Diary Method in Sociology

In the book's second section, we delve into specific ethical issues such as environmental impacts, accessibility, racial and cultural considerations in design, justice, and rights for data use and analytics, and navigating ethical considerations of learner autonomy in online learning. Warren and colleagues offer much-needed discussion on the environmental impacts of educational technology. Their paper prompts professionals to consider climate change and educational technologies' ecological impacts, which “hides behind product ordering interfaces with simple pricing.” We hope this piece spawns a greatly expanded conversation and body of scholarship with implications for practice and decision-making. Lomellini and colleagues tackle a topic that has long been discussed, but mainly approached through legalistic and compliance orientations. They discuss how this is a limited and limiting approach, inviting instructional designers to approach accessibility through more of a design mindset which embraces the iterative nature of devising solutions. Edouard’s chapter embodies the spirit of creativity and imagination that ethical considerations can evoke as he explores a makerspace designed to foster the creativity and world-building of racially minoritized learners, especially Black children. His chapter provides a specific example of how ethical considerations – namely of race and equity – directly informed the design, development, and implementation of a makerspace for university and school-aged residents in West Philadelphia in the United States. Greenhalgh challenges us to move beyond “superficial nod[s] to questions of justice, harm, and power” to explore deeper assumptions about data ethics. He uses four broad questions about purpose (of education and of educational technology), quality, and voice to illuminate ways in which designers can move beyond surface-level treatments of data rights and privacy. Greenhalgh’s piece echoes Davies’ concerns and answers Davies’ call with an example of how we understand the relationship between technology and education and how we can better question how technology shapes education’s purpose and outcomes. Scholes exemplifies an ethics-as-design approach as she identifies how strategies that better support adult online learners can also carry risks for learners. She models how designers can identify ethical issues that create tensions - or conflicts between different design parameters – and provides ideas for how designers may navigate the need to make trade-offs through various design possibilities. Although her piece may focus on a particular context and set of design considerations, Scholes’ piece serves as an excellent example of how designers can identify ethical issues in any context and then use design methods and ideas to generate possible solutions. The last chapter in our collection, by Sankaranarayanan and Park, addresses recent concerns and practical approaches to the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in instructional design practices. Moving beyond simply naming and identifying concerns, this chapter offers a rich array of practical strategies that designers can employ during different design tasks related to AI, both as a tool supporting instructional design and as a set of decisions on whether and how to use AI in educational contexts.

The use of qualitative methods is growing in anatomical sciences education. While common qualitative methods such as interviews and focus groups can provide rich insights into participant experiences, there is a wide variety of other qualitative methods that are ideal for different research topics. Research topics that may be emotive or sensitive can be challenging for participants to discuss when face-to-face with a researcher, and thus, methods such as qualitative research diaries can be ideal in circumstances where focus groups and interviews may limit participant engagement and depth of data collection. As diaries are added to over time, they can also be used to understand change and learning. Accordingly, studies using diary methods have substantive potential for furthering anatomical sciences education research. To aid researchers interested in using diary methods, this discursive article provides a practical beginner's guide to qualitative diary studies. First, we review the background and benefits of qualitative diary studies with relevance to health professions and anatomical sciences education. This includes a description of different types of diaries, such as handwritten, typed, audio, and audio-visual diaries. We also discuss key quality indicators to ensure that diary studies are conducted with rigor and ultimately contribute important research findings to advance anatomical sciences education. Drawing on case examples from our own prior health professions education research, we provide practical guidance on how to design and undertake diary studies, including ethical considerations, participant support, and analytical considerations, as well as highlighting challenges that researchers may encounter.

Design and engineering are socio-technical enterprises used to solve real-world problems. However, students in these fields are often under-equipped to consider the ethical and societal implications of their work. Our prior work showed that these societal considerations are more consistently embedded in design pedagogy in non-engineering than in engineering courses at MIT. Here, we examine underlying causes for this through a survey of instructors (231 courses from 29 departments). The main contribution of this work is an analysis of whether and how instructors incorporate social, ethical, and policy considerations in design pedagogy. The majority of respondents (60.6%) included these topics in their courses, primarily through discussion of social justice, identity groups, and ethics. These concepts were included more in non-engineering courses (65.8%) than engineering courses (46.9%). Many instructors, especially in engineering, cited irrelevance as the reason for not engaging with these topics in their courses (86.1% compared to 44.2% in non-engineering). We suggest that instructors question this perception and use the examples provided as a starting point to explore integration of these concepts into their technical content.

Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. - Paulo Freire Teaching magazine design in a department of journalism presents unique pedagogical challenges, in large part due to the need to grapple with the ideological underpinnings of the graphic design process. Recent critical scholarship indicates that consumer magazine design, in particular, perpetuates hegemonies of race, class and gender in its portrayal of marginalized societal groups; and prominent public controversies-regarding, for example, the photo-illustrations of O.J. Simpson that appeared concomitantly on the covers of Time and Newsweek in 1995 - reflect these concerns. With a view to addressing these important dimensions of design, in this article I outline a new approach to teaching magazine design that incorporates radical pedagogical theories with contemporary issues in visual communication. Scholars of visual communication have recently attempted to develop pedagogical strategies that incorporate a consideration of ethics and culture into the teaching of design. Lester (1995), for example, discusses the symbolic content of images via a framework for analysis that alerts students to the powerful sociopolitical implications of the design process. Lester's approach is significant; an understanding of the politics of design must be the point of departure for teaching design to journalists. We have entered an era in which design can no longer be presented in the classroom as a purely mechanical act, and most teachers of magazine design are aware that the traditional fine-arts focus on aesthetic principles and computer applications must not deflect attention from the ideologically charged and politically significant aspects of designing journalistic publications. But while consciousness-raising is important, it is meaningless unless it can be connected to praxis. This is where current pedagogies of design fall short. Even the newest approaches to the teaching of design do not include radical interventions that would infuse a progressive politics into the conceptualization of publication design, a politics that would combat the hegemonic constructions currently at work in most mainstream consumer magazines. Is there a need for such interventions? In this article, I use the emancipatory theories of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to argue that there is. Admittedly, Freire's philosophies developed from his work with peasants in desperately impoverished circumstances, yet his approach to education has a great deal of resonance in contemporary middle-class America, where oppression exists but is masked and mediated through cultural texts. As Shaull (1994) points out: At first sight, Paulo Freire's method of teaching illiterates in Latin America seems to belong to a different world from that in which we find ourselves in this country ... But there are certain parallels in the two situations that should not be overlooked. Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system ... Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes `the practice of freedom,' the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (pp. 15-16) Magazine designers transform the symbolic world, and critical methods of teaching must be incorporated into the magazine design curriculum in order to develop students' ownership of the sociopolitical potential of their work. This article presents a theoretical and practical framework for developing such a pedagogical practice. After defining the frame via Freire's theoretical principles, I turn to Sandra Harding's concept of standpoint epistemology to develop a teaching method that incorporates social change into the practice of magazine design. …

Considering the diversity of learners in the instruction design has been studied in this article. The purpose of this study is to make a theoretical and practical foundation for developing instructional lesson design in the view point of student’s culture and learning diversity education. In order to get my purpose of this study, firstly implications of considering the diversity of learners in the lesson design and it's directions of theoretical review were presented. Secondly, logic of instructional design for cultural and learning diversity of the students were studied as a theoretical foundation for developing instructional lesson designing in the view point of multicultural education. Thirdly, contents, methods, materials, assessment, learning environment were drawn as the elements for lesson plans based on theoretical review. Fourthly, instructional design method considering the diversity of learner was suggested. Finally, I pointed out that important thing is the quality and competency of teachers for considering the diversity of learners and equality between students in the class design. Much more important thing is that pre-service and in-service teachers have to get training to improve these qualities in teacher education institutions.

Instructional message design explores how various media and delivery systems might be used more effectively to help optimize instructional communications within context-specific instructional situations and learner needs. But use of the term appears to have fallen out of favor over the years since the mid-1990s. A review of the historical and theoretical foundations of instructional message design reveals that, while instructional design generally has shifted from objectivist to more constructivist perspectives on learning theory, the instructional message design field remains firmly rooted in early “transmission oriented” communications models. It appears that instructional message design has also suffered from definitional problems as well, with more recent narrow views of the field focused on media attributes supplanting earlier broad views of the field as an applied “linking science” between theory and practice. And, finally, while findings from studies on media attributes provide designers with some guidance for generally what will not work in terms of cognitive processing, the guidelines seldom shed light on what one should actually do within a particular learning context. It appears that reestablishing instructional message design as a valid area of inquiry within the field of instructional design will require catching up with recent philosophical shifts in communication theory while adjusting our definitions and research foci accordingly. The chapter concludes with recommendations for a revised guiding theoretical framework based on conversation theory, a broader definitional focus that looks at more than just optimizing cognitive processing, and a new systems view of our approach to research in this area.

