised Learning: Developing a Vygotskian Framework for E-learning

Personalisation has emerged as a central feature of recent educational strategies in the UK and abroad. At the heart of this is a vision to empower learners to take more ownership of their learning and develop autonomy. While the introduction of digital technologies is not enough to effect this change, embedding the affordances of new technologies is expected to offer new routes for creating personalised learning environments. The approach is not unique to education, with consumer technologies offering a 'personalised' relationship which is both engaging and dynamic, however the challenge remains for learning providers to capture and transpose this to educational contexts. As learners begin to utilise a range of tools to pursue communicative and collaborative actions, the first part of this paper will use analysis of activity logs to uncover interesting trends for maturing e-learning platforms across over 100 UK learning providers. While personalisation appeals to marketing theories this paper will argue that if learning is to become personalised one must ask what the optimal instruction for any particular learner is? For Vygotsky this is based in the zone of proximal development, a way of understanding the causal-dynamics of development that allow appropriate pedagogical interventions. The second part of this paper will interpret personalised learning as the organising principle for a sense-making framework for e-learning. In this approach personalised learning provides the context for assessing the capabilities of e-learning using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as the framework for assessing learner potential and development

Leading Communities of Practice in Social Work. Groupwork or management?

Social work in the UK has undergone a period of momentous change in the last decade with the introduction of a ‘modernising agenda’ that has increased managerial approaches to the organisation, development and delivery of services. Whilst posing a threat to some, these approaches are embedded and social workers must find ways of working within them to synthesise appropriate responses that promote the values and cultural heritage of social work within the new context. This paper considers the possibilities offered by communities of practice to develop learning organisations in which a managed and participatory approach to social care can be generated. A super-ordinate model of contending cultures is developed and practice that draws on and is predicated by groupwork principles is presented as a potential way forward

Interaction and Learning in an Extensive Reading Book Club.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Intra-active signatures in Capoeira: more-than-human pathways towards activism

This paper is informed by interdisciplinary research, practice and activism (Allegranti and Silas 2014; 2016, 2017) combining dance movement psychotherapy, cognitive neuroscience and the Afro-Brazilian art of Capoeira. Framed by feminist new materialism and posthumanism (Manning 2013; Harraway 2012; Barad 2007), and as an antidote to our global crisis, this writing foregrounds conceptual and political discourses that work towards counterhegemonic understandings of bodies, affect, brain activity and relating. Here, we present case studies arising from our ‘Capoeira Lab’ a hybrid laboratory, dance studio and psychotherapeutic space that demonstrates more-than-humanism in action, and what happens when insights from psychotherapy, neuroscience and capoeira are read through one another. To paraphrase Barad (2007), we propose Intra-active Signatures: a distributed and dynamic process between bodies, technology and environments – typified by the capoeira exchange. This more-than-human focus dislocates the centrality of the human and the cognitive bias instead, yielding ecologically renewable and neurodiverse ways human-environment relating and enacting ethical change. Ripples of move- ment in relating evolve micro acts of activism