A Bricolage of Critical Hermeneutics, Abductive Reasoning, and Action Research for Advancing Humanistic Values through Organization Development Practice

This is an emergent and auto-ethnographic study to find ways for the practice of organization development (OD) to recover and sustain humanism in the workplace. It begins with a literature review hermeneutically exploring the history and relevance of three modes of inquiry—hermeneutics, abductive reasoning, and action research—paratactically, which is to say, separately without overlap or reference to each other—to future OD practice. These three modes were selected from an extended literature search for non-reductive modes of inquiry that could address the range of human interests and workplace disease as I understand them. I combined my strong background reading on hermeneutics with the abductive reasoning of C. S. Peirce as two of the modes for review and also reflexively as part of my own methodology. The third mode, action research, is borrowed from the work of Kurt Lewin and his tradition in OD, known for its humanistic and democratic aims. Also included in the literature review is a report on the some of the more salient challenges and opportunities currently confronting the practice of organization development (OD) to provide a context for practical expression of my emerging discoveries. Following the literature review, I hermeneutically surfaced submerged, tacit (hidden-from-consciousness) generative connections from the confluence (flowing together) of the three modes, as they abductively emerged from within my expanding hermeneutic experience (known as a horizon) with the literature review. I then interpret the tacit relevance of that confluence through my life experience, for illuminating those OD challenges and opportunities. Finally this study integrates a sequence of critical hermeneutic and abductive processes in a participatory action research (PAR) pathway leading to plateaus of discovery and renewal through facilitation by humanistically oriented OD praxis. I conclude with five abduced interventions hypothetically drawn from personal case studies. My audience are OD practitioners inclined to develop wholistic humanism in the workplace through facilitative immersion with small groups and micro-cultures. Here they may find enlarged conceptual frames to reconceptualize OD, engage clients in transformative dialogue, and create actionable knowledge in their practice

Metalinear cinematic narrative : theory, process, and tool

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-218).Media entertainment technology is evolving rapidly. From radio to broadcast television to cable television, from motion picture film to the promise of digital video disks, as the media evolves, so do the stories told over these media. We already share many more stories and more types of stories from many more sources than we did a decade ago. This is due in part to the development of computer technology, the globalization of computer networks, and the emerging new medium which is an amalgam of television and the internet. The storyteller will need to invent new creative processes and work with new tools which support this new medium, this new narrative form. This thesis proposes the name Metalinear Narrative for the new narrative form. The metalinear narrative is a collection of small related story pieces designed to be arranged in many different ways, to tell many different linear stories from different points of view, with the aid of a story engine. Agent Stories is the software tool developed as part of this research for designing and presenting metalinear cinematic narratives. Agent Stories is comprised of a set of environments for authoring pieces of stories, authoring the relationships between the many story pieces, and for designing an abstract narrative structure for sequencing those pieces. Agent Stories also provides a set of software agents called story agents, which act as the drivers of the story engine. My thesis is that a writing tool which offers the author knowledgeable feedback about narrative construction and context during the creative process is essential to the task of creating metalinear narratives of significant dimension.by Kevin Michael Brooks.Ph.D

THE EFFECT OF HAPTIC INTERACTION AND LEARNER CONTROL ON STUDENT PERFORMANCE IN AN ONLINE DISTANCE EDUCATION COURSE

Today’s learners are taking advantage of a whole new world of multimedia and hypermedia experiences to gain understanding and construct knowledge. While at the same time, teachers and instructional designers are producing these experiences at rapid paces. Many angles of interactivity with digital content continue to be researched, as is the case with this study. The purpose of this study is to determine whether there is a significant difference in the performance of distance education students who exercise learner control interactivity effectively through a traditional input device versus students who exercise learner control interactivity through haptic input methods. This study asks three main questions about the relationship and potential impact touch input had on the interactivity sequence a learner chooses while participating in an online distance education course. Effects were measured by using criterion from logged assessments within one module of a distance education course. This study concludes that learner control sequence choices did have significant effects on learner outcomes. However, input method did not. The sequence that learners chose had positive effects on scores, the number of attempts it took to pass assessments, and the overall range of scores per assessment attempts. Touch input learners performed as well as traditional input learners, and summative first sequence learners outperformed all other learners. These findings support the beliefs that new input methods are not detrimental and that learner-controlled options while participating in digital online courses are valuable for learners, under certain conditions

Configuration Management of Distributed Systems over Unreliable and Hostile Networks

