Communicating Knowing Through Communities of Practice: Exploring Internal Communicative Processes and Differences Among CoPs

Knowing is an enacted, communicated process that is difficult to observe, let alone manage, in organizations. Communities of practice (CoPs) offer a productive solution for improving knowledge and knowledge management, but the communicative processes that enact CoPs have not been explored, leaving CoPs as an organizational black box. This research extends CoP theory as a means to determine the presence of a CoP and distinguish between various CoPs, and as a practical means to evaluate the communicative processes of organizational knowledge. CoPs enact the communicative nature of knowing through the elements of mutual engagement, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. Specifically, two groups of volunteers are examined through a combination of participation, observation, and interviews in order to explore CoP theory as a dynamic system for examining and evaluating organizational knowledge.     

Writing and Publishing

John Tebbel's A History of Book Publishing in the United States: Volume III--The Golden Age Between Two Wars, 1920-1940 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1978---$32.50)

Anne Lyon Haight and Chandler Grannis' Banned Books: 387 BC to 1978 AD (New York: Bowker, 1978---$13.95)

Bruce Joel Hillman and Judith Ann Beraha, eds. 1979 Writer's Market (Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books, 1978---$14.95)

Doris Ricker Marston's A Guide to Writing History (Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest, 1976---$8.50)

Girls Series Books: A Checklist of Hardback Books Published 1900-1975 (Children's Literature Research Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minn. 55455---price not given, but about $7.50, paper)     

Radio and Television History

ROD SERUNG: THE DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES OF LIFE INTHE TWILIGHT ZONE by Joel Engel (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990—$18.95, ISBN 0-8092-4538-8,368 pp.)

THE PIED PIPERS OF ROCK 'n ROLL: RADIO DEEJAYS OF THE 50s AND 60s by Wes Smith (Marietta, GA: Longstreet Press, 1989—$16.95, ISBN 0-929264-69-X, 300 pp.)

GUNSMOKE.A COMPLETE HISTORY by SuzAnne Barabas and Gabor Barabas (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1990—$45.00, ISBN 0-89950-418-3, 832 pp.) is just that—a detailed narrative and then episode guide to both the radio (1952-61)

THE COMPLETE ACTORS TELEVISIONCREDITS, 1948-1988, VOLUME I: ACTORS by James Robert Parish and Vincent Terrace (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989—$59.50, ISBN 0-8108-2204-0, 560 pp.)

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR: RADIO PROGRAMS FOR CHILDREN, 1929-1956 by Marilyn Lawrence Boemer (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989—$25.00, ISBN 0-8108-2270-9, 230 pp.)

I REMEMBER TELEVISION: A MEMOIR by Ira Skutch (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989—$29.50, ISBN 0-8108-2271-7, 273 pp.)

LIVE TELEVISION: THE GOLDEN AGEOF1946-1958 IN NEW YORK by Frank Sturcken (McFarland & Co., P.O. Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640—$29.95, ISBN 0-89950-523-6, 178 pp.)     

High Schools That Work and college preparedness: Measuring the model's impact on mathematics and science pipeline progression

The High Schools That Work school improvement initiative is the nation's largest comprehensive school reform model with over a thousand schools adopting its framework. The initiative's premise is that all students can meet the demands of a college preparatory curriculum if provided the right supports. Analyzing over a decade of data on student course taking and performance, we employ a rigorous comparative interrupted time series strategy to assess the extent to which HSTW meets its goal by increasing students’ successful progression through the mathematics and science pipelines. Each pipeline consists of three college preparatory courses: algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2 in mathematics and biology plus two physical science courses in science. The results show no effect on pipeline progression for the average student and some evidence of increased gaps in course taking between more advantaged and disadvantaged students.     

Schooling,symbolism and social power: The hijab in republican France

To fully understand the implications of the global climate of heightened suspicion about Islam we must also be aware of its expression through distinctive national discourses. Media debate leading up to the adoption by the French parliament of a law banning the hijab at school fits into a global discourse, but also presents local strategies of incorporation and silencing. The targets of scrutiny are primarily first and second generation migrants, a large and increasingly visible portion of whom live in rundown public housing and attend ‘problem’ schools associated with violence and failure. It is important therefore to consider the position, and positioning, of Muslims in relation to media representation. This article analyses the forms the dispute over the hijab has taken in France in terms of the role of the school in Republican ideology; the social and economic position of Muslims; and dominant representations of migrants and Islam.     

