Disruptive Fixation

Disruptive Fixation
Author: Christo Sims
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-03-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691163995

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. Disruptive Fixation is his account of how this "school for digital kids," heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. Sims shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes—often dramatically so. He traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. Sims offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.

Technology's Child

Technology's Child
Author: Katie Davis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262046962

How children engage with technology at each stage of development, from toddler to twentysomething, and how they can best be supported. What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology—ubiquitous in the world they inhabit—becomes a critical part of their lives? This timely book brings much-needed clarity to what we know about technology’s role in child development. Better yet, it provides guidance on how to use what we know to help children of all ages make the most of their digital experiences. From toddlers who are exploring their immediate environment to twentysomethings who are exploring their place in society, technology inevitably and profoundly affects their development. Drawing on her expertise in developmental science and design research, Katie Davis describes what happens when child development and technology design interact, and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics and social and cultural contexts. Critically, she explains how a self-directed experience of technology—one initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily—supports healthy child development, especially when it takes place within the context of community support. Children’s experiences with technology—their “screen time” and digital social relationships—have become an inescapable aspect of growing up. This book, for the first time, identifies the qualitative distinctions between different ages and stages of this engagement, and offers invaluable guidance for parents and teachers navigating the digital landscape, and for technology designers charting the way.

Advancing Research on Teachers' Professional Vision: Implementing novel Technologies, Methods and Theories

Advancing Research on Teachers' Professional Vision: Implementing novel Technologies, Methods and Theories
Author: Christian Kosel
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2024-07-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 283255217X

A classroom full of students can be overwhelming for teachers. It is critical that teachers are able to filter and meaningfully interpret the relevant information in this complex scenario. Much of this filtering and interpretation occurs through selective visual perception. Over the last decade, a rapidly growing number of studies in empirical educational research used eye tracking to investigate teachers' selective visual perceptual processes in the classroom. Theoretically, visual attention and perception are often conceptualized as knowledge-based noticing coupled with knowledge-based reasoning about what is visually perceived. Recent eye-tracking studies have shown that experienced teachers, in particular, show improved selective attention of classroom events through faster detection of relevant information and improved monitoring of learning-relevant situations. Researchers agree that a critical driver of selective attention processes is the professional knowledge (declarative, procedural, and metacognitive) of (experienced) teachers, which controls selective perceptual processes in a top-down process. The findings are significant and provide important insights for research on teacher professionalization.

The Digital Age and Its Discontents

The Digital Age and Its Discontents
Author: Matteo Stocchetti
Publisher: Helsinki University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9523690132

Three decades into the ‘digital age’, the promises of emancipation of the digital ‘revolution’ in education are still unfulfilled. Furthermore, digitalization seems to generate new and unexpected challenges – for example, the unwarranted influence of digital monopolies, the radicalization of political communication, and the facilitation of mass surveillance, to name a few. This volume is a study of the downsides of digitalization and the re-organization of the social world that seems to be associated with it. In a critical perspective, technological development is not a natural but a social process: not autonomous from but very much dependent upon the interplay of forces and institutions in society. While influential forces seek to establish the idea that the practices of formal education should conform to technological change, here we support the view that education can challenge the capitalist appropriation of digital technology and, therefore, the nature and direction of change associated with it. This volume offers its readers intellectual prerequisites for critical engagement. It addresses themes such as Facebook’s response to its democratic discontents, the pedagogical implications of algorithmic knowledge and quantified self, as well as the impact of digitalization on academic profession. Finally, the book offers some elements to develop a vision of the role of education: what should be done in education to address the concerns that new communication technologies seem to pose more risks than opportunities for freedom and democracy.

The Charisma Machine

The Charisma Machine
Author: Morgan G. Ames
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262537443

A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite its failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

Orthopaedic Knowledge Update: Trauma 5

Orthopaedic Knowledge Update: Trauma 5
Author: William Ricci, MD
Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Total Pages: 1325
Release: 2018-08-21
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1975123409

Orthopaedic Knowledge Update: Trauma 5 brings together relevant knowledge and new breakthroughs in orthopaedic trauma treatment and management. Developed in partnership with the Orthopaedic Trauma Association (OTA), this new edition features chapters on computer-assisted surgery, new technologies, and the diagnosis and management of infection associated with fractures and nonunions.

After Disruption

After Disruption
Author: Trevor Owens
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2024-05-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0472904361

The digital age is burning out our most precious resources and the future of the past is at stake. In After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, Trevor Owens warns that our institutions of cultural memory—libraries, archives, museums, humanities departments, research institutes, and more—have been “disrupted,” and largely not for the better. He calls for memory workers and memory institutions to take back control of envisioning the future of memory from management consultants and tech sector evangelists. After Disruption posits that we are no longer planning for a digital future, but instead living in a digital present. In this context, Owens asks how we plan for and develop a more just, sustainable, and healthy future for cultural memory. The first half of the book draws on critical scholarship on the history of technology and business to document and expose the sources of tech startup ideologies and their pernicious results, revealing that we need powerful and compelling counter frameworks and values to replace these ideologies. The second half of the book makes the case for the centrality of maintenance, care, and repair as interrelated frameworks to build a better future in which libraries, archives, and museums can thrive as sites of belonging and connection through collections.

Stuck with Tourism

Stuck with Tourism
Author: Matilde Córdoba Azcárate
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520344480

Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of Cancún, protected natural enclaves along the Gulf coast, historical buildings of the colonial past, and maquilas for souvenir production in the Maya heartland, this book explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatán’s inhabitants put it, people get stuck in tourism’s grip.

Brown Saviors and Their Others

Brown Saviors and Their Others
Author: Arjun Shankar
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478027118

In Brown Saviors and Their Others Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period, while masking other operations of power behind the racial politics of global brownness. In India, these operations of power center largely on the transnational labor politics of caste. Ever attentive to moments of discomfort and complicity, Shankar develops a method of “nervous ethnography” to uncover the global racial hierarchies, graded caste stratifications, urban/rural distinctions, and digital panaceas that shape the politics of help in India. Through nervous critique, Shankar introduces a framework for the study of the global help economies that reckons with the ongoing legacies of racial and caste capitalism.

Small Animal Surgery Secrets E-Book

Small Animal Surgery Secrets E-Book
Author: Joseph Harari
Publisher: Elsevier Health Sciences
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2004-01-14
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 143771143X

Focused and concise, yet comprehensive in scope, this text provides essential, practical information for solving surgical problems commonly encountered on rounds, in clinical situations, and in surgery. In more than 100 chapters, the expert contributors propose key questions and provide answers to solve these situations that confront practicing small animal veterinarians every day.The text begins with general concepts of surgery, including anesthesia, minimally invasive surgery, and wound management, followed by sections devoted to soft tissue, orthopedic, neurologic, oncologic, and oral surgery written by a diverse group of expert contributors from academic, private, and industrial practice. - Concise answers with valuable pearls, tips, memory aids, and "secrets" - 105 succinct chapters in surgery by nationally recognized experts - Bulleted lists and tables for quick review - Thorough, highly detailed index