Devices Without Borders: What an Eighteenth-Century Display of Steam Engines can Teach Us about ‘Public’ and ‘Popular’ Science

This essay details a public display of four steam engine models assembled in a Leiden orphanage courtyard in 1777. By examining the multiple purposes to which these engines were and could be put, alongside the various interests, goals and interpretations of their inventors, instructors and audience, the notion of a clear division between public and private as well as scientific research and popularization is questioned. In its place, the essay ends with a generalized image of modern science, its practitioners, users and audiences seen as a complex terrain in which relations and divisions are constantly asserted, contested and renegotiated.     

Understanding school districts as learning systems: Some lessons from three cases of complex transformation

We report on a study of three school jurisdictions in the province of Alberta. The original premise for the research on which this report is based was to investigate the diverse ways that school districts had administered resources that were provided through a major initiative to improve learning in the province. This account is not centrally concerned with how funds were utilized; rather, we report on how districts?? strategies and emphases within the initiative offer windows into the their systemic characters. The range of manifest characters, we argue, is a useful construct to inform policy, ensure the presence of necessary supports and structures, implement appropriate accountability measures, and set reasonable goals for large-scale initiatives in education.     

Teaching Technical Communication in an Era of Distributed Work: A Case Study of Collaboration Between U.S. and Swedish Students

As distributed work begins to shift the nature of practice for technical communication professionals in the workplace, faculty need new frameworks to help prepare students for roles that involve negotiating, supporting, and facilitating virtual global collaboration. This paper identifies key areas of metaknowledge appropriate to these new frameworks by synthesizing a review of current scholarship on such collaborations and a case study of students participating in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural team project.     

Teaching Technical Communication in an Era of Distributed Work: A Case Study of Collaboration Between U.S. and Swedish Students

As distributed work begins to shift the nature of practice for technical communication professionals in the workplace, faculty need new frameworks to help prepare students for roles that involve negotiating, supporting, and facilitating virtual global collaboration. This paper identifies key areas of metaknowledge appropriate to these new frameworks by synthesizing a review of current scholarship on such collaborations and a case study of students participating in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural team project.     

Teaching social perspective taking: how educators might learn from the Army

Frequently and accurately discerning others’ thoughts and feelings is associated with multiple valued educational outcomes across an array of settings. Despite its foundational role in social interactions, it is unclear whether individuals can be taught to improve their social perspective taking capacities. This experiment assesses whether a curriculum taught to US Army personnel (N?=?116) improved their social perspective taking prior to deployment. Results showed that participants improved their social perspective taking in three ways: through more accurately detecting biases in others, by generating more initial hypotheses to explain others’ behaviours, and by adapting their hypotheses in the face of new evidence. The curriculum did not affect participants’ perspective taking accuracy on a video measure. We discuss these findings with respect to their implications for other learning environments.