This article studies how digital games are part of the everyday lives of Swedish 6 to 7-year-old boys. The data consist of video recordings from two schools, two after-school centres and four homes. The focus is on how children engage in, organize and use digital games in face-to-face interaction. It is argued that digital game competence matters not only in front of the screen, but also in the playground. In addition, it is argued that what counts as game competence is negotiated in the peer group.
This article examines territorial negotiations concerning gaming, drawing on video recordings of gaming practices in middle-class families. It explores how private vs public gaming space was co-construed by children and parents in front of the screen as well as through conversations about games. Game equipment was generally located in public places in the homes, which can be understood in terms of parents' surveillance of their children, on the one hand, and actual parental involvement, on the other. Gaming space emerged in the interplay between game location, technology and practices, which blurred any fixed boundaries between public and private, place and space, as well as traditional age hierarchies.
The present study focuses on the ways in which response cries (Goffman, 1981) are deployed as interactional resources in computer gaming in everyday life. It draws on a large-scale data set of video recordings of the everyday lives of middleclass families. The recordings of gaming between children and between children and parents show that response cries were not arbitrarily located within different phases of gaming (planning, gaming or commenting on gaming). Response cries were primarily used as interactional resources for securing and sustaining joint attention (cf. Goodwin, 1996) during the gaming as such, that is, during periods when the gaming activity was characterized by a relatively high tempo. In gaming between children, response cries co-occurred with their animations of game characters and with sound making, singing along, and code switching in ways that formed something of an action aesthetic, a type of aesthetic that was most clearly seen in gaming between game equals (here: between children). In contrast, response cries were rare during the planning phases and during phases in which the participants primarily engaged in setting up or adjusting the game.
This article discusses the use of video cameras in participant observation drawing on approximately 300 hours of video data from an ethnographic study of Swedish family life. Departing from Karen Barad's post-humanistic perspective on scientific practices, the aim is to critically analyse how researchers, research participants and technology produce and negotiate children's corporeal privacy. Ethnographic videotaping is understood as a material-discursive practice that creates and sustains boundaries between private and public, where videotaping is ideologically connected to a public sphere that may at times 'intrude' on children's corporeal privacy. The limits of corporeal privacy are never fixed, but open for negotiation; ethnographers may therefore unintentionally transgress the boundary and thus be faced with ethical dilemmas. The fluidity of privacy calls for ethical reflexivity before, during and after fieldwork, and researchers must be sensitive to when ethical issues are at hand and how to deal with them.
This study describes the course of events within the area of health care with regard to two educational reforms in Sweden: the 1982 reform of certain middle length health care education called the Health Care 77 reform and the 1993 University and College reform. As a result of the first of these reforms, the nursing education was transformed from an education on the secondary school level to a university college level.
The present study which has its underpinnings within the implementation process has twoaims: first to clarify the governmental intentions and to illustrate how these intentions wereinterpreted and formulated by those in charge of executing the reforms and secondly toinvestigate to what degree other factors than those directly connected to the actual reformshave influenced the content and form of the operative activities.
The frame of reference describes the problems of political governing of education as twofold: the process of making political decisions and the process of executing those decisions.The reality where the goals are formulated and reality where goals are realized are governedby different contingencies, which may be difficult to bridge between. In the present study, thepolitical governing of a reform is seen in a curriculum theoretical perspective and theexecution of the reform is seen in an organization theoretical perspective.
The empirical material in this study entails primarily government and local documentssupplemented by interview studies along with studies of correspondence studies with thoseinvolved in the units of interest.
There are two main results of this study. The first result was that the formal politicalgoverning of an education has a certain impact but that the informal execution of a reformwill be dependent upon the values and culture of those in the local organization. The secondresult showed that the implementation process entails two phases: a transformation phasewhere government directives are reformulated into local documents and an implementationphase where the local documents are executed in an activity. Commonly, researchers includethe transformation phase within the implementation process but the results of this studysuggest that it may be of greater value to view the transformation phase as phenomena, whichcan be both defined and studied on its own.
The aim of this thesis is to develop and apply an empirical approach that can be used in studies of the relationship between different expectations of, and actual use of, information technology in educational settings. The studies focus on meanings of artefacts shaped in people's talk about and/or use of technology.
The aim is based on the twofold ambition to (1) develop an approach that opens the way for empirical investigations on the usage of technology and (2) to make a contribution to research about computers in education. I show how an approach based on a sociocultural perspective on learning, specified by inspiration from a sociotechnical perspective on artefacts, generates new questions about the usage of technology and its influence on learning and socialisation. Furthermore, I show how discourse analyses, inspired by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, can be used in studies of educational processes.
The thesis consists of five case studies. In the first study I examine the rhetoric on information technology during the years 1994-1998 (Paper I). In the three following cases I analyse video-recorded conversation between children using computers in science education (Papers II-IV). In the light of the results from the first four studies I return in the fifth to the rhetoric on technology. In that paper different expectations on the usage of technology in education and on the technology users, expressed in the curricula for the Swedish compulsory school during the years 1962-1998, are clarified and discussed (Paper V).
