Maria Spante

University West · School of Business, Economics and IT

Purpose The purpose of this study is the development of a methodology that draws on activity theory (AT) to assess educators’ and leaders’ professional learning in a pre-school setting. Design/methodology/approach The paper reports on a case study of professional development in an active learning classroom (ALC) where 20 professionals participated...

Purpose This study aims to depict how a change laboratory (CL) promotes sustainable professional practice at the workplace to tackle unequal access to educational success. Design/methodology/approach The empirical findings are from a CL focusing on school professionals’ agency and a follow-up study one year after the CL. Findings The study shows...

This study explores the opportunities and challenges of teaching under flexible spatial and digital conditions of the learning environment of a newly build school, analyzing how teaching is organized and what curricular genres can be discerned, what resources and practices are offered to stimulate students meaning-making and what framing, relations...

This study explores the opportunities and challenges of teaching under flexible spatial and digital conditions of the learning environment of a newly build school, analyzing how teaching is organized and what curricular genres can be discerned, what resources and practices are offered to stimulate students meaning-making and what framing, relations...

This chapter outlines challenges and opportunities for teachers in higher education in their design work of e-learning courses targeting practitioner’s competence development of production technology knowledge. Teachers are challenged to develop up-to-date learning material and digitize learning tasks such as virtual labs and machine-related cases...

In recent years, many countries have introduced programming as content in their national educational strategies. This study focussed on how teachers from various K-6 schools met regularly in learning groups to discuss their experiences integrating programming in MakerSpace settings, places equipped with various materials that can be used to constru...

Purpose The goal to stimulate perspective taking and inference making on social phenomena, such as gender roles in society, has proven to be difficult to achieve in general and in particular for primary school students. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop creative models and concepts for learning that provide guidance addressing these cha...

Team Research Support and Publishing at University West’s Library consists of four librarians who guide researchers and doctoral students in issues regarding publishing strategies, bibliometrics, Information Literacy and how to make research publications available e.g. in the local repository DiVA. The service is frequently used in several ways by...

Den här kunskapsöversikten ger en bild av hur tillgången på teknik har förändrats i skolan, hur synen på lärande förändras samt lärares och elevers möjligheter och utmaningar att använda digital teknik i undervisningen. Översikten vänder sig till alla verksamma inom förskola och skola. Idag pratar vi mycket om att alla barn och ungdomar behöver för...

Digital competence and digital literacy are concepts that are increasingly used in public discourse. However, how the concepts are used and how they are defined remains unclear. This paper presents a systematic review of research where these concepts are used in higher education research. The aim is to establish an understanding of referencing stra...

The aim of the workshop is to co-create different types of collaborative elements, models and strategies for inclusion in schools and for learning in other settings. Participants from a variety of organizations are invited: game designers; drama, history, and social science teachers; principals; school developers; writers; theater professionals'; a...

Frågan om vi ska använda digital teknik i skolan har ersatts av hur den kan användas för att uppnå lärandemål. Hur kan digital teknik bli ett meningsfullt och stimulerande verktyg i lärares undervisning och elevers lärande? När den digitala infrastrukturen tar form i svenska skolor behöver den underbyggas med en medvetenhet kring den förändring som...

Learning within the organization is not only linked to the formal training and education of the employees, but also to informal processes of sharing knowledge. The knowledge is often embedded in organizational activities, practices and norms, as well as in social ties among individuals in the organization. We analyzed employees’ behavior and accept...

This small-scale interview study explore engineering expert teachers' experiences and ideas of e-learning within engineering education. The aim is to capture teachers`teachersèxperiences entering educational situations that forces them towards new modes of teaching as well as towards a closer collaboration with the industry engineering professional...

behaviour and acceptance of online social networking as an information system of learning was performed by a descriptive case survey within a telecom corporation in Pakistan. The results showed that a majority of the studied employees favours social networking to connect colleagues at different levels and more than half of the respondents share the...

