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In the field of educational robotics, it is important to understand the processes trough which child-robot interactions are established during play activities. In terms of socio-material characteristics, robots can vary widely, from more mechanical robots to more anthropomorphic ones. Research has shown that the degree of anthropomorphization of the robot has an impact on how children perceive and interact with the robot. The role of the socio-material characteristics is still poorly explore in the 18–36-month age group. The aim of the study was to investigate how the presence of two robots, which differed in their socio-material characteristic of anthropomorphization, shapes both the individual and group play activities of 25 children aged 18–36 months. The children were observed during free group play sessions in which they had access to two types of robots: Idol, with more human-like features, and Pixy, a more mechanical robot with minimal anthropomorphism. Observations made through video recordings were transcribed. Qualitative analysis was conducted, and six units of analysis of children’s interaction with robots were identified. The main finding from our study is that children as early as 18 months are sensitive to the socio-material characteristics of the robotic artefact, influencing the way they interact with the robot and with each other. Notably, children displayed more imitation behaviors and social interactions with Idol, the more anthropomorphic robot, while Pixy, the mechanical robot, was primarily explored for its mechanical features. From an educational point of view, we highlight the importance of the construction of the learning environment and the choice of materials to propose to the children in play; the robot could be used to reinforce symbolic play, imitation, and to support group interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed collaborative invention projects by teams of lower-secondary (13–14-year-old) Finnish students. In invention projects, student teams design and make materially embodied collaborative inventions using traditional and digital fabrication technologies. This investigation focused on the student teams' knowledge creation processes by examining how they applied maker practices (i.e., design process, computer engineering, product design, and science practices) in their co-invention projects and the effects of teacher and peer support. In our investigations, we relied on video data and on-site observations, utilizing and further developing visual data analysis methods. Our findings assist in expanding the scope of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) research toward sociomaterially mediated knowledge creation, revealing the open-ended, nonlinear, and self-organized flow of the co-invention projects that take place around digital devices. Our findings demonstrate the practice-based, knowledge-creating nature of these processes, where computer engineering, product design, and science are deeply entangled with design practices. Furthermore, embodied design practices of sketching, practical experimenting, and working with concrete materials were found to be of the essence to inspire and deepen knowledge creation and advancement of epistemic objects. Our findings also reveal how teachers and peer tutor students can support knowledge creation through co-invention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning and working together towards better health outcomes today have become more complex requiring an investigation on how interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional collaboration (IPC) practices could be sustained and further developed. Through a sociomaterial perspective, we can better understand IPE and IPC practices by foregrounding the material aspect of learning and working together and examining its relationship with humans and their interactions. This article aimed to examine existing literature that discusses the application of sociomaterial perspectives in IPE and IPC. A scoping review was conducted following Arksey and O'Malley's framework to explore the extent within the current body of knowledge that discuss how sociomaterial perspective is applied in IPE and IPC practices. A systematic database search was performed in September 2021 to retrieve literature published from 2007 onwards, with forty-three papers meeting the inclusion criteria. These papers included research articles, book chapters, conference papers and commentaries, with the majority originating from Europe. The thematic analysis revealed the following themes: (1) power as a sociomaterial entity shaping IPE and IPC; (2) inclusion of non-health professionals in reimagining IPE and IPC practices, and (3) the critical understanding of sociomateriality. The findings suggest that a sociomaterial perspective can allow for the reimagination of the contemporary and future practices of interprofessionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To acquire information from the real world and respond appropriately to life's circumstances, vision is indispensable for humans. However, due to its ubiquitous nature, we often perceive the world unconsciously, thereby overlooking the opportunity to contemplate the significance of sight. Seeing goes beyond being a mere method of gathering information; it is an act of uncovering new perspectives and engaging in profound exploration. Theories on creative problem-solving strongly advocate for the advantages of adopting multiple viewpoints. By generating a multitude of alternatives through information gleaned from diverse perspectives, we enhance our ability to expand the range of choices available to us, thus facilitating more effective problem-solving. In