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Action learning is a pedagogical practice that helps participants learn by talking about their workplace action with fellow participants ("comrades in adversity") in their action learning set. This paper raises questions about the action in action learning, such as: how do members of an action learning set learn from and through each other? How do they learn through their developing conversation and interaction? To answer such questions, I argue that, "ethnomethodology" (the study of "member's methods" or "folk methods" for doing "any" kind of practical action) is useful for showing the intricacy of the practical learning process in action learning, as in learning in action, more generally. The paper illustrates the conversational and interactional work of members doing things and learning together in action (for example discovering things in science and in board meetings); and argues that this approach may also be used to study action learning in practice.

This research evaluated the effectiveness of the Public Child Welfare Certification Program, a specialized child welfare program delivered in bachelor of social work (BSW) curricula across the state of Kentucky. This evaluation gathered data for 10 years on satisfaction with the program, preparation for work in the state's child welfare agency, commitment to the agency, and retention. Data were collected from 199 graduates and 84 supervisors at 6 months and 2 years postgraduation. Results indicate that workers and supervisors report a high level of preparedness, as well as high levels of commitment to and retention with the agency. Supervisor support, coworker support, and personal/professional stress were mediators of commitment to the agency. Implications for child welfare practice and social work education are discussed. (Contains 2 tables.)

The article provides an actor-network critique of ideas on community that are influential in higher education and draws implications for networked learning theory and practice. Networked learning is examined as an educational movement which contains alternative models of learning but which offers to create a sense of virtual community within the structures of mass higher education. Benedict Anderson's work is drawn upon to understand the notion of community and to examine "the nation" as a prototypical community. Aspects of actor-network theory are discussed and illustrated, from which a critique of the idea of community in higher education is developed.

This research evaluated the effectiveness of the Public Child Welfare Certification Program, a specialized child welfare program delivered in bachelor of social work (BSW) curricula across the state of Kentucky. This evaluation gathered data for 10 years on satisfaction with the program, preparation for work in the state's child welfare agency, commitment to the agency, and retention. Data were collected from 199 graduates and 84 supervisors at 6 months and 2 years postgraduation. Results indicate that workers and supervisors report a high level of preparedness, as well as high levels of commitment to and retention with the agency. Supervisor support, coworker support, and personal/professional stress were mediators of commitment to the agency. Implications for child welfare practice and social work education are discussed., IN AN EFFORT TO RECRUIT and retain committed and outstanding bachelor of social work (BSW) graduates in the practice of public child welfare, in 1996 the Kentucky Cabinet for Health [...]

A study was conducted to examine the moral dimension of Harold Garfinkel's approach towards organizational phenomena. Data from a study of an executive MBA classroom is analyzed. It is concluded that endogenously organized sequences of interaction and vernacular discourse accomplish the emergent socio-moral order of the class.

Of growing interest in the area of improving the search experience is the collection of implicit user behavior measures (implicit measures) as indications of user interest and user satisfaction. Rather than having to submit explicit user feedback, which can be costly in time and resources and alter the pattern of use within the search experience, some research has explored the collection of implicit measures as an efficient and useful alternative to collecting explicit measure of interest from users. This research article describes a recent study with two main objectives. The first was to test whether there is an association between explicit ratings of user satisfaction and implicit measures of user interest. The second was to understand what implicit measures were most strongly associated with user satisfaction. The domain of interest was Web search. We developed an instrumented browser to collect a variety of measures of user activity and also to ask for explicit judgments of the relevance of individual pages visited and entire search sessions. The data was collected in a workplace setting to improve the generalizability of the results. Results were analyzed using traditional methods (e.g., Bayesian modeling and decision trees) as well as a new usage behavior pattern analysis ("gene analysis"). We found that there was an association between implicit measures of user activity and the user's explicit satisfaction ratings. The best models for individual pages combined clickthrough, time spent on the search result page, and how a user exited a result or ended a search session (exit type/end action). Behavioral patterns (through the gene analysis) can also be used to predict user satisfaction for search sessions. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval--Relevance feedback, search process General Terms: Experimentation, measurement Additional Key Words and Phrases: Implicit measures, search sessions, explicit feedback, explicit ratings, user interest, user satisfaction, prediction model

Instead of forcing a choice between active and passive portfolios, we create a better-of-two option to (1) calculate active management's value and (2) find the optimal weights for an active-plus-passive portfolio that dynamically replicates this option through time. To replicate the option at a 10-year horizon, the strategy initially allocates roughly 60% to the active asset. Using historical returns and 60/40 portfolios, we found that the ending wealth distributions in excess of the all-passive portfolio that uses the better-of-two strategy significantly exceeded those of an all-active strategy with superior downside protection. Investors could implement this strategy with institutional or individual separate accounts, institutional funds, or a single fund with passive and active subportfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]