Economic incentives of large criminal profits and the threat of legal consequences have pushed criminals to continuously improve their malware, especially command and control channels. This thesis applied concepts from successful malware command and control to explore the survivability and resilience of benign configuration management systems. This work expands on existing stage models of malware life cycle to contribute a new model for identifying malware concepts applicable to benign configuration management. The Hidden Master architecture is a contribution to master-agent network communication. In the Hidden Master architecture, communication between master and agent is asynchronous and can operate trough intermediate nodes. This protects the master secret key, which gives full control of all computers participating in configuration management. Multiple improvements to idempotent configuration were proposed, including the definition of the minimal base resource dependency model, simplified resource revalidation and the use of imperative general purpose language for defining idempotent configuration. Following the constructive research approach, the improvements to configuration management were designed into two prototypes. This allowed validation in laboratory testing, in two case studies and in expert interviews. In laboratory testing, the Hidden Master prototype was more resilient than leading configuration management tools in high load and low memory conditions, and against packet loss and corruption. Only the research prototype was adaptable to a network without stable topology due to the asynchronous nature of the Hidden Master architecture. The main case study used the research prototype in a complex environment to deploy a multi-room, authenticated audiovisual system for a client of an organization deploying the configuration. The case studies indicated that imperative general purpose language can be used for idempotent configuration in real life, for defining new configurations in unexpected situations using the base resources, and abstracting those using standard language features; and that such a system seems easy to learn. Potential business benefits were identified and evaluated using individual semistructured expert interviews. Respondents agreed that the models and the Hidden Master architecture could reduce costs and risks, improve developer productivity and allow faster time-to-market. Protection of master secret keys and the reduced need for incident response were seen as key drivers for improved security. Low-cost geographic scaling and leveraging file serving capabilities of commodity servers were seen to improve scaling and resiliency. Respondents identified jurisdictional legal limitations to encryption and requirements for cloud operator auditing as factors potentially limiting the full use of some concepts

An Eurhythmatic Response to Adaptive Accrual: A Rhetoric of Adaptation

This dissertation applies to the study of adaptation principles of rhetoric, transtextual analysis and visual semiotics. It posits that adaptations are imitations-with-variations and that rather than existing in binary, one-to-one correspondence with their models, adaptations and their models accrue semiosis, forming large “megatexts.” These megatexts are composed of networks of associations that have meaning and change according to their contexts. Adaptation analysis becomes a matter of reading associations and textual linkages, or “reading through” the accrued texts. Eurhythmatic analysis, an analytical strategy drawn from both ancient and modern rhetoric, accounts for these variations while emphasizing the material contexts out of which variations emerge. This project uses these rhetorical strategies to address issues particular to new media adaptations, such as the nature of authorial ethos and identity in a marketplace of competing adaptations and collaborative creation. It examines the process of rhetorical identification that occurs in video game adaptations which ostensibly claim the same model, yet vie for legitimacy – children squabbling for the birthright of the recognized heir. Finally, this thesis examines the new adaptive possibilities opened up by the DVD anthologizing process whereby diverse texts are brought under a titular umbrella. These texts and the navigational overlays designed to constrain and control them, blur the otherwise clear boundaries between adaptation and model, between inside and out. In transtextual terms, this distinctive adaptive form is an internal hypertext, or an adaptation situated on the threshold that distinguishes the paratext from the hypertext

MODELING MULTIPLE SOURCE USE: USING LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS AND SOURCE USE BEHAVIORS TO PREDICT RESPONSE QUALITY

Multiple source use (MSU) has been identified as both a critical competency and a key challenge for today's students, living in the digital age (Goldman & Scardamalia, 2013b). Theoretical models of multiple source use provide insights into how the MSU process unfolds and identify points at which students may encounter challenges (i.e., in source selection, processing, and evaluation, Rouet & Britt). However, understandings of MSU have been limited by two gaps in the literature. First, while points of challenge in students' MSU process have been examined independently, comprehensive models considering the joint role of source selection, processing, and evaluation in task performance have not been fully investigated. Further, while research on MSU has focused on students' behaviors when engaging with texts, individual difference factors have been considered only to a limited extent, despite their theorized importance (Rouet, 2006). The purpose of the present study was to examine the extent to which multiple source use behaviors (i.e., source selection, processing, and evaluation) and learner characteristics (i.e., prior knowledge, domain general source evaluation behaviors, stances on the target issue) predicted open-ended task performance, both independently and in conjunction with one another. Participants were 197 undergraduate students, asked to complete measures assessing their prior knowledge, stances on the Arab Spring in Egypt, the topic of the task, and domain general source evaluation behaviors. Then, participants were tasked with using a library of six sources to respond to a controversial prompt about a contemporary event (i.e., Arab Spring in Egypt). While students engaged with sources, log data of source use were collected (e.g., number of sources accessed, time on texts) and participants were asked to rate sources accessed in terms of trustworthiness, usefulness, and interestingness. Four indices were used to assess open-ended response quality: (a) word count, (b) the number of arguments included in students' responses, (c) scores on the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982), reflecting the extent to which students' responses integrated and evaluated information presented across texts, and (d) the number of citations in students' answers. Key findings included the role of students' ratings of source interestingness and time on texts as predictive of open-ended task performance. Further, students' accessing of document information about sources (e.g., author credentials that may aid in source evaluation, Britt & Aglinskas, 2002) and trustworthiness evaluations were found to be associated with SOLO scores. Overall, as compared to multiple source use behaviors, learner characteristics were found to have a more limited effect on task performance. Findings are discussed and implications for theoretical conceptions of multiple source use and instructional practice are presented

