The plight of the sense-making ape

This is a selective review of the published literature on object-choice tasks, where participants use directional cues to find hidden objects. This literature comprises the efforts of researchers to make sense of the sense-making capacities of our nearest living relatives. This chapter is written to highlight some nonsensical conclusions that frequently emerge from this research. The data suggest that when apes are given approximately the same sense-making opportunities as we provide our children, then they will easily make sense of our social signals. The ubiquity of nonsensical contemporary scientific claims to the effect that humans are essentially--or inherently--more capable than other great apes in the understanding of simple directional cues is, itself, a testament to the power of preconceived ideas on human perception

Heroes and Victims:Fund Manager Sense-making, Self-legitimation and Storytelling

This paper explores how fund managers continue to do their job when on one level they know they cannot all be exceptional. They do this by telling stories, constructing satisfying narratives to explain to themselves, as well as others, why their investments work out and providing equally plausible reasons for when they underperform. Using the story typology of Gabriel (2000. Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) – epic, tragic, comic and romantic, we explore two sets of fund manager narratives. First, we analyse the transcripts of interviews with 50 equity fund managers in some of the world's largest investment houses. Second, we examine a similar number of published fund manager reports to their investors. In both cases, we show how storytelling is used by asset managers to make sense of what they do and justify their value to themselves as well their clients and employers. Similar processes are employed in both sets of narratives, one verbal and informal, the other written and formal. Our study serves to highlight how storytelling is an integral part of the work of the professional investor

From Information to Sense-Making: Fetching and Querying Semantic Repositories

Information, its gathering, sharing, and storage, is growing at a very rapid rate. Information turned into knowledge leads to sense- making. Ontologies, and their representations in RDF, are increasingly being used to turn information into knowledge. This paper describes how to leverage the power of ontologies and semantic repositories to turn today’s glut of information into sense-making. This would enable better applications to be built making users’ lives easier and more effective

Engaging Processes of Sense-Making and Negotiation in Contemporary Timor-Leste

The articles in this special issue build on past ethnographic inquiries and focus on political and social change since Timor-Leste independence. One of the things we have found particularly exciting about researching post-independent Timor-Leste has been to carry out fieldwork in a context where not just researchers, but also our informants, are caught up in processes of sense-making of determining what kind of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is becoming. The reality of ethnographic research in such a context is far different from, as Ferguson (1999, 208) has it, the archetypal image of the anthropologist dropped into the middle of a cultural homogenous village community where the researcher acquires from local informants a degree of cultural fluency. Rather, while we as researchers have tried to learn about Timor-Leste, our informants, as citizens of a new nation, have been absorbed in a parallel process of learning, deliberating and at times contesting what kind of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is, and should become in the future (see Kammen 2009). In other words, making sense of independent Timor- Leste has, over the past decade, been a project that preoccupies Timorese citizens as much as the foreign researcher. This issue addresses some of these processes of sense-making and negotiation; and highlights the ambiguities and paradoxes, while stressing the heterogeneity and unpredictability of contemporary Timor-Leste

Participatory sense-making in psychotherapy

250 p.La presente tesis propone un enfoque enactivo de la psiquiatría y la psicoterapia que va más allá de una concepción puramente ¿mentalista¿ de la empatía y la alianza terapéutica hacia una perspectiva de segunda persona, destacando el papel constitutivo de la interacción corporal pre-reflectiva entre terapeutas y pacientes en el proceso terapéutico. La tesis se cimienta en la teoría de la intersubjetividad entendida como participatory sense-making, que describe la coordinación de actividades intencionales y no intencionales como vehículo de la emergencia de significados compartidos en las interacciones interpersonales. Se presentan tres trabajos aplicando el marco enactivo a la investigación en psicoterapia: (1) un comentario sobre estudios correlacionales de coordinación no verbal y resultado psicoterapéutico, donde se sugieren nuevas hipótesis de trabajo e interpretaciones de datos empíricos, (2) un análisis interpretativo-fenomenológico de los mecanismos intercorporales pre-reflectivos implicados en la transición de la terapia presencial al formato online, y (3) un análisis y clasificación fenomenológico-enactivo de las intervenciones corporales en los procesos terapéuticos. Estos trabajos demuestran que el marco enactivo promueve una forma particular de investigar psicoterapia

Sense-Making and Library History

A few days before leaving for Philadelphia I was asked to read over a manuscript written by Don Davis, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and one of his doctoral students at Texas, Jon Aho, in which they were kind enough to mention my name, identifying me as a "library historian." I had never really thought of myself as a library historian and am really not sure of exactly what that means—I presume someone who does histories of libraries as opposed to real history. I am not a real historian. I was an English major. The only official course work I have had in history consists of a course taken as an undergraduate at the University of Florida (UF)—a survey of English history—taught by an elderly gentleman who was a holdover from the days before 1947 when UF was a male school. His entire series of lectures quickly degenerated into a series of dirty jokes about Henry VIII, which he told while carefully watching the reactions of the women in the class. This experience, plus a short course in historical methods taken at the insistence of my major professor at Florida State University (FSU) during my doctoral work there, of which I can remember nothing, accounts for my entire academic background in history

Why call bodily sense making "languaging"?

Journal ArticleN/AThe European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013

Sense-Making with Students: An Ethics in Action Case Example

A student has recently returned from a service trip abroad, and meets with her academic advisor to plan classes for the following semester. The advisor is anxious to hear about the student’s experience, but as the student begins to share stories, she reveals some information that raises red flags for the advisor. She begins sharing the pictures she took with members of the host community that she has posted on her Facebook page, and there is little evidence that the host community participated in planning the event in any way. The advisor also suspects that the student has been allowed to complete duties outside her scope of knowledge, and with little supervision. As the advisor pushes on these points of concern, the student becomes frustrated and defensive. She believes the trip did wonders for the community it served, and she is shocked that the advisor might suggest otherwise. The student is planning to apply for professional medical programs and she is certain that this experience will give her a “leg up” in the admission process. The advisor isn’t so sure, and wants to help the student reflect more critically on the experience without shutting down her enthusiasm for serving vulnerable populations

The role of pedagogical tools in active learning: a case for sense-making

Evidence from the research literature indicates that both audience response systems (ARS) and guided inquiry worksheets (GIW) can lead to greater student engagement, learning, and equity in the STEM classroom. We compare the use of these two tools in large enrollment STEM courses delivered in different contexts, one in biology and one in engineering. The instructors studied utilized each of the active learning tools differently. In the biology course, ARS questions were used mainly to check in with students and assess if they were correctly interpreting and understanding worksheet questions. The engineering course presented ARS questions that afforded students the opportunity to apply learned concepts to new scenarios towards improving students conceptual understanding. In the biology course, the GIWs were primarily used in stand-alone activities, and most of the information necessary for students to answer the questions was contained within the worksheet in a context that aligned with a disciplinary model. In the engineering course, the instructor intended for students to reference their lecture notes and rely on their conceptual knowledge of fundamental principles from the previous ARS class session in order to successfully answer the GIW questions. However, while their specific implementation structures and practices differed, both instructors used these tools to build towards the same basic disciplinary thinking and sense-making processes of conceptual reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and metacognitive thinking.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure