Leonardi, Paul M. (M.A. Communication) The Mythos of Engineering Culture: A Study of Communicative Performances and Interaction Thesis directed by Assistant Professor Michele H. Jackson Across a wide variety of literatures, researchers consistently identify similar values and practices that characterize "engineering culture." Engineers themselves are aware that they belong to a professional culture that sets explicit guidelines for what it means to be an engineer. The amazing coherence and persistence of engineering culture suggests that there is a certain mythos surrounding it. Recently, professional engineering associations and engineering scholars have pointed to the importance of group work in the field of engineering and have suggested that engineers are not adequately prepared to work well with others. As Barley (1996) contends, the nature of work in the U.S. is changing dramatically and the most serious barriers to adapting successfully to these changes are likely to be cultural. Moreover, in passing, recent engineering scholars have suggested that the culture of engineering may impeded the collaborative process of a team (Ingram & Parker, 2002). This thesis explores the intersections between engineering culture and group interaction by examining the ways in which the mythos of engineering culture plays out in communicative performance. Through interviews and participant observation iv of engineering students at the University of Colorado, I adopt a cultural communicative performance perspective (Pacanowsky & O'Donnell-Trujillo, 1983) to study how the mythos of engineering culture is performed in engineers' interactions with one another. This study shows that the mythos of engineering culture does shape the communicative performances constitutive of engineering c...

Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) are predominant in both theory and practice. However, are the same systems discussed in theory actualised in practice? By comparing and contrasting KMS in theory and practice, this paper demonstrates that they are indeed dissimilar. In theory, KMS have both subjective and objective components. In practice, only the objective component of KMS appears to be actualized; hence, these KMS in practice are essentially Organisational Memory Systems at best and not KMS at all. 1.

With the evolving functionality in television-based (TVbased) information and entertainment appliances, there is an increased need to enable users input text through remote control devices. We present a novel text input method, The Numpad Typer (TNT), for interactive TV, multimedia home terminals or other similar applications. Embodied in a TV remote control and guided by a visual map on the TV screen, TNT was designed for consistent spatial Stimuli-Response (S-R) compatibility and consistency of use. Five users tested TNT in ten sessions of 45-minutes. This initial investigation showed that users on average could type 9.3 and 17.7 correct words per minute with TNT doing the slowest and the fastest session respectively. The study also showed that the users found the TNT method easy to grasp and fun to use. Subjectively the participants felt they mastered the method rather quickly in comparison to their actual speed improvement.

In many disciplines, creativity has been recognised as an important part of problem solving. In business, creativity enables the generation of better solutions and provides an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. In Information Systems (IS) creativity assists developers in finding solutions to difficult problems by helping to efficiently utilise available resources and allows the more effective planning and running of complex projects. One of the most important aspects of IS development is Requirements Engineering (RE), the development activity aimed at understanding the needs and wants of IS customers. While previous RE researchers suggested that creativity is crucial in building high quality information systems, fostering creative outcomes in RE is difficult as it is affected by the multifaceted socioorganisational context within which IS development commonly takes place. This paper reports findings from an empirical study into creativity in RE. Specifically, it reports various contextual factors which were found to influence the creativity of individuals and their teams. Keywords: Requirements Engineering, Creativity, Case Study. 1

Many people contributed to the completion of my dissertation, and it gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the numerous forms of assistance I received. Faculty and staff of the University of Michigan (UM) School of Information (SI) provided unlimited support, encouragement, and guidance throughout my studies. Initial thanks go to my committee members. My chair, Associate Professor Margaret Hedstrom, mentored me through each stage of the program. Her wisdom, her confidence in me, and her ability to offer comments of just the right kind at exactly the right time helped me to sharpen my thinking, to improve my writing, and to achieve more than I thought possible. Associate Professor Paul N. Edwards introduced me to the field of science studies and offered advice that enhanced the presentation of my research. Professor Jeffrey K. MacKie Mason and Assistant Professor Brian Athey accepted a methodological approach different from their own and offered comments that substantially improved my dissertation. Others at SI also assisted me. Associate Dean and Professor Gary Olson played a substantial role in making SI a wonderful place to pursue a doctoral education. Professor Judy Olson provided support at a critical time in my research. Associate Dean