this paper, we present Posthuman CollectiveEyes, a digital platform that enriches the human act of visual perception by integrating diverse viewpoints such as collective human, augmented human, and nonhuman viewpoints, and constructs posthuman viewpoints from the diverse viewpoints. In the design of Posthuman CollectiveEyes, we adopt the more-than-human perspective, widely employed in the social sciences to analyze the impact of technology on human actions and decision-making in organizations and societies. This perspective enables us to uncover knowledge that conventional human-centered approaches cannot capture, as the objective of Posthuman CollectiveEyes is to expand human cognitive capabilities through enhanced visual perception. The novel contribution of our approach lies in demonstrating that the design of innovative digital platforms aimed at enhancing human abilities necessitates a fresh design approach that incorporates the more-than-human perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asylum determinations are highly complex and difficult decisions. At the heart of this decision lies a credibility assessment of the asylum claimant's narrative, which confronts the decision-maker with a seemingly straightforward question: do I believe this person's story? To uphold legitimacy of this assessment, semi-legal criteria have been established internationally. However, these criteria have been criticized for relying on inaccurate and simplistic assumptions about human behavior, autobiographical memory, and communication. In light of this contestation, I ask how the legal-administrative practice of assessing credibility of asylum applications gains legitimacy in the eyes of the public, policy-makers, and legal professionals despite resting on highly disputable assumptions? To answer this question, I draw on interviews, observations, and written judgements from the Swedish administrative courts to explore how symbolic messages are tacitly conveyed through the use of judicial language, activities, and objects. The analysis suggests that cohesive, albeit tacit, messages about credibility assessments being accurate (rather than arbitrary), objective (rather than subjective), professional (rather than lay), and just (rather than unjust) are produced to both near and distant audiences. The study contributes to the literature on credibility assessments by offering a theoretical perspective that can unpack the relationship between symbolic communication in courts and perceived legitimacy for disputed practices within asylum determinations and migration control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers great potential in organizations. The path to achieving this potential will involve human-AI interworking, as has been confirmed by numerous studies. However, it remains to be explored which direction this interworking of human agents and AI-enabled systems ought to take. To date, research still lacks a holistic understanding of the entangled interworking that characterizes human-AI hybrids, so-called because they form when human agents and AI-enabled systems closely collaborate. To enhance such understanding, this paper presents a taxonomy of human-AI hybrids, developed by reviewing the current literature as well as a sample of 101 human-AI hybrids. Leveraging weak sociomateriality as justificatory knowledge, this study provides a deeper understanding of the entanglement between human agents and AI-enabled systems. Furthermore, a cluster analysis is performed to derive archetypes of human-AI hybrids, identifying ideal–typical occurrences of human-AI hybrids in practice. While the taxonomy creates a solid foundation for the understanding and analysis of human-AI hybrids, the archetypes illustrate the range of roles that AI-enabled systems can play in those interworking scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School spaces, technologies, and educational activities shape each other reciprocally. This mixed-methods study (i) developed a methodological framework for tracing the interdependence between school spaces, digital instruments, and teachers' practices in their use, and (ii) created practice-based knowledge about the relations of teachers' perceptions of educational activities to school spaces in order to acknowledge architects and educational practitioners in designing learning environments that support educational renewal. We participated in the construction process of a new general upper-secondary school building in Finland, taking into consideration the school's operating culture and teachers' pedagogic needs (social aspects), as well as the mediation of school spaces by digitalization and national curriculum reformation (material aspects). The data were collected through a teacher survey (n = 31), teacher interviews (n = 10), and the analysis of group notes that teachers (n = 39) generated in a participatory workshop. The results revealed that teachers consider it critical in the design of new learning environments to foster a collaborative and multidisciplinary school culture that emphasizes learners' wellbeing and inclusion, as well as utilizing readily-available digital instruments with basic-level functionality. The developed methodological framework appeared suitable for visualizing (with radar charts) the sociomaterial interdependence of school spaces, digital instruments, and teachers' personal and collective pedagogical activities. We argue that teachers' perceptions of school spaces, digital instruments, and pedagogic practices entanglement consolidates learning environments design from an educational point of view and should be taken into consideration when constructing new school buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When telework was discussed