Search results

The purpose of this study was to assess particular student outcomes when design thinking was integrated into an environmental engineering course. The literature is increasingly promoting design thinking for addressing societal and environmental sustainability engineering challenges. Design thinking is a human-centered approach that identifies needs upfront.

In an undergraduate engineering course, Design for the Environment, students have begun to obtain hands-on experience in applying design thinking to sustainability challenges. This case study investigates the association between the use of design thinking and student creativity with sustainability design solutions. Student perspectives on their own creativity and future sustainable design practices as a result of the course were also investigated.

The findings were favorable for design thinking, being associated with a significant difference and medium-to-large effect with regards to solution novelty. A qualitative analysis showed a positive association between design thinking and students’ perceptions of their creativity and future anticipated sustainability practices. Using a content analysis of reflective writings, students’ application of design thinking was assessed for comprehensiveness and correctness. A two-week introductory design-thinking module and significant use of in-class active learning were the course elements that most notably impacted students’ use of design thinking.

This case study preliminarily demonstrates that application of design thinking within an environmental engineering course may be associated with beneficial outcomes related to creativity and sustainability.

A review of the literature did not uncover studies of the use of design thinking for undergraduate socio-environmental challenges to promote creativity and sustainable-practices outcomes, although the literature has been calling for the marrying of these two areas.

The health equity and prosperity of communities is closely linked to the effectiveness and success of local health coalitions. Social network analysis (SNA) is one mechanism to quantify and understand the factors leading to collaboration and effectiveness within these coalitions. This study aims to investigate network characteristics associated with perceived success and satisfaction in a health coalition and determine significant factors related to organizational collaborations.

This study examined the Olympic Peninsula Healthy Community Coalition (OPHCC) which aims to prevent chronic disease in rural Clallam County, Washington. Representatives (n = 21) from member organizations (n = 18) were asked to report on organization characteristics, perceived satisfaction in coalition activities, perceived success toward coalition's mission, and collaborations with other organizations in the coalition. Multilevel modeling used to analyze whether an organization's position within the coalition network was associated with their perceived satisfaction and perceived success. Exponential random graph modeling was used to examine what factors may impact collaboration ties between coalition members.

Organization representatives reported a total of 252 collaboration ties. In multilevel models, organization characteristics and network centrality scores accounted for between 61 and 68% of variance displayed in satisfaction scores and 45–61% of variance in perceived success scores. Exponential random graph modeling revealed activity level, for-profit status, and transitivity as significant factors in collaborative tie presence.

Encouraging consistent active participation, a balance of organizational type, and projects which require more than two collaborators may provide an environment for collaborative ties between organizations.

The narrative of The Americans weaves together a spy thriller and a family drama, though it drives home the inseparability of the political and the personal through the lives of the central characters, Philip and Elizabeth, a couple whose marriage is a cover for their work as Soviet spies. This chapter provides a queer reading of their marriage, drawing from the real history of the Cold War politics of sexuality that associated American values with the hetero- and gender normative, white, and middle-class nuclear family. In contrast, the Soviet Union was understood to have disrupted this natural order by installing the state as an overbearing patriarch. Philip and Elizabeth’s fictional cover as a nuclear family requires them to perform American marriage, family, and selfhood. In doing so, they reflect the centrality of the family in America’s Cold War self-image in which the family serves as the anchor of the American order, enabling economic and political self-sufficiency. Their performance of the family challenges our ability to differentiate between real, authentic family that can serve as the legitimate source of social reproduction and between the counterfeit, fake family that disrupts the social order. The queer family, refusing to be placed beyond realm of the political by the moral language of family values, subverts our ability to distinguish between genres since the family drama is already a political thriller.

In this paper, we aim to understand why consumers often prefer products made using traditional practices even when products made using new practices are not of lower quality. We argue that this resistance, which we call “production process conservatism,” is heightened when the product is used in the performance of a social ritual.

We develop this argument in the context of diamond jewelry, as consumers have generally been resistant to diamonds that are produced in laboratories, i.e., lab-created diamonds. Hypotheses were tested using experiments conducted with an online sample (Experiment 1) and with an MBA student sample (Experiment 2).

In Experiment 1, we find that married female respondents significantly prefer mined diamonds to lab-created diamonds when they are used as part of an engagement gift as opposed to a more routine gift. In Experiment 2, we find the same effect among women; in addition, the perceived risk associated with the ritual is found to mediate this production process conservatism.

This paper contributes to the understanding of a macrosocial phenomenon – acceptance of an innovation – by examining microinteractive processes in groups.

This paper develops an original theory that when individuals deviate from traditional aspects of rituals, they risk signaling a lack of commitment or cultural competence to the group even when such aspects are not explicitly stated.

To rescue at-risk historical scientific data stored at the McGill Observatory, the objectives of the Data Rescue Archive Weather (DRAW) project are: to build a repository; to develop a protocol to preserve the data in weather registers; and to make the data available to research communities and the public. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The DRAW project adopts an open archive information system compliant model as a conceptual framework for building a digital repository. The model consists of data collection, conversion, data capture, transcription, arrangement, description, data extraction, database design and repository setup.

A climate data repository, as the final product, is set up for digital images of registers and a database is designed for data storage. The repository provides dissemination of and access to the data for researchers, information professionals and the public.

Doing a quality check is the most important aspect of rescuing historical scientific data to ensure the accuracy, reliability and consistency of data.

The DRAW project shows how the use of historical scientific data has become a key element in research analysis on scientific fields, such as climatology and environmental protection.

The historical climate data set of the McGill Observatory is by nature unique and complex for preservation and research purposes. The management of historical scientific data is a challenge to rescue and describe as a result of its heterogeneous and non-standardized form.

The purpose of this study was to demographically describe 4-H volunteer leaders’ competencies for effective delivery of 4-H youth development programs. As a subset of the data, occupation, level of education, college major of the volunteer leaders, staff and faculty were gathered as the primary focus the article. The study was descriptive and correlational in nature. The study found that 4-H volunteer leaders are more highly educated than those from earlier studies; educational majors are more diverse; 10 of the 32 competencies were found to be significant by level of education; and level of education has no impact upon the ten fundamental competencies needed to effectively deliver 4-H programs.

This study is a radical interactionist analysis of family conflict. Drawing on both a negotiated order perspective and Athen's theory of complex dominative encounters, this study analyzes the role that domination plays in conflicts among intimates. As the family engages in repeated conflicts over roles, the family also engages in negotiations over the family order, what role each party should play, interpretations of past events, and plans for the future. These conflicts take place against a backdrop of patriarchy that asymmetrically distributes power in the family to determine the family order. The data from this study come from a content analysis of mothers with substance use problems as depicted in the reality television show Intervention. The conflicts in these families reveal that these families develop a grinding family order in which families engaged in repeated conflict but also continued to operate as and identify as a family. These conflicts are shaped by and reinforce patriarchal expectations that mothers are central to family operation. The intervention at the end of each episode offered an opportunity for the family to engage in a concerted campaign to try to force the mother into treatment and reestablish the family order.

In this paper, we review the literature on learner control and discuss the implications that increased control may have for training in e-learning environments. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the learner control literature, focusing on adults and workplace training. We begin by reviewing the literature on learner control, focusing on the positive and negative effects associated with providing adult learners with control in e-learning environments. We organize our review into instructional design factors that have been manipulated to provide learners with control and person issues that moderate the relation between learner control and outcomes. Then, we summarize developments in training research and in adult learning that relate to learner control in order to provide a theoretical context for understanding learner control in adult workplace e-learning.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).