Knowledge management: a neuro-hemispherical view of the field

Knowledge Management Research & Practice - The definition and subsequent use of knowledge within and across organisational and social contexts has been a vibrant and evolving growth area over...     

Faculty Liaisons: an embedded approach for enriching teaching and learning in higher education

This paper explores the experiences of a group of academic developers who support educational development work as Faculty Liaisons at a large, research-intensive university. These academic developers inhabit complex ‘third spaces’, providing support through an embedded partnership relationship that requires lateral movement across functional and organizational boundaries to create new professional spaces, knowledge, and relationships. The authors utilize narrative inquiry and auto-ethnographic approaches to present an interpretive qualitative analysis of their experiences supporting Faculty and University projects across complex and evolving organizational boundaries. From this analysis, they highlight key roles and responsibilities associated with their blended context and identify challenges that academic developers who occupy third spaces within academic organizations face as they negotiate competing interests, identities, and requirements associated with the diverse range of their projects and the blended experience of working in scholarly and administrative, central- and Faculty-based roles. The lessons they have learned from these experiences will be of particular interest to academic developers who are experiencing the flux of change within higher education settings that are impacting teaching and learning practices both for faculty in the classroom and for those across the institution who support them.     

The mutual impact of personality traits on seating preference and educational achievement

Several studies have investigated the association between students' seating positions and their classroom performance. However, the role of personality traits on seating preference in the classroom has not been well investigated. The aim of the study was to understand how students choose their seats according to their personality traits in a classroom context and the influence of personality characteristics and seat selection on educational achievement. The seating positions of the medical students were recorded on an architectural plan during each class session, and the means and standard deviations of the students' locations were calculated in X and Y orientations. The locations of the students in the class were analyzed based on three architectural classifications: interactional zone, distance from the board, and access to the aisles. The NEO Five-Factor Inventory was used to evaluate the five main personality characteristics of the students. Midterm and final exam scores were used to measure the students' educational achievement. Analysis of variance showed a statistical significance correlation between the interactional zones and both agreeableness and conscientiousness. Mantel–Haenszel analysis showed a statistical significance association between sex and agreeableness and openness to experiences, which was mainly caused by zone II. Among the tested characteristics, a statistically significant relationship was observed between agreeableness and final exam scores. There was a statistical significance difference in openness and extraversion between the students with a high number of absences and their classmates. A relationship between the student's locations in the class, their educational achievements, and some of their personality characteristics are addressed.     

Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature

This study provides a conceptual overview of the literature dealing with the process of citing documents (focusing on the literature from the recent decade). It presents theories, which have been proposed for explaining the citation process, and studies having empirically analyzed this process. The overview is referred to as conceptual, because it is structured based on core elements in the citation process: the context of the cited document, processes from selection to citation of documents, and the context of the citing document. The core elements are presented in a schematic representation. The overview can be used to find answers on basic questions about the practice of citing documents. Besides understanding of the process of citing, it delivers basic information for the proper application of citations in research evaluation.     

Problem solving activity in the workplace and the school: The case of constructing solids

The purpose of the present study is to document, compare, and analyze the nature of spatial reasoning by practitioners (plumbers) in the workplace and students in the school setting while constructing solids, with given specifications, from plane surfaces. Data were collected from a plumbing workshop and five high school students while constructing a cylindrical container of capacity one-liter and height of 20 cm. The results confirm the power of activity theory and its methodology in explaining and identifying the structural differences between the two activities in the two different cultural settings. Students and plumber activity structures differed in the operational aspect (actions) and the means and concrete conditions (operations) under which such a goal is carried out. Activity theory has the potential to explain the differences between the two activities in terms of differences in the motive, social-cultural settings, the tools that were available and accessible which resulted in different actions, and the constraints (operations) under which the task was executed. Theoretical and pedagogical implications were identified. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.