An investigation into children's agency : children's initiatives and practitioners' responses in Finnish early childhood education

This paper investigates adult–child interaction in the early years of education. The intention is to understand how children's initiatives and practitioners’ responses support and/or hinder children's agency. Our ethnographic data include 150 h of video data supplemented by observational field notes from a Finnish Early Childhood Education (ECE) centre with eight five-year-old children and two ECE practitioners. The video data were analysed abductively by using an Interaction Analysis method. The children's initiatives were found to manifest in several modes, namely asking a question, suggesting, challenging, refusing and ideating. The responses to these initiatives by the ECE practitioners included accepting, accepting after a rejection, adapting, rejecting or ignoring. The analysis points to ways in which adult–child relationships are negotiated in everyday activities, showing the relational nature of agency and suggesting that the ways in which adult engages in the child's initiations are an intricate part of children's agency.Peer reviewe

Teacher interventions in students’ collaborative work in a technology-rich educational makerspace

This study reports on an investigation of teacher interventions in students' collaborative work in an educational makerspace. We draw on a qualitative analysis of video data on teacher-student interaction derived from 94 students (aged 9-12) and their teachers in a Finnish school. The results show that the teacher interventions were both student- and teacher-initiated. Three leading teacher intervention strategies were identified, namely authoritative, orchestrating and unleashing which emerged in teacher-student interactions dealing with conceptual, procedural, technological, behavioural and motivational issues. The study demonstrates the demands makerspaces pose for teacher-student interaction, and how moving from authoritative to collaborative interaction requires collective efforts and cultural change.Peer reviewe

Online condition monitoring of MV cable feeders using Rogowski coil sensors for PD measurements

Condition monitoring is a highly effective prognostic tool for incipient insulation degradation to avoid sudden failures of electrical components and to keep the power network in operation. Improved operational performance of the sensors and effective measurement techniques could enable the development of a robust monitoring system. This paper addresses two main aspects of condition monitoring: an enhanced design of an induction sensor that has the capability of measuring partial discharge (PD) signals emerging simultaneously from medium voltage cables and transformers, and an integrated monitoring system that enables the monitoring of a wider part of the cable feeder. Having described the conventional practices along with the authors' own experiences and research on non-intrusive solutions, this paper proposes an optimum design of a Rogowski coil that can measure the PD signals from medium voltage cables, its accessories, and the distribution transformers. The proposed PD monitoring scheme is implemented using the directional sensitivity capability of Rogowski coils and a suitable sensor installation scheme that leads to the development of an integrated monitoring model for the components of a MV cable feeder. Furthermore, the paper presents forethought regarding huge amount of PD data from various sensors using a simplified and practical approach. In the perspective of today's changing grid, the presented idea of integrated monitoring practices provide a concept towards automated condition monitoring.This work is done under the project Smart Condition Monitoring of Power Grid that is funded by the Academy of Finland (Grant No. 309412)

“My Treasure Box” : Pedagogical documentation, digital portfolios and children’s agency in Finnish early years education

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with the inclusive use of digital portfolios in pedagogical documentation in Finnish early childhood education (ECE), and examines children’s participation and agency in the process. The chapter draws upon empirical data from the research and development programme of three Finnish municipalities and their ECE centres. Altogether, the empirical data comprise the digital portfolios of 71 children from six ECE groups each comprising of children aged 3 to 5 years old. This writing demonstrates how the construction of digital portfolios in these ECE groups produced a dynamic tension between the adults’ and children’s agency; between digital archiving and narrative documentation of the children’s lived experiences; and between documentation and reflection. The results also indicate how digital portfolios created inequality among the children regarding the ways in which the children were seen and heard in their portfolios, and how they were able to participate and demonstrate agency in this process. The chapter concludes by considering the conditions of participatory work in ECE classrooms in which the child’s agency. matters.Peer reviewe

Dissolving the digital divide : Creating coherence in young people's social ecologies of learning and identity building

This chapter discusses current research on educational efforts to connect school learning with young people’s digital practices in- and out-of-school. Instead of focusing on divides between in-school and out-of-school learning or between the “digital generation” and other age groups, in this chapter we discuss what recent research says about the ways in which school can become a space in which young people’s digital practices can transformatively converge with schooling, and how this convergence is related to their learning and identity building. We begin our narrative reflection of current research by focusing on the myth of digital natives. Next, we will conceptualize recent efforts to researching and understanding young people’s engagement, learning and identity building across sites and contexts. We will then turn to illuminating some key rationales of current educational research on creating convergence in young people’s social ecologies via the use of digital technologies and media. We conclude our reflections by pointing out that although there are some promising findings on how digital technologies and media can create convergence in young people’s engagement and learning across sites and contexts, less research attention is given to young people’s personal sense-making and self-making mediated by their digital practices, and how formal education could build on those practices for academic, vocational and/or civic ends.Peer reviewe

Towards automated analysis of research methods in library and information science