in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic, the context of staying home was strongly considered. As a result, the primary focus has been on carrying out one's assigned work at home. In other words, people tend to focus on the fact that they can carry out their work without being restricted by location. However, the networked aspect of telework is important. In other words, to realize telework, it is necessary to fully consider the aspect of making one's own work visible and collaborating with others. In this paper, the author clarifies the significance of the "connection" that information systems engender by examining the mechanism of inducing organizational citizenship behaviour from the perspective of "sociomateriality" proposed by Wanda Orlikowski et al. in information systems research. Furthermore, we warn against "discretionary bias," a tendency to "free oneself from the constraints of time and place," which appears, because telework was introduced as a measure to prevent the spread of infection. In addition, this paper examines the case of intranets in the 1990s to clarify the nature of connection through information systems and to find new insights in old cases, just as the Industrial Revolution is referenced in discussions of whether AI will take away jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines Bourdieusian practice with narrative sociomaterial theory to investigate what story of higher education and its purpose is being conveyed to students. Our case study revolves around a Danish university. We conduct a sociomaterial analysis of three university sites: an information day for prospective students, a video of a campus tour, and on-campus signage. We subject photographs of these data and the transcribed video to a sociomaterial analysis of how material objects and human subjects are socially positioned. We find that sociomateriality constructs two conflicting narratives about the purpose of higher education. High school graduates are courted with a narrative of an educational, person-centric, and knowledge-centric journey that will safely lead to favorable professional positions. Upon enrollment a changed, market-centered narrative envisions students as soon-to-be business assets who must self-optimize to forge a career. Both narratives remain at the stage of ante-narrative as they do not provide an ending: while the person-centric narrative is replaced upon enrollment, the business-centric narrative reduces university experiences to the "start" of the students' career. On a sociopolitical level, our case is indicative of the trend of higher education adjusting its symbolic rules to business parameters and thus handing over relative autonomy to the economic field. Moreover, our study entails implications for theory in that it brings together Bourdieusian and Bojean (ante)narrative theory and conceptualizes dominant narratives as nomos. The paper further offers ideas on how to document and analyze data for researchers taking a sociomaterial approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging field of responsible management (RM) studies the integration of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics in managerial practices. Therefore, turning to practice theories for the study of RM appears to hold great promise of conceptual and methodological contribution. We propose a posthumanist practice approach for studying RM-as-practice. Managerial practices are conceived as the agencement of heterogeneous elements (humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans, materials, and discourses) that achieve agency in their being interconnected. Thus, RM is understood as processual, relational, emergent, and sociomaterial. We contribute a framework for the empirical study of RM-as-practice on the basis of three sensitizing concepts: situatedness, sociomateriality, and textures. We further discuss the implications of understanding responsibility as response-ability, an engaged practice for relating to the other and the RM researcher's role as internal to the practice agencement under study, thus, opening the debate on our own response-ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing interest in the use of ethnography as a qualitative research approach to explore, in depth, issues of culture in health professions education (HPE). Our specific focus in this article is incorporating the digital into ethnography. Digital technologies are pervasively and increasingly shaping the way we interact, behave, think, and communicate as health professions educators and learners. Understanding the contemporary culture(s) of HPE thus means paying attention to what goes on in digital spaces. In this paper, we critically consider some of the potential issues when the field of ethnography exists outside the space time continuum, including the need to engage with theory in research about technology and digital spaces in HPE. After a very brief review of the few HPE studies that have used digital ethnography, we scrutinize what can be gained when ethnography encompasses the digital world, particularly in relation to untangling sociomaterial aspects of HPE. We chart the shifts inherent in conducting ethnographic research within the digital landscape, specifically those related to research field, the role of the researcher and ethical issues. We then use two examples to illustrate possible HPE research questions and potential strategies for using digital ethnography to answer those questions: using digital tools in the conduct of an ethnographic study and how to conduct an ethnography of a digital space. We conclude that acknowledging the pervasiveness of technologies in the design, delivery and experiences of HPE opens up new research questions which can be addressed by embracing