This paper reports on a project aimed at identifying and exploring the development and implementation processes of teaching practices with interactive whiteboards (IWBs) in two Swedish K-6 schools. The purpose of the project was to generate results and insights of value when preparing student teachers for professional use of IWBs and to give school...

By using Virtual Reality systems, or Virtual Environments (VEs), complex models can be designed and developed on a large scale and their features visualized, simulated, discussed and documented. These models are claimed to replace expensive physical models, and are highly appreciated for projects in architecture. People can, however, experience mod...

This article describes a study that investigated the need for and challenges connected to the establishment of a collaboratory - a sociotechnical forum where information and other resources can be made accessible and used by practitioners within library and information science. In order to identify needs and challenges interviews were carried out w...

Under which conditions has collaboration added value over individual work? How does performance change when using different technologies? These are important questions for industry and for research. This paper addresses them for pairs versus individuals using physical objects and virtual representations for object-focused task-solving. Based upon p...

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of social interaction in shared virtual environments (SVEs), supported by virtual reality (VR) systems over time. SVEs are computer generated 3D graphical spaces where geographically distributed people can meet and interact with each other in a graphical space. Although there have been a number of studies abo...

Abstract This paper reports on a study that explored the needs and challenges with respect to the creation of a collaboratory forlibrary and information science practitioners.To identify needs and challenges interviews were conducted with practitionersat a variety of institutions.The results suggest that there is aneed for a collaboratory to facili...

Virtual environments systems based on immersive projection technologies (IPTs) offer users the possibility of collaborating intuitively in a 3D environment. While considerable work has been done to examine interaction in desktop-based collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), there are currently no studies for collaborative interaction using IPTs....

Collaboration at a distance has long been a research goal of distributed virtual environments. A number of recent technologies, including immersive projection technology systems (IPTs) and head-mounted displays (HMDs), promise a new generation of technologies that are more intuitive to use than desktop-based systems. This paper presents an experime...

Today, some independent film makers use methods for distance collaboration over the Internet to gather expertise and collaborators from all over the world, putting together virtual film crews whose participants might never meet in real life. In some cases, most pre-production and post-production work is carried out in these virtual teams, using onl...

The pre-production process in film making known as production design often involves collaboration between artists, designers and film makers from all over the world. Traditionally, this collaboration requires either long-distance travelling in order to arrange face-to-face meetings and workshops, or the slow distribution of design sketches and mode...

This study examines pairs of subjects who used networked immersive projection technology systems to collaborate on five tasks over an extended period of time (210+ minutes). The aim was to compare zero history and mutual history partners, to examine how their experience changed over time, and compare their experience of different tasks. Analysis yi...

This study examines pairs of subjects who used networked immersive projection technology systems to collaborate on five tasks over an extended period of time (210+ minutes). The aim was to compare zero history and mutual history partners, to examine how their experience changed over time, and compare their experience of different tasks. Analysis yi...

This study examines pairs of subjects who used networked immersive projection technology systems to collaborate on five tasks over an extended period of time (210+ minutes). The aim was to compare zero history and mutual history partners, to examine how their experience changed over time, and compare their experience of different tasks. Analysis yi...

Working together in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) with different systems is often problematic; different capabilities can lead – among other things – to an unequal distribution of tasks and to misunderstandings. This paper reports on an experiment in which participants worked together on a task and switched halfway through from an immer...

With the development of new digital technologies, it has been envisaged that in the future, we can 'be together' at a distance inside virtual environments. A number of technologies have emerged in re cent decades which have brought this vision closer: The use of videophones and large interactive projection screens in the home create some possibilit...

Presence and copresence have been key goals of researchers and developers of shared virtual environments. Much research has assumed that the two reinforce each other; that is, an enhanced sense of presence enhances copresence and vice versa. In this essay we question this assumption, and provide some examples in which users experience high presence...