Previous studies of research methods in Library and Information Science (LIS) lack consensus in how to define or classify research methods, and there have been no studies on automated recognition of research methods in the scientific literature of this field. This work begins to fill these gaps by studying how the scope of “research methods” in LIS has evolved, and the challenges in automatically identifying the usage of research methods in LIS literature. A total of 2,599 research articles are collected from three LIS journals. Using a combination of content analysis and text mining methods, a sample of this collection is coded into 29 different concepts of research methods and is then used to test a rule-based automated method for identifying research methods reported in the scientific literature. We show that the LIS field is characterized by the use of an increasingly diverse range of methods, many of which originate outside the conventional boundaries of LIS. This implies increasing complexity in research methodology and suggests the need for a new approach towards classifying LIS research methods to capture the complex structure and relationships between different aspects of methods. Our automated method is the first of its kind in LIS, and sets an important reference for future research

Sociomaterial movements of students' engagement in a school's makerspace

This study investigates the sociomaterial movements of student engagement in a school's makerspace. Here, we understand sociomaterial movements as emergent and relational, comprising complex dynamics of agency across students, teachers and materials in situated, culturally framed activities. Our study draws on data comprising 85 hours of video recordings of 9-12-year-old students' (N = 94) engagement in a technology-rich makerspace in a Finnish elementary school. The video data were transcribed and analyzed qualitatively using a multimodal interaction analysis. The sociomaterial movements were found to be displayed across a tension-laden continuum between (1) procedural activity-analysis and reflection; (2) individual activity-collaboration; (3) "doing school"-empowerment; and d) alienation-identification. Together, the study offers a potential approach for investigating and understanding the often overlooked workings of sociomateriality that constitutes students' emergent engagement and learning opportunities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEAM) learning contexts.Peer reviewe

Motive-demand dynamics creating a social context for students’ learning experiences in a making and design environment

Making and design environments, often referred to as makerspaces, have aroused recent educational interest. These environments typically consist of spaces that support interest-driven engagement in hands-on creative activities with a range of digital artefacts. Although a variety of benefits from participating in making and design activities have been proposed, we currently have limited understanding of students’ learning experiences in makerspaces situated in schools. Following Hedegaards’ conceptualisations, we investigate motive-demand dynamics in students’ social activity in a school-based digital making and design environment, ‘The FUSE Studio’. We highlight our findings via vignettes selected from 65 h of video recordings of 94 students (aged between 9 and 12 years old) carrying out activities; the recordings were collected intermittently from an elective course over one semester. Our study illustrates how the students’ learning experiences were shaped through tension-laden interplay between the motives and demands of their activity situated across personal, relational and institutional contexts. The findings make visible how established ways of working and being at school interacted and came into tension with the students’ motive orientations, thereby limiting and at times transforming the social context of their learning. Our work also demonstrates how the analysis of motive-demand dynamics offers one useful conceptual tool to unpack students’ learning experiences in novel learning environments.Peer reviewe

The Core Interaction of Platforms: How Startups Connect Users and Producers

The platform economy is disrupting innovation while presenting both opportunities and challenges for startups. Platforms support value creation between multiple participant groups, and this operationalization of an ecosystem's value co-creation represents the "core interaction" of a platform. This article focuses on that core interaction and studies how startups connect producers and users in value-creating core interaction through digital platforms. The study is based on an analysis of 29 cases of platform startups interviewed at a leading European startup event. The studied startups were envisioning even millions of users and hundreds or thousands of producers co-creating value on their platforms. In such platform businesses, our results highlight the importance of attracting a large user pool, providing novel services to those users, offering a new market for producers, supporting the core interaction in various ways, and utilizing elements of the platform canvas - an adaptation of the business model canvas, which we have accommodated for platform-based business models - to accomplish these goals

Childhood cognitive ability and physical activity in young adulthood

Objective: Childhood cognitive ability is associated with lifestyle in adulthood, including self-reported physical activity (PA). We examined whether childhood cognitive ability is associated with objectively-measured PA and sedentary time (ST) in young adulthood. Methods: Participants of the Arvo Ylppö Longitudinal Study (n=500) underwent tests of general reasoning, visuo-motor integration, verbal competence and language comprehension at the age of 56 months yielding a general intelligence factor score; at the age of 25 years they wore omnidirectional accelerometers for 9 days (Range=4-10 days) measuring overall daily PA (counts per minute, cpm), ST and light and moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) (minutes), and completed a questionnaire on occupational, commuting, leisure-time conditioning and non-conditioning PA. Results: After adjustment for sex, age, BMI-for-age SD score at 56 months and mean of valid minutes of measurement period for PA, per each one SD increase in the childhood general intelligence factor score, overall daily PA decreased by -8.99 CPM/day, ST increased by 14.93 minutes/day, time spent in light PA decreased by -14.39 minutes/day, and the odds per each level increase in physical demandingness of the work and in time spent in non-conditioning leisure-time PA decreased by 38% and 31%, respectively (p-values<0.04). These associations were mediated via higher young adulthood level of education. Conclusions: In contrast to expected, in this cohort of young adults with high variability in PA, of whom many were still studying, higher childhood cognitive ability was associated with more objectively-measured and self-reported physical inactivity. Whether these findings persist beyond young adulthood is a subject of further studies