the digital in ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Simulation as an educational tool is known to have benefits. Moreover, the use of simulation in continuing interprofessional development is vital in rural and remote communities with limited case volumes and resources. This study explored power dynamics between rural simulation participants and urban expert co-debriefers during a simulated operating room crisis and debriefing. The aim is to gain a rich understanding of rural/urban relational dynamics embedded within the constraints and affordances of videoconferencing technology. Methods: In situ observations of a videoconference-enabled simulation and debriefing were conducted, followed by seven semi-structured interviews, in this qualitative case study. A sociomateriality lens with additional sensitizing concepts of power from critical theory was employed to explore human and nonhuman interactions between rural learners, urban co-debriefers, and videoconferencing technology. Results: The interviews exposed subtle expressions of power dynamics at play that were curiously not observable in the enactment of the exercise. Rural learners appreciated the objectivity of the urban debriefers as well as the nurse/physician dyad. However, rural participants appeared to quietly dismiss feedback when it was incongruent with their context. Videoconference technology added both benefits and constraints to these relational dynamics. Discussion: Awareness of power relationships, and insights into affordances and constraints of videoconferencing may enhance operationalization of interprofessional simulation-based education (SBE) in rural and remote contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative expectations are that Governing Boards will be involved in setting the strategic direction of the organisation. However, knowledge of the processes and practices by which Boards engage in strategy is limited. In particular, very few empirical studies have penetrated the 'black box' of the Boardroom and examined the complex Board/Management interactions that amount to Boards 'doing' strategy. Here we address this gap, presenting an in-depth analysis of an unfolding process in which the Board and Management of a single organisation engaged in setting strategic direction over an 18-month period. We observed planning events, video-recorded Board meetings, analysed texts pertaining to the initiative, and spoke to key personnel. We adopt a 'strong' process approach which brings together strategy as process and as practice (SAPP). Our analysis is multi-modal: we track the iterative development of the strategy through documents/texts produced for Board meetings; and we adopt a sociomaterial approach in illuminating the entanglements of the human and nonhuman which constitute strategising. By considering events over a series of episodes, we have built a picture showing how micro-level practices in the Boardroom are layered incrementally in the emergence of strategy at organisational level. Relatedly, we show how these practices enable the Board to negotiate the tensions between control and service/collaboration. Hence the paper contributes to theory and knowledge around Board engagement in strategic activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gap between how learners interpret and act upon feedback has been widely documented in the research literature. What is less certain is the extent to which the modality and materiality of the feedback influence students' and teachers' perceptions. This article explores the semiotic potential of multimodal screen feedback to enhance written feedback. Guided by an "Inquiry Graphics" approach, situated within a semiotic theory of learning edusemiotic conceptual framework, constructions of meaning in relation to screencasting feedback were analysed to determine how and whether it could be incorporated into existing feedback practices. Semi-structured video elicitation interviews with student teachers were used to incorporate both micro and macro levels of analysis. The findings suggested that the relationship between the auditory, visual and textual elements in multimodal screen feedback enriched the feedback process, highlighting the importance of form in addition to content to aid understanding of written feedback. The constitutive role of design and material artefacts in feedback practices in initial teacher training pertinent to these findings is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become ubiquitous as a form of assessment in medical education but involve substantial resource demands and considerable local variation. A detailed understanding of the processes by which OSCEs are designed and administered could improve feasibility and sustainability. This exploration of OSCE design is informed by Practice Theory, which suggests assessment design processes are dynamic, social and situated activities. The overall purpose is to provide insights that inform on-the-ground OSCE administration. Fifteen interviews were conducted with OSCE academics and administrators from three medical schools in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. Drawing from post-qualitative inquiry, Schatzki's Practice Theory was used both as a sensibility and as an analytic framework. OSCE design was characterised by planning activities, administration activities, negotiation activities and bureaucratic activities; it involves significant and resource-intensive effort in negotiation and coordination. There was considerable local variation but at the same time activities were remarkably consonant across national boundaries. There was a tension between general understandings such as reliability and validity that underpin the OSCE and the improvisational practices