Disconnecting to Connect: Developing Postconnectivist Tactics for Mobile and Networked Technical Communication

ABSTRACT

In a networked society, humans are connected through mobile devices to always-on networks, and these technologies merge with us in new ways. In this environment, studying human-networked interactions involves an expanded type of usability. In this article, we argue that a key component of usability is how humans connect and disconnect from these networks. For this reason, the authors advocate studying how users connect and disconnect between online and offline contexts in their everyday life. Such an effort involves questioning our assumptions about the role of connection in usability and introduces methodological issues in studying these processes. These shifts require our research to be more multidisciplinary and more methodologically demanding, with major implications for the portability and durability of technical communication research.     

Exploring the Affective Inner Experiences of Therapists in Training: The Qualitative Interaction Between Session Experience and Session Content

Thirty‐four 1st‐year counseling students recorded their inner experiences following a simulated counseling session. Using a qualitative collective case study approach to extract emotion from a large pool of inner experience, 6 judges identified samples of affect through a triangulation process using intensity, extreme, and critical case sampling and then coded them into naturally occurring core ideas and domains. Affective experiences in the inner experiences were found frequently and were often quite intense. Affect was verbally suppressed and was mostly not noticeable on the audiocassettes. Four predominant affective themes emerged from the inner experiences: anger/frustration, disappointment/regret, anxiety/fear, and happiness/excitement.     

Childbirth education for multiple pregnancy: part 1: prenatal considerations

Women with a multiple pregnancy have unique learning needs in preparing for birth. This paper explores the issues relevant to women with a multiple pregnancy to support a positive birth experience. One of the foundations of childbirth education and nursing care is to provide the individual woman and her family with knowledge regarding the birth process, what to expect, and how to cope with labor and birth. Education also focuses on caring for the newborns after birth and how to manage in the early days at home. However, traditional childbirth education classes, which meet in a series of evenings or Saturdays, may not meet the needs of women with a multiple pregnancy. In addition, because of the differences in care that exist for women with a multiple pregnancy, new paradigms for childbirth education are needed to meet the learning needs of these families. The purpose of this paper is to provide information to the childbirth educator on the differences in care women with a multiple pregnancy can expect and to suggest strategies to meet the childbirth education needs of these families.     

Individualized learning methods in perspective

This article reviews a number of individualized approaches to student learning. The order in which they are discussed is such that each successive approach offers students an increasingly wider degree of choice to determine their own goals and the means of achieving them. Thus at one end of the spectrum is the Keller Plan type of approach, offering students very limited freedom of choice, while at the other end is the Independent Study type of approach, offering students the greatest degree of freedom. The individual approaches are reviewed, and placed in perspective relative to one another, by noting to what extent each might be described as reflecting a number of well-recognised principles of learning. It is clear from the review that an approach cannot automatically be described as being an improvement on another simply because it offers students a greater degree of freedom of choice.     

Very Early Language Deficits in Dyslexic Children

At 2 1/2 years of age, children who later developed reading disabilities were deficient in the length, syntactic complexity, and pronunciation accuracy of their spoken language, but not in lexical or speech discrimination skills. As 3-year-olds, these children began to show deficits in receptive vocabulary and object-naming abilities, and as 5-year-olds they exhibited weaknesses in object-naming, phonemic awareness, and letter-sound knowledge that have characterized kindergartners who became poor readers in other studies. These late preschool differences were related to subsequent reading status as well as to prior language skills, but early syntactic proficiency nevertheless accounted for some unique variance in grade 2 achievement when differences at age 5 were statistically controlled. The language deficits of dyslexic children were unrelated to maternal reading ability and were not observed in children from dyslexic families who became normal readers. The implications of the results for etiological issues are discussed.