Research with children from diverse backgrounds that supports expression of their perspectives, ideas, opinions and representations is needed for policies and programmes to become more equitable and responsive to their concerns and needs. Child-focused research requires additional ethical and methodological considerations to address unequal power imbalances, support autonomy and agency and enable participation. This chapter draws on a research project which investigated best practice career education for primary-school students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds to explore the ethical, methodological and practical challenges of conducting qualitative research with children. This project used a multi-method research methodology, which included participant drawings and group interviews. The chapter discusses ethical and methodological considerations and how utilisation of multi-method research approaches with children can generate rich and reflective data not possible through other methods. The chapter then explores the methodological benefits and practical challenges experienced in implementing this approach. Suggestions are offered as to how a multi-methods approach can be used as an effective tool in qualitative research with children from low SES backgrounds in the field of career education.

Ethics can be intentionally interwoven into introductory instructional design (ID) courses and ID practice without significant additional work through a reframing of foundational content and grounding of the role of an instructional designer as a designer as a “reflective practitioner.” In reviewing the literature on ethics, casting a net widely to include literature on critical approaches to technology, we identified three major themes both within instructional design and technology (IDT) and in other design- and technology-oriented disciplines such as engineering on practical approaches to ethics. Those themes center around key practices – reflection, interrogation, and design – that designers use to tackle the ethical problems that arise in practice and that are embedded in the fabric of the problem spaces we work in. In our book, Ethics and Educational Technology (Moore & Tillberg-Webb, 2023), we explored these three themes in depth and created Ethics in Practice sections for each chapter with readings, resources, and activities on common ethical problems designers confront, such as accessibility, equity, designing for diverse learners, data rights and privacy, and other considerations. Although ethics are, simply stated, a regular feature of the problems and problem spaces that IDT professionals navigate and seek to address, no model in the field addresses or integrates ethics, even a little (Moore, 2021). We would like to see that change. In this chapter, we will discuss ideas for integrating ethics into the typical instructional design course using an example from one of Heather’s courses where she has woven in ideas from our text alongside Larson & Lockee’s (2020) text, Streamlined ID. We conclude with ideas for ethics across the IDT curriculum where ethical considerations can be incorporated and the implicit ethos of a method or area of study made more explicit.

Over the last decades, much research on peer learning practices has been conducted. Quantitative, experimental designs focusing on problems of cause and effect dominate. Consequently, effects on achievement are well documented, as is the influence of different conditions on the effect rate. In spite of the general acknowledgment of the importance of peer learning and a large amount of research on collective learning practices, questions regarding the quality of peer interaction, and how peer relations influence learning, are not well elaborated. This paper complements the discussion on effect focusing on the processes of interaction between peers, and relates these to theoretical perspectives on learning as fundamentally social. Inspired by meta-ethnography an integrative analysis across seven qualitative studies was accomplished. The approach enabled an investigation of peer interactions in different educational settings. The analysis elaborates on how instructional designs and students’ relational knowledge mediate interaction in peer learning. The paper further discusses the potential of approaches synthesising qualitative studies as a tool in qualitative research.

While Internet-based tools are gaining currency in social work teaching and practice, social work researchers are tapping into the development of computer-mediated methods for research with dispersed and hard-to-reach populations. This article is a reflective commentary about the opportunities and challenges of using computer-mediated methods in a qualitative inquiry about young people’s (18–26 years) experiences of negotiating lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) identities in Australian workplaces. The research used two Internet-based methods of online interviews and web-based surveys to capture young people’s experiences of disclosing and discussing LGBQ identities in past and current work environments. In this commentary, I outline these methods and explore the technical, methodological and ethical challenges and tensions presented by using online tools in qualitative research. To conclude, I discuss wider applications of computer-mediated communication for social work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had far-reaching effects in research and the academic world. It has been used in many ways by the scientific community within the context of qualitative research, such as literature and systematic reviews, for conceptualization purposes, thematic and content analysis. It has however prompted concerns and questions about the potential for unreliable research, bias, and unethical behavior in the outcomes of AI-produced research. The purpose this paper is to examine the current use of AI in research, its strengths and limitations, dilemmas and ethical considerations from theoretical critical perspective principles, while delivering five key considerations for the appropriate, rigorous, and reliable use of AI in research practice. The first step is to become acquainted with the data generated by AI systems. The second is concerned with removing biased content and addressing ethical concerns when using AI, while the third is concerned with cross-referencing information generated by AI. The fourth step is to control the analysis process. The fifth and most important key consideration is the demonstration of cognitive input and skills by the researcher throughout the process of using AI in any qualitative research study and in reaching conclusions.

As new technologies emerge and evolve, possibilities open up for their use in research. In this article, we consider wearable digital video glasses as a data collection tool in qualitative research involving child participants. We draw on data from a recording made during our pilot study of the ways young children’s social interactions produced learning opportunities during family shopping experiences. The recording was produced when the digital video glasses were worn by one six-year old boy when shopping with his family. Four extracts from the recording are analysed briefly to demonstrate how data collected through use of the digital video glasses informed transcription and the analysis. Issues and implications for use of the wearable technology are discussed focusing on methodology and methods, implications for transcription, benefits and limitations as a data collection tool, ethical considerations and applicability for researching young children’s social interactions.

CyGaMEs is a formalism for instructional game design that aligns an instructional game with targeted content. The CyGaMEs method derives from instructional design, cognitive science analogical reasoning, learning science, and game design theory. The author summarizes the theoretical foundations, introduces the method, describes the CyGaMEs assessment tools, and summarizes research that demonstrates how game-based technologies can be used to authentically assess knowledge growth as it occurs during game-based learning. The author argues that theoretically and empirically sound instructional design methods like CyGaMEs enhance the effectiveness of game-based learning and assessment.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeView responses to this article:A brief response to assent in applied behaviour analysis and positive behaviour support: ethical considerations and practical recommendations Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional informationNotes on contributorsCassi BreauxCassi (Cas) Breaux, M.A., M.S., BCBA, LBA (pronouns they/them) is a content creator and the manager of educational content development for CRInstitute at CentralReach. They have been in the field of behaviour for more than 15 years, most notably as a special education teacher and behaviour specialist for NYC public schools, a tech and BCBA in private clinics, and a private practice owner. They have been adjunct faculty for Association for Behavior Analysis International approved Verified Course Sequence courses for more than 9 years. They have created more than six hours of assent and dignity continuing education courses for CRInstitute, as well as over 100 hours of content on the BCBA Task List (5th ed.). Their goal is to help the field of applied behaviour analysis become assent-based and person-centered, through a lens of anti-ableism.Kristin SmithKristin Smith, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA is a behaviour analyst who specializes in instructional design and measurement. She began her career in the field of behaviour analysis in 2002. She has experience implementing and designing intervention programs across a variety of contexts, with learners ranging in age from 18 months to 40 years. She’s provided behaviour analytic services to learners including, but not limited to those with autism, chromosomal deletions, cognitive impairments, learning disabilities, social-emotional and/or behavioural problems, significant challenging behaviour, blindness, and children with multiple disabilities. Kristin is passionate about disseminating the practice of behaviour analysis that is rooted in learner autonomy and dignity, maximizes efficiency, and incorporates a constructional approach to intervention. Kristin brings her areas of expertise including measurement, instructional design, assessment, and data analysis to her role as a Sr. Instructional Designer at CentralReach.

The goal of this chapter is to identify ethical concerns that instructional designers should be aware of when designing and developing learning games, simulations, and virtual worlds. Partly taken from ethical considerations that researchers are required to follow as part of standard institutional review board processes for the protection of human subjects, we suggest specific ethical principles which designers should consider prior to and during the design of these complex learning systems as well as during the evaluation of the products. We provide examples from existing and past learning games, simulations, and multi-user virtual environments that have either followed these principles or left questions to be addressed and propose a series of ethical considerations in future designs.