The results of the thesis show that expectations are central parts of human action and that different expectations may result in different kinds of practices. The historical studies show that it is in no way obvious for what purposes artefacts are to be used in educational settings, or who is to decide on this issue.
During the last decades, researchers from a cognitive science tradition respectively a sociocultural perspective on learning have been discussing students’ mental models of the earth. In the study reported here, we elaborate questions discussed in this debate in relation to meaning making in educational settings. The aim is to develop and use an approach for analysing the role of earlier experiences in students’ meaning-making processes. In video recordings of twenty pairs of 8-11 year olds, we study what they discern as relevant questions, information etc. and what they re-actualise when answering questions. In their work, the children had access to various artefacts, as globes or maps. The analyses take point of departure in pragmatism and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s works. The results show that some of the problems that children have according to previous research do not appear as problems in our material. For example, that people can live on the other side of the earth is not problematic. They rather discuss where the other side is located. Also, our analyses illustrate that the meaning of artefacts is constituted within people’s actions. Differences between our and previous findings can be understood as differences between the situations that the children are working in.
The aim of this paper is to develop an approach that can be used in addressing the issue of the use of information technology and its importance in human meaning making. By using a combination of Wittgenstein’s work method, a sociocultural perspective on learning, and a sociotechnical perspective on artifacts a specific focus for analyses was discerned: the relation between the use-of-technology in meaning-making on one hand and the circumstances for this meaning-making on the other hand. The conversations of six groups of children, who worked with an assignment, that required that they doubted information they encountered, were video recorded and analyzed. The analyses were done in three interrelated steps. (a) The students use-of-technology in meaning making, (b) the meaning patterns that the students encounter on the web, and (c) students’ intentions and habits. Our findings show that, while the mode of reinforcement of the texts used by the students may have provided little opportunity for doubt or learning how to doubt, the students’ habits and intentions with their work determined the result of the interaction, namely copying information from the web. Taking our point of departure in this empirical illustration we discuss theoretical and methodological questions concerning the understanding of the use of information technology in educational settings.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the Swedish folk high school as a possible arena for multicultural encounters. This is done at two levels. One is the so called institutional level, where an attempt is made to identify the underlying set of values of the folk high school in a multicultural perspective. The other is the organizational level, which is the local folk high school as a possible arena of encounters. These two levels can also be termed arenas of formulation and realization.
The major part is the field study at four schools. An attempt has been made to find out to what extent the schools live up to the criteria for arenas of multicultural encounter thatare identified from official governmental documents and related research. In other words, to relate the arenas of formulation and realization to one another.
These criteria imply that the task of the folk high school in this respect is to develop and strengthen ethnorelative attitudes among its students and to equip them for communicative actions.
The field study of the arena of realization, the local folk high school, has shed light onsome aspects of the multicultural encounter. There are indications that the folk highschool has the potentiality for living up to the above-mentioned criteria. However, thispotentiality is not being used in full, neither by governmental agencies nor by the actorson the local arena.
Vi befinner oss nu i en lågkonjunktur som innebär att många blir uppsagda från sina arbeten och den grupp som har drabbats hårdast i Sverige är arbetare inom den privata sektorn. Som en reaktion på den förändrade arbetsmarknaden har de företag som levererar omställningsprogram ökat explosionsartat.
I svåra tider ökar konkurrensen om arbeten och höga krav ställs på den arbetssökandes förmåga att marknadsföra sig själv. Omställningsföretagen arbetar med att hjälpa dem som blivit uppsagda på grund av arbetsbrist att finna ny sysselsättning, detta gör de med hjälp av jobbcoacher. Omställningsprogram och jobbcoaching är ett nytt fenomen och det finns därmed ett behov av forskning på området.
Syftet med arbetet är att studera ett omställningsprogram vars avsikt är att coacha människor som mist sin anställning till att få ny sysselsättning. Studien görs på ett företag som levererar omställningsprogram och belyser hur de människor som befinner sig i programmet upplever det under tiden det pågår. För att uppnå syftet har telefonintervjuer med tjugo deltagare i omställningsprogrammet genomförts.
Coacherna hjälper deltagarna att själva inse sin potential och detta gör de genom att, likt Sokrates, ställa frågor som får individen att plocka fram alla de egenskaper och färdighetersom kan vara till nytta i en anställning. Deltagarna får hjälp med att skriva CV vilket uppskattas då det idag är hög konkurrans på arbetsmarknaden.
Deltagarna är sammantaget positiva till programmet vilket dels kan bero på att programmet kanske är väl planerat och genomförs på ett framgångsrikt sätt. Det är även troligt att en bidragande orsak till omdömet är att deltagarna inte hade några förväntningar på programmet.De har blivit uppsagda och är inställda på att själva ta sig an sin situation. De förändringsförslag som deltagarna fört fram i intervjuerna rör tidpunkten för informationsmötet samt önskemål om workshop angående vidare studier. Det faktum att de känner glädje över att de har en coach som hjälper dem och faktiskt ser dem går hand i hand med vad som visats i forskning från 1930 talet.