Impacts of Service Learning on Undergraduate Teaching Assistants in an After-School Program: A Qualitative Approach to Discovery

This qualitative study took a phenomenological approach to examine undergraduate teaching assistants’ experiences with CARE Now, a service learning after-school program. The purpose of this study was to identify impacts of the service learning program on the teaching assistants through semi-structured interviews. This study expands on prevalent service learning research by exploring the experiences of students’ leading their peers in a service learning project. Findings suggest that internal motivations, personal challenges and support, resiliency, contextual challenges, transformational experience, growth, and advocacy are all perceived impacts teaching assistants encounter. Suggestions for future research are provided

Mentoring for Nursing Research: Students\u27 Perspectives and Experiences

This paper explores the connection between nursing research and mentorship. The importance of nursing research and the concept of mentoring are discussed based on a review of the literature. Using personal experiences of undergraduate research assistants, positive outcomes of mentorship are explained. Outcomes cited include collaborative effort on projects, future aspirations, preparedness for evidence-based practice, improved patient care, personal and professional development, and increased exposure and awareness of research. The relevance of mentoring to current and future nursing research is described

Research assistants’ perception of mistreatment and the strategies they prefer to overcome this mistreatment

The purpose of this study is to determine research assistants’ perception of mistreatment from other faculty members and the strategies they prefer to overcome this mistreatment. The sample of this study includes 255 research assistants who work at seven faculties at Kocaeli University, Turkey. This study is in the descriptive survey model. In order to measure research assistants’ perception of mistreatment, “Mistreatment Scale” developed by Harlos and Axelrod (2005) and adapted to Turkish by Günçavdı and Polat (2015); and in order to measure strategies which research assistants prefer to overcome this mistreatment, “Secondary Appraisal Scale” developed by Rogers (1998) were used as data collection tools. It has been found out that research assistants’ perception of mistreatment from faculty showed significant difference depending on personal and organizational variables.  Also it has been found out that research assistants used “barriers” strategies mostly to overcome mistreatment. This research has given an idea about research assistants’ experiences about being exposed to mistreatment, but this study is limited to students at Kocaeli University. In the future researches, the samples can be extended by taking research assistants who work at other universities as the sample. 

Dialogue with computers: dialogue games in action

With the advent of digital personal assistants for mobile devices, systems that are marketed as engaging in (spoken) dialogue have reached a wider public than ever before. For a student of dialogue, this raises the question to what extent such systems are genuine dialogue partners. In order to address this question, this study proposes to use the concept of a dialogue game as an analytical tool. Thus, we reframe the question as asking for the dialogue games that such systems play. Our analysis, as applied to a number of landmark systems and illustrated with dialogue extracts, leads to a fine-grained classification of such systems. Drawing on this analysis, we propose that the uptake of future generations of more powerful dialogue systems will depend on whether they are self-validating. A self-validating dialogue system can not only talk and do things, but also discuss the why of what it says and does, and learn from such discussions

This Time It's Personal: from PIM to the Perfect Digital Assistant

Interacting with digital PIM tools like calendars, to-do lists, address books, bookmarks and so on, is a highly manual, often repetitive and frequently tedious process. Despite increases in memory and processor power over the past two decades of personal computing, not much has changed in the way we engage with such applications. We must still manually decompose frequently performed tasks into multiple smaller, data specific processes if we want to be able to recall or reuse the information in some meaningful way. "Meeting with Yves at 5 in Stata about blah" breaks down into rigid, fixed semantics in separate applications: data to be recorded in calendar fields, address book fields and, as for the blah, something that does not necessarily exist as a PIM application data structure. We argue that a reason Personal Information Management tools may be so manual, and so effectively fragmented, is that they are not personal enough. If our information systems were more personal, that is, if they knew in a manner similar to the way a personal assistant would know us and support us, then our tools would be more helpful: an assistive PIM tool would gather together the necessary material in support of our meeting with Yves. We, therefore, have been investigating the possible paths towards PIM tools as tools that work for us, rather than tools that seemingly make us work for them. To that end, in the following sections we consider how we may develop a framework for PIM tools as "perfect digital assistants" (PDA). Our impetus has been to explore how, by considering the affordances of a Real World personal assistant, we can conceptualize a design framework, and from there a development program for a digital simulacrum of such an assistant that is not for some far off future, but for the much nearer term

Situating approaches to interactive museum guides

This paper examines the current state of museum guide technologies and applications in order to develop an analytical foundation for future research on an adaptive museum guide for families. The analysis focuses on three critical areas of interest in considering group and social interaction in museums: tangibility the role of tangible user interfaces; interaction visit types and visit flows; and adaptivity user modeling approaches. It concludes with a discussion of four interrelated trajectories for interactive museum guide research including embodied interaction, gameplay, transparent and opaque interaction and the role of personal digital assistants

Towards solidarity: working relations in personal assistance

This article explores personal assistance from the assistants' perspectives. Many assistants are satisfied with their work and the possibility to combine the work with other activities on a flexible basis. However, the structural framework of the personal assistance scheme creates risks for the workers who carry out the assistance. These risks are related to strong user control, intimate and personalized relations, part-time work, weakly formalized working conditions and few chances to gain qualifications for future employment opportunities. The gendered labour market is also a structural condition of the scheme. The article focuses on three theoretical working life discussions: flexibility, professionalization and co-determination (between service user and assistant). The article reveals the specific and inverted form these processes are transformed into by the personal assistance scheme and suggests that they create barriers for sustainable working conditions for the assistants as well as options for developing solidarity between service users and assistants

Neither friend, nor device: the role of personal epistemologies in communication with smart speakers

With smart speakers diffusing into society, artificial intelligence is moving from the imaginative reservoirs of dystopian storytelling into vernacular living. How do users perceive communication with it? Are Alexa and Siri considered simple devices, sentient assistants, or even artificial friends? Based on nine qualitative interviews with former smart speaker users in Germany, this study analyzes smart speaker use and related personal epistemologies within a media repertoire perspective. By presenting six interrelated action-guiding principles explaining smart speaker use and people’s ambivalent sensemaking, we argue that smart speakers appear neither as friends nor as mere neutral devices to their users. The identified principles explain the peripheral role of smart speakers within media repertoires as handy but suspicious gimmicks. For future smart speaker adoption, whether smart assistants are interpreted as simple-minded, exploitative gimmicks or relevant, reliable, and trustworthy companions will be crucial