associated with design and administration. Our findings highlighted the role of blueprints as a key coordinating artefact but with too many rules and procedures prompting cycles of bureaucracy and complexity. Emphasising coordination rather than standardisation might ease workloads, support adaptation to local environments and prevent an overly reductive approach to this assessment format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the notion of 'embodied belonging' through an ethnography of the social and material aspects of accessing mental health care in the UK. I focus on moments of access and transition in a voluntary sector organisation in London: an intercultural psychotherapy centre, serving a range of im/migrant communities. Whilst both 'belonging' and 'place' are often invoked to imply stability, I explore how material contexts of access and inclusion can paradoxically be implicated in the ongoing production of precarity-of unstable, uncertain, and vulnerable ways of being. A sociomaterial analysis of ethnographic material and visual data from two creative mapping interviews attends to material and spatial aspects of the centre and its transitory place in the urban environment. It demonstrates how these aspects of place became entangled in client experiences of access: uncertainties of waiting, ambivalence towards belonging to a particular client group, and questions around deservingness of care. This engendered an embodied and situated experience of 'precarious belonging'. I therefore argue that precarity should be 'placed', both within the concept of embodied belonging, and ethnographically, within the material constraints, impermanence, and spatial politics of projects to include the excluded in UK mental health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surgeons practice their own variations on a procedure. Residents experience shifting thresholds between variations that one surgeon holds firmly as principle and another takes more lightly as preference. Such variability has implications for surgical education, but the impact is not well understood. This is a critical problem to investigate as programs seek to define procedures for competency-based medical education (CBME) and improve learning through deliberate practice. Our study analyzes the emergence of procedural variation in an early-adopter CBME program through a situational analysis of tonsillectomy, a foundation level procedure in this otolaryngology, head and neck surgical program. An earlier phase of the study identified frequent variations (n = 12) on tonsillectomy among co-located surgeons who routinely perform this procedure (n = 6). In the phase reported here we interviewed these surgeons (n = 4) and residents at different stages of training (n = 3) about their experiences of these variations to map the relations of contributing social and material actors. Our results show that even a basic procedure resists standardization. This study contributes a sociomaterial grounded theory of surgical practice as an embodied response to conditions materialized by intra-relations of human and more-than-human actors. Shifting root metaphors about practice in surgical education from standardization to stabilization can help residents achieve stable-for-now embodiments of performance as their practice thresholds continue to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contexts and methods for communicating in healthcare and health professions education (HPE) profoundly affect how we understand information, relate to others, and construct our identities. Multimodal analysis provides a method for exploring how we communicate using multiple modes—e.g., language, gestures, images—in concert with each other and within specific contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate how multimodal analysis helps us investigate the ways our communication practices shape healthcare and HPE. We provide an overview of the theoretical underpinnings, traditions, and methodologies of multimodal analysis. Then, we illustrate how to design and conduct a study using one particular approach to multimodal analysis, multimodal (inter)action analysis, using examples from a study focused on clinical reasoning and patient documentation. Finally, we suggest how multimodal analysis can be used to address a variety of HPE topics and contexts, highlighting the unique contributions multimodal analysis can offer to our field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation aimed to analyze the collaborative making processes and ways of organizing collaboration processes of five student teams. As a part of regular school work, the seventh-grade students were engaged in the use of traditional and digital fabrication technologies for inventing, designing, and making artifacts. To analyze complex, longitudinal collaborative making processes, we developed the visual Making-Process-Rug video analysis method, which enabled tracing intertwined with social-discursive and materially mediated making processes and zoomed in on the teams' efforts to organize their collaborative processes. The results indicated that four of the five teams were able to take on multifaceted epistemic and fabrication-related challenges and come up with novel co-inventions. The successful teams' social-discursive and embodied making actions supported each another. These teams dealt with the complexity of invention challenges by spending a great deal of their time in model making and digital experimentation, and their making process progressed iteratively. The development of adequate co-invention and well-organized collaboration processes appeared to be anchored in the team's shared epistemic object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to the literature on Information