Improving Native American children’s listening comprehension through concrete representations

The primary purpose of the present study was to determine whether recent findings documenting the benefits of text-related motor activity on young children’s memory for reading passages [Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young readers’ reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 424–436.] could be extended to the text processing of Native American children. Forty-five third through seventh-grade students with academic learning difficulties listened to four narrative passages under one of three instructional conditions: manipulate, where students moved toy objects to represent the story’s content; visual, where students observed the results of an experimenter’s toy manipulations; and free-study, where students thought about the content of the presented story sentences. Findings were consistent with the literature documenting the comprehension and memory benefits of text-relevant concrete representations, with students in the manipulate and visual conditions statistically outrecalling students in the free-study condition. In contrast to the results of the Glenberg et al. (2004) reading study, no conditions-related differences were observed on a final passage where students were instructed to generate internal visual images of story events in the absence of external visual support (i.e., when no toys were present).     

Constructing Rotating Item Pools for Constrained Adaptive Testing

Preventing items in adaptive testing from being over- or underexposed is one of the main problems in computerized adaptive testing. Though the problem of overexposed items can be solved using a probabilistic item-exposure control method, such methods are unable to deal with the problem of underexposed items. Using a system of rotating item pools, on the other hand, is a method that potentially solves both problems. In this method, a master pool is divided into (possibly overlapping) smaller item pools, which are required to have similar distributions of content and statistical attributes. These pools are rotated among the testing sites to realize desirable exposure rates for the items. A test assembly model, motivated by Gulliksen's matched random subtests method, was explored to help solve the problem of dividing a master pool into a set of smaller pools. Different methods to solve the model are proposed. An item pool from the Law School Admission Test was used to evaluate the performances of computerized adaptive tests from systems of rotating item pools constructed using these methods.     

The impact of video exposure on students entering school psychology

School psychology is experiencing a shortages crisis. Within this two‐part study, the Social Cognitive Career Theory was used to examine the impact of video interventions on students' choice and application to school psychology programs. A sub‐sample of participants were followed across 4 years. Findings suggest that, when measured immediately before and after, a short video intervention had a significant impact on participants' perceived knowledge and intentions to apply to a school psychology training program. However, when measured across several years, the video was not found to have a significant impact on actual application to a school psychology training program. Nevertheless, exposure to school psychology from multiple sources was still found to be the best predictor of actually applying to a school psychology program. Study results highlight the importance of concerted efforts throughout the career development pipeline to expose students to the profession of school psychology.     

Surveillance,documentation and privacy: an international comparative analysis of state intelligence records

The annals of modern history are replete with examples of how state agencies have constructed mechanisms to observe and document the subversive activities of internal parties or individuals as well as perceived foreign influences or threats. While the definition of “subversive” changes with governing parties, the documentation of previous systems persists in the custody of archival repositories. These files represent the lives and work of individuals, and archivists face significant moral and ethical challenges regarding their disposition. This comparative study examines cases from across the globe and throughout the twentieth century to reveal the dispositions of surveillance records. More specifically, the study identifies the main variables that impact how these files are handled. This study begins with a theoretical framework that identifies common trends in the archival literature regarding surveillance files and their place in recovery and reconciliation efforts. Definitions are provided to establish the boundaries of this work within a broad categorization of levels of access that emerged from the case studies. Each level of access is then explored more deeply using specific examples to illustrate the complexities of custody and access encountered with these records. Ultimately, the study of the disposition and access to surveillance files uncovers three interrelated themes: the power of records, the impact of archival practice and the need to fully explore the context in which those files are created and retained.     

Large-Scale Patterns of Entertainment Gratifications in Linguistic Content of U.S. Films

We count words in film subtitle files in an attempt to reveal morally relevant patterns of linguistic content. We argue that function words (e.g., pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions) should be positively associated with thought-provoking narrative forms. To test this hypothesis, we associate function words to aggregate measures of film viewership and appraisals. Results suggest that function words are negatively associated with measures of viewership but positively associated with appraisals. As such, our finding is consistent with the idea that function words are more likely to occur in narrative forms that audiences value more than they actually consume. We relate this finding to past research, which has shown the same pattern for hedonic versus meaningful entertainment gratifications. Discussion centers on implications for recent theorizing in this area.