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Michael E. Brown's book, The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrates that prominent attempts to account for the social dimension of human affairs rely on an unstated notion of a “course of activity,” that is diametrically opposed to the conceptualization of sociality that is presumably intended to realize it. I want to focus on the idea of a “course of activity” in order to locate his work in and clarify its importance to the development of dialectical reason from Heraclitus through Hegel and beyond. Of special importance is the bearing of his research on the critique of contemporary theories of agency and sociality, and, since considerable attention has been paid, in this regard, to the arts and humanities, some of what I will say about this refers to art and its avant-garde moments—-particularly in my work on Dada and Brown's account of two avant-garde theatrical performances. 

This chapter examines what is entailed by separating agency from individuality and what it means for the idea of a “course of activity,” (going on) and its relation to the concept of sociality. This also bears on questions of ontology, as Brown's course of activity is generative and nonrepeatable. The course of activity and nonrepeatability are linked to both avant-garde practice and theoretical notions that reframe our temporal understandings. These include the avant-garde of dada and surrealism, and the reformulations of bourgeois time of Jean Duvignaud, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The question raised here is that of a teleological understanding—how we link the present course of activity with future events.

Media considerations are pedagogical rather than technological in nature. In online courses, we use technology to enable learner interaction. In this chapter, we focus on a process through which we identify media that will help bring our course to life. Technology tools come and go, quickly. While some specific tools are suggested, it is the process by which to identify and select media that is enduring. We begin with a discussion of media-enabled course activities that are used to guide the selection process. The 10 activities are organized by type of interaction they represent and the media characteristics they require. Media have affordances or functions that can be matched with identified course activities to meet learner interaction needs. These needs help to narrow the scope of our selection decisions. After exploring a variety of functions and tools, we exemplify the media selection process. We extend the work started in previous chapters by identifying media needs in light of design and interaction decisions under the playground and symphony metaphors. In so doing, we demonstrate how the phases of the redesign process inform our technology choices.

The technique of ABC has been widely adopted by universities in the UK, with the assumption that the more accurate identification of costs makes them more manageable. It is the purpose of this paper to consider this question of manageability through identification and allocation in the university sector and to question this as a basis for decision making and resource allocation. The type of costing systems in place in an organisation must meet the needs of the organisation as a whole and there are a number of factors that will affect the type of costing system that is required and there are a number of costing systems that can be used. This paper considers the use of ABC within a university and whether school costing and course costing can meet the requirements of a university facing a challenging business environment where a significant amount of pressure is being exerted on the financial stability of some universities. In doing so the ability of ABC to satisfy the informational requirements of a university is called into question.

When implemented effectively and systematically across a curriculum, high impact practices (HIP) have the potential to increase student engagement and result in higher student achievement. The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) is a four-year military university with a large liberal education core curriculum that provides the foundation for service and officership in the United States Air or Space Forces. Building on the liberal education core, the civil engineering (CE) major’s courses begin with the cornerstone field engineering course, paired with a two-week co-curricular experience for students at an Air or Space Force installation. With its motto “construct first, design later,” the field engineering course is an HIP and quintessential experiential learning course that gives students a practical frame-of-reference for future analysis and design courses. The CE major culminates with another HIP, the capstone design course, which gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, building confidence in their ability to successfully apply those skills to the increasingly complex problems they will face after graduation. This book chapter provides a case study of the CE major at the USAFA, documenting the HIPs across the majors’ program, and highlighting the key elements and benefits of each.

This article aims to provide an overview of Texas State University's Common Experience, an innovative initiative that engaged tens of thousands of people in shared consideration of sustainability as a single topic during academic year 2010‐2011.

The discourse begins with an overview of the Common Experience from a pedagogical perspective based on five principles of effective instructional practice identified by the National Research Council (NRC) in their synthesis of the research from the fields of cognitive, developmental and educational psychology, and brain research on how people learn. Based on a case study research design, the article next provides detailed descriptions of course‐based and non‐course Common Experience activities, including examples from the year‐long initiative. The discourse then focuses on important elements organizers should consider when planning non‐course activities, followed by a description of the planning process needed to replicate the initiative at other institutions.

Based on five principles of instructional practice, the Common Experience is a pedagogical innovation designed to cultivate a common intellectual conversation across the campus, to enhance students' participation in the intellectual life of the campus, and to foster a sense of community across the campus and extended community. In so doing, the Common Experience in sustainability inspired people on campus and in the community to change behavior and social policy, build scientific understanding, connect local environmental issues to global themes, and reshape values – components crucial to sustainability education.

The Common Experience is more likely to yield progress toward finding solutions to sustainability problems because it promotes engagement and input from all stakeholders within the campus and surrounding community through shared vision and face‐to‐face dialogue in a variety of contexts.

This chapter describes and analyzes the result of an active, cooperative learning design adopted in “Change Management,” an elective course at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), which is a fully online university. The paper describes the context and foundations that support the learning design, outlines the learning activities and their evolution, and presents the results of a student survey to assess the design’s effectiveness in reaching its main goals. The results of the survey suggest that students perceived this design as enhancing their teamwork abilities, while being interesting and motivating, as well as useful in learning the course’s content. Therefore, the desired goals were attained and the design was kept, with minor changes, in subsequent editions of the course. In addition, students without prior teamwork experience valued the collaborative activities more than students who had previously worked in teams in other subjects of their degrees. In contrast, no differences were found for individual learning activities. This suggests that the design can be useful in introductory courses where students are asked to learn in virtual teams for the first time.

The question facing sociology is whether it is a field or a discipline. If it is a field, then there is no need for theorizing. However, if sociology is a discipline, then problem-solving cannot be disentangled from theorizing without a loss of intelligibility – the inability to explain the social as the concept of the discipline. Through the quasi-realism of problem-solving as a course of activity, this chapter presents cognitive sociology as a paradigm appropriate to the concept of the social understood as an ongoing course of activity. In doing so, it is shown how bounded rationality and expertise play a crucial role in how communication interacts with the division of cognitive labor, especially through the idea of representational representationality. Representational representationality is an idea that reveals how the degree of clarity among language, meaning, and thought is relative to the issues of audience and ignorance. Representational representationality is significant because it demonstrates how the relationship among meaning, language, and thought is subject to communicative errors – errors arising from a predicament of intelligibility and not merely arising from issues of computational skill, as described by Herbert Simon's model of bounded rationality and expertise in human problem-solving. The argument that follows from this shows how the means for adapting to ambiguity amounts to the difference between Simon's model and a quasi-real model in terms of its principle of rationality, principle of efficiency, and its cognitive style of problem-solving for deliberate practice. These dimensions are shown to effect what “examples” are good for in the problem-solving process, thereby revealing the politics of expertise. The politics of expertise demonstrates how the conflicts in sociological explanations of strategy are not merely conflicts that can be set aside as a pluralism of values. Rather, the conflicting explanations of theory and theorizing can only be resolved when the situational rationality of sociology as a discipline realizes the quasi-realism of problem-solving as a course of activity.

This research paper aims to explore the impact of using wiki activities to support a blended learning course (70 per cent in-class and 30 per cent PBwiki activities) on the knowledge management of library and information science (LIS) students compared to 100 per cent in-class learning.

In the 2015 academic year, the researcher compared an experimental group (41 students) and a control group (41 students). Instruction of the experimental group was based on combining 2 h (70 per cent) of in-class learning and 1 h (30 per cent) of wiki-based learning activities each week. The control group’s experience was 100 per cent in a physical classroom without the use of a wiki. The researcher used a t-test to compare the means of the control and experimental groups in achievement tests and the students’ attitudes based on principles of activity theory (technological, individual and community levels) at 0.05 alpha levels.

The principal results of the study are that students in the experimental group perform better than those in the control group on the achievement test, learning tracks and attitudes. Learning tracks analysis shows that students in the experimental group had greater participation in different topics of discussion in the PBwiki than did the control group. The first topic discussed by students in the wiki is related to exam revision, and the second topic is related to the course content.

This research paper is useful for readers, parents, students and schools to explore the effectiveness of PBwiki activities to support blended courses in LIS education.

This paper has two purposes. First, to provide insight into the formation of completely online small groups, paying special attention to how their work practices develop, and how they form identity. Second, to pursue conceptual development of a more multi‐level view of completely online group experience, which can be made visible through analysis of the unique interaction logging system used in this study.

The authors conduct a mixed methods study that integrates interviews, grounded theory analysis, case study methods and social network analysis to build a multi‐layered view of completely online group and community development.

Completely online group formation is explicated as a socio‐technical system. The paper identifies themes of tool uptake and use, and patterns of interaction that accompany group formation and development of completely online group practices. These patterns show little respect for the boundaries of space and time. It then shows how groups who are paired together for two non‐sequential activities develop a common internal structural arrangement in the second activity, and are viewable as groups in the larger course context in four of six cases.

The time bounded nature of the group and community, combined with the educational context limit the generalizability of these findings.

The study shows how completely online group development can be made visible. Managers of work teams and teachers who work with classrooms in completely online contexts need to recognize the dynamic structure and interaction practices of completely online teams.

First, little research has been conducted on completely online group formation. Second, a conceptual understanding of how group members relate to one another and how groups interact with other groups in the same socio‐technical context is not explored in prior work. Third, the paper performs this analysis including data from rich, contextualized usage logs, which enables greater insight into online group interactivity than prior research.

This monograph looks at the growing use of the outdoors for management development on both sides of the Atlantic. The author suggests the term “Outdoor Development” to describe a systematic use of outdoor activities which incorporate process reviews and the application of experiential learning methods.