Systems (IS) implementation and provides insights into how IS implementation emerges as an assemblage constituted by diverse sociomaterial practices –that is, the intertwining of humans and technology in practice– during the implementation of Greece's Yearly Property Tax policy and information system over the period 1997–2015. Drawing on the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and Delanda on 'assemblage theory' and Burke's on motive (expressed as 'intentionality' and 'motivation') we discuss IS implementation as a performative process that is shaped by assemblage agents' intentionality and motivation and conclude that explicitly attending to these dynamics during the emergence of policy and technology as a sociomaterial assemblage contributes to a better understanding of IS implementation and its success. We propose that higher levels of motivation and intentionality are related to higher chances of successful implementation. Finally, limitations and future research directions are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers a theoretical extension of previous work on physical metaworlds by using an interpretive methodology to investigate technological metaworlds in travel. While physical and technological metaworlds initially seem to share some core characteristics, a deeper dive into the data reveals important differences. Specifically, concepts related to the cognitive dissonance of technological metaworlds consistently emerged in the data collection and analysis, suggesting more adverse psychological impacts relative to the physical variety previously articulated in the literature. How and why this occurs is discussed through the delineation of a core conceptual category named Cognitive Dissonance of Technological Metaworlds and three associated sub-categories: Cognitive Dissonance of Technology as Tool, Cognitive Dissonance of Technology as Safe Haven, and Cognitive Dissonance of Technology as Placeless Space. These findings extend existing theory in this area while also illuminating future inquiry on issues related to the psychological impacts of technology use in travel. Destination managers may use these findings in conjunction with choice architecture techniques to help travelers make experience-optimizing decisions about technology use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, the significance of the relationship between the university environment and the student experience is well-documented. In response, UK university leaders have driven forward policies that focus on estates’ expansion and regeneration. The restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity to explore questions around the importance of the materiality of campus and its impact on the student experience. This case study examines students’ experiences over time within a post-1992 UK university during the 2020/2021 academic year and makes a tri-fold contribution. First, it explores how restrictions placed on learning spaces can foreground the relationship(s) between space and learning practice. Second, through adopting a sociomateriality perspective, the paper examines students’ reactions to the top-down approach taken to Higher Education (HE) policymaking, and the potential for exposing manifestations of power within the student experience. Third, the paper illustrates how photovoice methodology can encourage reflections on the impact of materiality on the student experience. The findings reveal two principal themes: power dynamics and community participation. The authors make recommendations for university leaders to adopt a community-first, co-creation approach towards future policymaking that enables meaningful dialogue with students and educators and drives forward sustainable, inclusive change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate around sustainability by proposing the need for an ecocentric stance to sustainability that reflexively embeds humans in—rather than detached from—nature. We argue that this requires a different way of thinking about our relationship with our world, necessitating a (re)engagement with the sociomaterial world in which we live. We develop the notion of ecocentrism by drawing on insights from sociomateriality studies, and show how radical-reflexivity enables us to appreciate our embeddedness and responsibility for sustainability by bringing attention to the interrelationship between values, actions and our social and material world. We examine the implications of an ecocentric radically reflexive approach to sustainability for management education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present article is to contribute to the development of a socio-material, situated conceptualization of creativity, in exploring music making as it becomes meaningful in performative emergence processes of the digital age. It uses the creative practices of musicians to analyse and discuss the qualities of ‘digital materials’ in a creative setting, today very often playing a critical role in the production and performance of music. Methodologically, the analysis is based on interviews with professional musicians performing at Roskilde Festival and observations inspired by the autoethnographic approach. The study concludes that creative musical emergence in performance situations of the digital age depends on an openness towards a fragility, imperilling the situation and ‘cracking’ the digital materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a ubiquitous part of medical education, although there is some debate about its value, particularly around possible impact on learning. Literature and research regarding the OSCE is most often situated within the psychometric or competency discourses of assessment. This paper describes an alternative approach: Actor-network-theory (ANT), a sociomaterial approach to understanding practice and learning. ANT provides a means to productively examine tensions and limitations of the OSCE, in part through extending research to include social relationships and physical objects. Using a narrative example, the paper suggests three ANT-informed insights into the OSCE. We describe: (1) exploring the OSCE as a holistic combination of people and objects; (2) thinking about the influences a checklist can exert over the OSCE; and (3) the implications of ANT educational research for standardisation within the OSCE. We draw from this discussion to provide a practical agenda for ANT research into the OSCE. This agenda promotes new areas for exploration in an often taken-for-granted assessment format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of decision-making in High Reliability Organizations as supported by Information Technology have mostly pertained to the “cold” context, that is, the planning and briefing tasks that precede intervention. Meanwhile, the degree of elasticity required of High Reliability Teams during critical processes is key to stabilizing team performance and can be enhanced through the use of technology. However, off-the-shelf technologies are often used in organizations without due consideration of their impact on task interdependence and affordance. This article presents the results from a three-step explorative field study that investigated the effects of the imbrication between human (e.g., users) and material (e.g., technology) agencies on the decision-making processes used by a police force. Particularly, we address the impact on the individual, collective, and shared affordances of mobile technology (i.e., smartphone) in terms of the daily work routine of officers on the streets. Teams of police officers were shadowed during their daily work for a period of 80 hours. This article presents the findings in the form of four vignettes. The approach used proved useful for determining the affordance of technology in relation to task interdependence on micro-processes and decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explore how the basic conception of ‘emergence’ informs the study of creativity as a socio-material practice. Initially, the article explicates how creative processes, products and performances involve not only tangible, but also intangible and social elements. Secondly, the theoretical conception of creativity as socio-material and the general philosophical notion of emergence are introduced. Inspired by the idea that a ‘whole’ is other than the sum of its ‘parts’ and by examples primarily from the world of music, the article argues that the relationship between subject and object - the main analytical focus of studies on creativity as a socio-material practice - is fundamentally embedded in an emergent process. The article concludes by highlighting how emergence theory acknowledges the performance or product as an intangible material for creative processes of musicians, and that studies of the socio-materiality of creative practices clearly involving tangible, intangible and social elements must refer to the emergent process through which the creative product or performance evolves meaning. The theoretical framework suggested is relevant for researchers interested in exploring how materials, social settings and physical environments are involved in creative processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart homes are fast becoming a reality, with smart TVs, smart meters and other such “smart” devices/systems already representing a substantial household presence. These, which we collectively term “smart domestic products” (SDPs), will need to be promoted, adopted, and normalized into daily routines. Despite this, the marketing canon lacks a substantive discourse on pertinent research. We look to help correct this by melding ideas from organizational sociology, innovation diffusion and appropriation studies, and service dominant logic. Consequently, we suggest a framework for research that responds directly to the specific characteristics of SDPs. Using the SDP eco-system as a context, our framework emphasizes the interplay of embeddedness, practice, value and engagement. It comprises a four-stage horizontal/longitudinal axis we describe as proposal, project, practice and pause. Cross-sectionally we focus on value, and combine aspects of existing thought to suggest how this impacts each stage of our engagement continuum. We subsequently identify perceived personal advantage as the resultant of these two axes and propose this as the key for understanding consumer and SDP sociomaterial engagement. This article also advances a definition of SDPs and ends with an agenda for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed medical education (DME) is becoming increasingly prevalent. Much of the published literature on DME has focused on the experiences of learners in distributed programs; however, our empirical work leads us to believe that DME changes the context significantly, not only for learners, but also for other important members of the educational community including audiovisual professionals, administrative professionals and faculty teachers. Based on a three-year ethnographic study, we provide a detailed account of how alliances between various workers involved in DME develop to produce and deliver an undergraduate medical curriculum across geographically separate campuses. We explore the question 'What is the work involved in the delivery of a DME program?' and cast a critical gaze on the essential but invisible, and therefore potentially unrecognized and underappreciated, contributions of AV professionals, administrative professionals, and faculty teachers. Our