Exploring the adoption process of personal technologies: A cognitive-affective approach

The impact of cognitive and emotional factors on the customer's decision to adopt a new technology has long been at the core of innovation and marketing literature. Today, the proliferation of personal technologies makes the understanding of the adoption process of such innovations a vital issue. This article, moving from long-established technology adoption theories, integrates affective factors to propose a comprehensive framework to interpret and orient innovation and marketing approaches of companies. To do this, we review a rich literature from the domains of management, information systems, marketing and cognitive psychology, identifying six possible sources of perceived value for personal technologies, hence attitude to adopt them: functional value, monetary value, social value, entertainment value, epistemic value and aesthetic value. After defining and framing them in the extant literature, we discuss how the framework may be adopted in practice to support Companies' strategies in the surprisingly under-explored industry of personal technologies.     

Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication,by Ronald E. Rice,Maureen McCreadie,and Shan-Ju L. Chang. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2001. xiii + 357 pp., $45.00. ISBN 0-262-18214-9.

Critics have argued that information and communication technologies (ICTs) disconnect people from their social networks and reduce public participation. Research in support of this perspective has been biased by two assumptions. The first is a tendency to privilege the Internet as a social system removed from the other ways people communicate. The second is a tendency to favor broadly supportive strong social ties. Survey and ethnographic observations from Netville, a 2-year community networking experiment, suggest that weak, not strong ties experience growth as a result of ICTs. By examining a unique and underexplored stage in the life cycle of a community networking project, the end of a networking trial, this article demonstrates how ICTs facilitate community participation and collective action (a) by creating large, dense networks of relatively weak social ties and (b) through the use of ICTs as an organizing tool.     

Teaching Pragmatic Psychodynamic Psychotherapy to Graduate Social Work Students

Evolving developments in psychodynamic theory have strengthened it as an evidence-based approach and have made it concordant with social work’s strengths-based, multicultural perspective. An elective focused on teaching fundamental concepts of psychodynamic psychotherapy was developed for graduate social work students based on Kolb’s theory of experiential learning, applied to Summers and Barber’s pragmatic model of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Data were collected based on students’ experienced self-efficacy with specific competencies in psychodynamic psychotherapy in the first, sixth, and last class. Outcomes were positive, and the data were used to make specific suggestions to strengthen course outcomes.     

The effectiveness of a learning disabilities inservice program

Forty-three regular classroom teachers were provided with four one-hour inservice sessions related to the field of learning disabilities. Pre- and posttest administrations of the Learning Disabilities Information Inventory were utilized to measure change resulting from these sessions. Twenty-four control subjects did not participate in these sessions but did complete the dependent measure. An analysis of covariance with pretest scores serving as the covariate indicated that the inservice treatment did result in improved performance on the dependent measure. Approximately 50% of the experimental subjects completed a follow-up questionnaire and most indicated that the sessions increased their knowledge of learning disabilities and provided them with techniques and materials useful in their classroom settings. It is concluded that such inservice sessions are a viable means of increasing classroom teachers' information concerning learning disabilities and the Learning Disabilities Information Inventory is sensitive to the effects of such inservice.     

Sustaining collaboration: English-as-a-second-language, and content-area teachers

This research is an investigation into English as a Second Language (ESL) and content area teachers’ perceptions of collaboration after they completed a joint professional development program called the Collaborative Teaching Institute (CTI). The overall objective of the study was to identify how CTI and other joint professional development programs for ESL and content area teachers could better support sustained teacher collaboration. The study yielded information on the key actors, opportunities, tensions and conflicts in the collaboration between the two sets of teachers. The researchers also sought to identify specific types of activities that emerged when the teachers were successful in working together.