Many phenomena related to software development are qualitative in nature. Relevant measures of such phenomena are often collected using semi-structured interviews. Such interviews involve high costs, and the quality of the collected data is related to how the interviews are conducted. Careful planning and conducting of the interviews are therefore necessary, and experiences from interview studies in software engineering should consequently be collected and analyzed to provide advice to other researchers. We have brought together experiences from 12 software engineering studies, in which a total of 280 interviews were conducted. Four areas were particularly challenging when planning and conducting these interviews; estimating the necessary effort, ensuring that the interviewer had the needed skills, ensuring good interaction between interviewer and interviewees, and using the appropriate tools and project artifacts. The paper gives advice on how to handle these areas and suggests what information about the interviews should be included when reporting studies where interviews have been used in data collection. By sharing experience, knowledge about the accomplishments of software engineering interviews is increased and hence, measures of high quality can be achieved. 1

To Dandelion Kaczmarczyk, who always reminded me about the most important things in life. Acknowledgments There are so many people who supported, encouraged and mentored me while I worked on this dissertation. Most important, I would like to thank my advisor, Risto Miikkulainen. First, for supervising this interdisciplinary research. Second, for teaching me so much about conducting rigorous research and expressing my results with confidence. Third, for being a nice person. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee. Andrew Bernat, for his excellent advice on many occasions; Anthony Petrosino, for directing me to important resources on cognition and learning; Raymond Mooney, for his perspective on machine learning; Bradley Love for his perspective from cognitive psychology; Lowell Bethel, for his encouragement, especially during my early years at UT. Many other people supported me and my work at critical junctures. I want to especially thank Marilla Svinicki for her support during my comprehensive exams, and when I was developing my human subject study. Also, Jim Bednar, for his technical advice on numerous occasions, and Elaine Rich for her understanding of the importance of teaching and learning. Many of the staff in

Abstract: The processes of conducting and reading interviews are important in phenomenographic research, as well as other qualitative research orientations making significant contributions in higher education research and development. This paper aims to contribute to an ongoing conversation about the quality of research in higher education by exploring the interview, transcription and analysis processes through the experiences of the writer in a phenomenographic study conducted at Macquarie University last year. Transcription is explored as a transformative process, a bridge between interview and analysis across which the data, as well as the interviewer-researcher, are re-orientated towards the process of analytical reading. The critical aspects of interviews as living conversations are identified, namely that they are productive interactions in which the data is constituted, that the interviewee and interviewer negotiate on several levels to produce a shared meaning, and that meaning production in interviews is achieved through language. Finally, the interpretive reading of the artefacts of living conversations is considered, and some difficulties are identified.

This article summarizes findings from studies that employed electronic mail (e-mail) for conducting indepth interviewing. It discusses the benefits of, and the challenges associated with, using e-mail interviewing in qualitative research. The article concludes that while a mixed mode interviewing strategy should be considered when possible, e-mail interviewing can be in many cases a viable alternative to face-to-face and telephone interviewing. A list of recommendations for carrying out effective e-mail interviews is presented.

In order to develop intellectual expertise, the student needs to learn how to perform sophisticated pattern identification, and to employ effective study and test taking strategies. These cognitive requirements are complex and analytical. In order to help students succeed in their chosen field, we need to better understand how instruction can best help develop these meta-cognitive skills. This paper reports the results of a study in which novices attempted to categorize calculus integration problems in one of three delivery methods (Drill and Test, Fully Integrated, Incremental Learning). The results demonstrate that Incremental Learners develop the most effective study and test taking strategies, have the best conceptual development, and have the most positive reactions to learning. The results, together with a previously reported computational study, confirm that Incremental Learners develop the best meta-cognitive attributes necessary for expertise.