goal is to make visible the complexity of DME, including the essential contributions of these workers. The study was theoretically framed in sociomateriality and conceptually framed in Star and Strauss' notion of articulation work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is set in socio-material farming to offer a way of conceptualising actions and interactions of children in preschool involved in the understanding of scientific concepts. A model of early science education about the physical phenomena of shadow formation is implemented in group work in a French context. The research involved 44 children (13 females and 31 males) of 5-6 years old. The research design was organised in three video recording steps: pre-test, teaching session and post-test. We focus on the analysis of nine teaching sessions to investigate children's 'understanding' of shadow formation. A descriptive and qualitative approach was used. In particular, we have identified three main categories (the interaction of the children with the tools, the embodiment and verbal dimension)-with respective indicators-to perform the analysis. From the results, all the categories explored seem to influence each other: all material, human and social dimensions contribute to the children's understanding of shadow formation. Also we have identified some elements that can serve as a potential source of improvement of the teaching session on shadow formation. Finally, the research provides insights on how to improve science activities in preschool with the aim of supporting early understanding of physical phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the wow- effect as a phenomenon in science teacher education. Through ethnographic fieldwork at a teachers' college in Denmark, the author encounters a phenomenon enacted in a particular way of teaching that wows the students. The students are in the process of becoming natural science/technology and biology teachers. This article explores and theorizes the wow-effect by examining tension fields within the phenomenon between boredom and engagement, new and old technologies, and being active and sedentary. By situating this phenomenon in a discussion of theory and practice in teacher education, the author discusses how teaching according to the wow-effect is both engaging for the students as well as problematic in relation to learning certain theoretical aspects of natural science/technology and biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-plagiarism, textual recycling and redundancy seemed to be controversial and unethical; however some questions about its definition are still open. The objective in this paper presented study was to use bibliometric analysis to synthesise and visualize the research literature production and derive a typology of self-plagiarism research. Five topics emerged: Self-plagiarism, Institutional self-plagiarism, Self-plagiarism and ICT, Self-plagiarism in academic writing, Self-plagiarism in science. The state of the art topics seem to be 'social medium', 'virtual world', 'face book', 'sociomateriality', 'knowledge sharing', 'open access', 'institutional repository', 'retraction' and 'responsible conduct'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special issue Educational Settings as Interwoven Socio-Material Orderings contributes to the advancement of context-oriented approaches to education, learning and development by combining thick descriptions and theory-dense analyses of concrete and eventually interrelated socio-material arrangements in and across a variety of educational and developmental contexts. We explore below two issues that seem to be central across the relevant literature as well as across the contributions by the authors of the special issue: (a) the notion of 'individual' as a relevant unit of analysis and (b) the notion of 'socio-material orderings' as another relevant analytical frame. The notions 'individual' and 'socio-material ordering' encompass all research participants and arrangements, including therefore the researchers and their everyday settings. The last part of our paper discusses the epistemological and methodological implications of this proposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the conditions for the assimilation of information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) in organizations and the influence of various actors in the organization and eBusiness context. To do so it draws on the literature on assimilation gap, sociomateriality and infrastructure together with a study of implementation and use of information and communication technology in and among organizations in a Swedish region. There were substantial investments in web infrastructure made on a regional level and the focus of this study is how the investments were transformed and assimilated in practices, relations and communication. Based on the empirical data from the case study, the paper extends the assimilation process into interplay among actors in organizations contexts. It describes organizations' strategies for coping with their needs for information and the actors in these processes. Two categories of actors are identified, sensemaking and sensegiving actors, as most important in assimilation of IS/IT in organizations. A sociomaterial perspective gives guidance and a better understanding of the assimilation process in terms of knowledge and interpretative frames, and how assimilation involves identity construction and negotiations among sensemaking and sensegiving actors. The contribution of this paper is a better understanding of the context of assimilation and adaptation of IT in organizations' business processes, and steps to be taken to improve readiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]