PROTOTYPING PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES : Reading Frank Gehry’s experiments through Deleuze and Guattari

This thesis attempts to describe and interpret the design practice of an American architect, Frank O. Gehry through concepts developed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator, French psychotherapist, philosopher and activist, Félix Guattari. At the same time, prototyping a website-based interactive project called PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES, it explores an alternative form for the Doctoral thesis. In addition to connections with visual arts, such as painting and cinema, the experimental project PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES includes references to concepts and phenomena from various areas of knowledge revealing distinctive, unusual qualities of Gehry’s creative approach in the production of design artefacts. The thesis documents and discusses means of representation in architectural design fused into the specific creative culture of Frank O. Gehry. It notices that the discourse in architectural theory and practice, often neglects what occurs on a particular molecular level of the architectural design process. It shows that elements of micro-level of design procedures render Gehry’s idiosyncratic design phenomena intelligible and perceptible in a new way. It claims that it has been possible because Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts become perceptibly operational in the interpretation of such phenomena, at the level of elementary units of Gehry’s design procedures. Moreover, through this close-up perspective, the thesis’ investigations identify certain similarities in the operational modes of the architect and the painter. It demonstrates how Gehry, who has anchored his interest in painting, and specifically in what he defined as ‘immediacy in painting,’ was able to transform the practice of architectural drawing from projective to a cognitive one. It also shows, how the architect re-defines the commonly applied projective geometries from passive, arbitrary role to an active agent, and how the architect links drawing practice with the construction process on a new, almost palpable level. While stressing its the manual character, the thesis demonstrates that Gehry’s explorative culture of challenging means of representation employed in architectural design production facilitates the re-disciplining of architecture culminating in the integration of the CATIA system in the design procedures. This study of Gehry’s design actions and strategies can help the reader to understand the significance of experimental and intuitive design practices. The thesis proposes the Deleuzian interpretation of Gehry’s experiments in the aesthetics of design thinking and acting. It renders perceptions of patterns, according to which, other design practices can operate

Poetic Machines: an investigation into the impact of the characteristics of the digital apparatus on poetic expression

This thesis aims to investigate digital methods of signification in order to examine the impact of the apparatus on poetic expression. This is done through a critical analysis of the translation process from analogue to digital, in the sense that even as we read a page we are in fact translating sight into sound. The resulting effects of this change in form are explored in order to understand their impact on meaning-making in the digital realm. Through this interrogation the comprehension and definition of ePoetry (electronic poetry or digital poetry) is extended, by exposing the unique affordances and specificities of digital expression. Digital poetry theorists such as Loss Pequeño Glazier posit that the emerging field of electronic literature is composed of interweaving strands from the areas of computer science, sociology, and literary studies. This is reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, which necessitates an engagement with the broad areas of translation, literature, and digital media studies. Currently the pervasiveness of digital technology and access to the Internet means that the creation and consumption of online content such as ePoetry is becoming seamless and apparently effortless. Whilst recent studies have explored electronic literature as a field, there is a noticeable deficit of research that specifically focuses on ePoetry, a deficit that this thesis seeks to rectify. Within this work cybernetic and technosocial theories of communication are drawn on which provide as much emphasis on the apparatus, as is afforded to the author and reader. Traditional poetry criticism is problematised with reference to its suitability for application to online works in order to develop a comprehensive ePoetry rhetoric that explores not only what is being said, but also crucially how it is being said. Theories of translation are also used as a context in which to analyse the transposition of poetry from analogue to digital. This framework then forms the basis for a study that explores the move from print to pixel by analysing qualitative ePoet interviews as well as their corresponding ePoems