README.first is a bilingual collection of mini-essays, published in the run up to the Plokta filmfestival. We’ve asked writers, researchers, theorists, artists, programmers, and others to pick an online video that functions as a stepping stone for their thought and practice and to comment shortly on why they find the video so significant, funny, or outright disturbing. The resulting reflections speak about Silicon Valley obsessions, our mediated social lives, the impact of technology on centuries old games, and more.Plokta showcases film as a frame of socio-technological themes and discussions. With these essays we want to broaden the scope to one of the most significant developments in visual culture of the past decades: the rise of online video. At the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), online video has been a research topic already since 2007, in a continuous project named Video Vortex. Together, Plokta and INC, hope to stimulate reflections before, during and after the festival on what the moving image has to say to us.
MULTIFILE
Boekbespreking van Raad Voor Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling (Red.) (2009) Polarisatie, bedreigend en verrijkend, Amsterdam: SWP.
DOCUMENT
Lives of Data maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts.Lives of Data emerged from research projects and workshops at the Sarai programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. It brings together fifteen interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners to set up a collaborative research agenda on computational cultures. The essays offer wide-ranging analyses of media and techno-scientific trajectories of data analytics, disruptive formations of digital economy, and the grounded practices of data-driven governance in India. Encompassing history, anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), media studies, civic technology, data science, digital humanities, and journalism, the essays open up possibilities for a truly situated global and sociotechnically specific understanding of the many lives of data.
MULTIFILE
Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul.The text in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between 1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological research turning into an analysis of people’s opinions. He explores with an exciting clarity the notion of ‘opinion’ as a specific form of apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into ‘social types’ as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists. He associates the form of ‘comprehension’ the ‘social types’ postulate with Spinoza’s notion of ‘affections’ (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by reinstating images in general as ‘affective thought processes’.Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.
MULTIFILE
Deze uitgave bundelt zestien essays die geschreven zijn door een groep van gevestigde historici en opkomend talent. Het is een rijke verzameling opstellen over landen, steden en regio’s. Samen illustreren ze de relevantie van onze sociaal-culturele, economische, demografische of politieke geschiedenis. Deze reikwijdte past goed bij Maarten Duijvendak, emeritus-hoogleraar Economische, sociale en regionale geschiedenis. In zijn onderwijs en onderzoek propageerde hij een ‘wijde horizon’ gecombineerd met een ‘scherpe blik’. De essays zijn, elk afzonderlijk en als gebundeld geheel, geïnspireerd op dit adagium.
LINK
This study aims to identify an adequate approach for revealing conceptual understanding in higher professional education. Revealing students’ conceptual understanding is an important step towards developing effective curricula, assessment and aligned teaching strategies to enhance conceptual understanding in higher education. Essays and concept maps were used to determine how students’ conceptual understanding of international business can be revealed adequately.
DOCUMENT
Higher professional education aims to prepare students for professional practice, for which students will need to develop conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding requires a synthesis of relevant facts, theories and practices. This research explores what types of change take place in students’ conceptual understanding during a bachelor course. Forty-four senior international business majors in the Netherlands wrote expository essays at the beginning and end of a 14-week course. A rubric was used to grade the essays on six components of conceptual understanding using a 5-point scale. Results indicated five types of change: regressive, minor, modest, substantial and major. The most significant increases in conceptual understanding appeared to relate to context-specific or conceptual knowledge. Results also indicated that individual students’ conceptual understanding changed in different ways, with improvements in some components and deterioration in others, particularly global context. Discussion includes suggestions to account for the different types of change, and curricular implications.
LINK
Higher professional education aims to prepare students for professional practice, for which students will need to develop conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding requires a synthesis of relevant facts, theories and practices. This research explores what types of change take place in students’ conceptual understanding during a bachelor course. Forty-four senior international business majors in the Netherlands wrote expository essays at the beginning and end of a 14-week course. A rubric was used to grade the essays on six components of conceptual understanding using a 5-point scale. Results indicated five types of change: regressive, minor, modest, substantial and major. The most significant increases in conceptual understanding appeared to relate to context-specific or conceptual knowledge. Results also indicated that individual students’ conceptual understanding changed in different ways, with improvements in some components and deterioration in others, particularly global context. Discussion includes suggestions to account for the different types of change, and curricular implications.
DOCUMENT
This paper investigates whether students change their entrepreneurial entry preference if they are presented with different options. We propose that students’ entry preferences are mediated by concepts proposed by threshold theory: choice options, opportunity costs and psychic income. This study is exploratory in nature, analyzing a small sample of 31 student essays both quantitatively and qualitatively to test our propositions. Though lacking a control group, enrolment in a six-week module on entry mode options by a group of third year Bachelor students at a Dutch university resulted in some interesting changes—in particular, toward greater clarity in the entrepreneurial entry mode preference as well as a shift toward takeover options (including firm acquisition and family succession). However, thematic analysis of students essays reveals that the perceived ability to act on such preferences may still be limited by opportunity costs (i.e., the higher need for financial capital) and a self-perceived lack of human capital (entrepreneurial or management experience).
DOCUMENT
From the article: "Whilst the importance of online peer feedback and writing argumentative essays for students in higher education is unquestionable, there is a need for further research into whether and the extent to which female and male students differ with regard to their argumentative feedback, essay writing, and content learning in online settings. The current study used a pre-test, post-test design to explore the extent to which female and male students differ regarding their argumentative feedback quality, essay writing and content learning in an online environment. Participants were 201 BSc biotechnology students who wrote an argumentative essay, engaged in argumentative peer feedback with learning partners in the form of triads and finally revised their original argumentative essay. The findings revealed differences between females and males in terms of the quality of their argumentative feedback. Female students provided higher-quality argumentative feedback than male students. Although all students improved their argumentative essay quality and also knowledge content from pre-test to post-test, these improvements were not significantly different between females and males. Explanations for these findings and recommendations are provided"
MULTIFILE
