Michele H. Jackson

The learning environment in clicker classrooms: student processes of learning and involvement in large university‐level courses using student response systems

To explore what social and educational infrastructure is needed to support classroom use of student response systems (Roschelle et al., 2004), this study investigated the ways in which student characteristics and course design choices were related to students’ assessments of the contribution of clicker use to their learning and involvement in the classroom. Survey responses of over 1500 undergraduates enrolled in seven large enrollment ‘clicker courses’ offered by three university departments are analyzed. A number of factors contribute to students’ positive perception of clickers: a desire to be involved and engaged, a view that traditional lecture styles are not best, valuing of feedback, class standing, previous experience with lecture courses, anticipated course performance, and amount of clicker use in the classroom. These results underscore the importance of considering social and communication elements of the classroom when adopting student response technology.

Student culture vs group work in computer science

Our industrial advisory boards tell us that our students are well prepared technically, but they lack important group work skills. Simply adding project courses and requiring that assignments be done in groups has not improved the situation. A careful study of student culture in Computer Science has uncovered barriers to collaboration, which can be overcome only by pervasive changes in the way we approach our curriculum.

Accomplishing Knowledge A Framework for Investigating Knowing in Organizations

This article proposes a shift in how researchers study knowledge and knowing in organizations. Responding to a pronounced lack of methodological guidance from existing research, this work develops a framework for analyzing situated organizational problem solving. This framework, rooted in social practice theory, focuses on communicative knowledge-accomplishing activities, which frame and respond to various problematic situations. Vignettes drawn from a call center demonstrate the value of the framework, which can advance practice-oriented research on knowledge and knowing by helping it break with dubious assumptions about knowledge homogeneity within groups, examine knowing as instrumental action and involvement in a struggle over meaning, and display how patterns of knowledge-accomplishing activities can generate unintended organizational consequences.

Technological Determinism and Discursive Closure in Organizational Mergers

In times of organizational change leaders often tell stories that justify publicly the directions in which organizations move. Such stories are always political in nature and often reflect the motives of the storyteller. We observe how leaders in high‐tech organizations use the story of technological determinism in organizational settings as a discursive practice through which they invoke the “inevitability” of technology to justify managerial decisions to the public. Rather than taking ownership of certain actions, managers are able to use this story to claim that certain organizational changes are inevitable, and to eliminate alternative stories. We examine this strategy as it appears in the public discourse produced during two mergers in the high‐tech and telecommunications industries occurring from 1998 to 2002: US West and Qwest, and AOL and TimeWarner. Finally, we demonstrate that the story of technological determinism performs discursive closure around each merger.

The Social Construction of Technology in Studies of the Workplace

The environment of the modern organization has always been technological, but this has been understood in a number of distinct ways. For example, seen as collections of rationalized and instrumental practices, organizations themselves have been regarded as technologies in which effective information and communication processes are critical (Taylor, 1911; Thompson 1967). Of more interest to this volume are the perspectives that have looked at information and communication technologies within organizations. Technologies have had profound effects on the way certain information work is done, such as actuarial work (Yates, 1993). With the expanding capabilities of digital computing, fields of study such as office automation (Johnson & Rice, 1984), operations research (Arnoff, 1957) and management information systems (Dickson, 1982) emerged to focus on the question of how computer-based information and communication technologies might be integrated into organizational processes to make organizations and organizational processes more efficient and effective or otherwise to fulfill unmet organizational needs. Even as organizational scholars turn increasingly to considering issues of information and communication technologies (ICTs), a complementary turn is made by technology scholars who look to social and organizational issues implicated in technology design and development. Located in fields such as the sociology of technology, computer science, and the anthropology of work, and typically organized under the general category of social construction, this research holds that technologies are and have always been social. Our interest in this chapter is to explore the intersection between social constructionism and the study of ICTs in the workplace. We begin by identifying a set of assumptions that underlie a constructionist perspective and indicate some ways in which these assumptions appear in studies of the workplace. Fundamental to constructionism is the active effort to privilege

The conversational classroom

Concepts taught in large, lower-division computer science courses are carefully explained in standard textbooks. Thus we hypothesized that the classroom experience should not consist primarily of a restatement of those explanations by the professor. Instead, it should provide an opportunity for the students to learn through a process of conversation among themselves and with the professor. We were able to establish such a process in a sophomore-level course with an enrollment of 116 students. This change led to a doubling of the percentage of A and A- grades compared to historical values.

The Connectivity Paradox: Using Technology to Both Decrease and Increase Perceptions of Distance in Distributed Work Arrangements

This manuscript is one of many in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research on “Communication and Distance,” Volume 38, No. 1. Distributed work arrangements are gaining in popularity. Such arrangements are enabled through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Problematically, the same ICTs that are implemented to overcome distance felt in these settings can also create the expectation of constant connectivity for individuals, constructing a paradox for teleworkers who find the potential benefits of distributed work negated by the very technologies that made the arrangement possible. To combat this problem, teleworkers sometimes use their ICTs strategically to decrease, rather than increase, the distance they feel from colleagues. Findings indicate this strategic use of ICTs to increase distance are often covert, such that teleworkers can appear to colleagues as if they are working in a manner similar to how they would at an office while, at the same time, reaping the benefits of not being in a central location.

Defensive climate in the computer science classroom

As part of an NSF-funded IT Workforce grant, the authors conducted ethnographic research to provide deep understanding of the learning environment of computer science classrooms. Categories emerging from data analysis included 1) impersonal environment and guarded behavior; and 2) the creation and maintenance of informal hierarchy resulting in competitive behaviors. These communication patterns lead to a defensive climate, characterized by competitiveness rather cooperation, judgments about others, superiority, and neutrality rather than empathy. The authors identify particular and recognizable types of discourse, which, when prevalent in a classroom, can preclude the development of a collaborative and supportive learning environment.

Student and faculty attitudes and beliefs about computer science

The curriculum should inspire students to view CS as both accomplishment and intellectual discipline.

Should Emerging Technologies Change Business Communication Scholarship

The scope, scale, and substance of business communication are undergoing a sea change as the result of recent developments and emerging uses of communication technologies. This article adopts Sproull and Kiesler’s model of first-level and second-level effects to explore how business communication research might respond to these changes and to introduce the articles in this issue by Herrmann and by Turner and Reinsch. Herrmann is offered as an example of how researchers might tap the increasing amount of data available, and Turner and Reinsch’s concept of multicommunicating is offered as an example of how researchers can fundamentally rethink basic communication concepts.