Sociocultural constructivism assumes that a learner’s capacity for intellectual growth increases with the presence of scaffolding or support during interaction. Moreover, from participating in dialogic interaction, there is appropriation of the knowledge shared and jointly created by learners which could transform individual understandings. Hence, interactions are opportunities for scaffolding ...

Processes of appropriation of groupware systems in organizations are social processes that are strongly intertwined with processes of reflection and communication. We suggest facilitating these processes by supporting the creation of socio-technical self-descriptions. Self-description is an important element of social systems such as organizations and can be extended to include descriptions of ...

We analyze how economic shocks and policies affect the intensity of social conflict. We view conflict phenomena such as crime and civil war as involving resource appropriation activities. We show that not all shocks that could make society richer reduce conflict. Positive shocks to labor intensive industries diminish social conflict, while positive shocks to capital intensive industries increas...

Adoption of new technology such as Open Source Software (OSS) is one of the important issues in organizations. Despite being considered as cost effective by many organizations, OSS implementation still encounters many challenges. This paper describes a case study conducted at one of Malaysia’s public universities which initially adopted Open Source based applications but then later rejected the...

The mobility of activities entails intrinsic parameters such as the mobility of tasks and technologies, as well as changing conditions underlying mobile computing. The interactions between these parameters bear directly on the appropriation of mobile technologies deployed in these activities. In this paper, I analyze the appropriation of mobile technologies as a function of motives, conditions ...

This paper explores the use of cognitive mapping for eliciting users' sensemaking during information system (IS) appropriation. Despite the potential usefulness of sensemaking, few studies in IS research use it as a theoretical lens to address IS appropriation. A possible reason for this may be that sensemaking does not easily lend itself to be used in practice. We introduce cognitive mapping a...

What do young people want from information and communication technology? Why do they adopt some technologies but reject others? What roles do mobile technologies play in their lives as they move from childhood toward the adult world? Working from a social constructionist perspective, and on the basis of an extensive empirical research process, we are gaining insight into the variables heeded by...

This paper examines a group of white speakers in South Philadelphia who exhibit appropriation of African American Vernacular English /TH/-fronting. Speakers with the most antagonistic contact and most aggressive attitudes toward their African American neighbors show the highest rates of /TH/-fronting. This paper argues that appropriation of the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) ethnole...

Existing studies of IT within early childhood education and care settings are scant, and those that do exist traditionally utilise a Cartesian world-view where humans and IT are separate self-sufficient entities with properties. In this worldview, change is attributed to either the technological or the human entity, leading to limited, either techno-centric or human-centred accounts of IT imple...

This case study uses a sociocultural perspective and the concept of appropriation (Newman, Griffin and Cole, 1989; Rogoff, 1990) to describe how a student learned to work with linear functions. The analysis describes in detail the impact that interaction with a tutor had on a learner, how the learner appropriated goals, actions, perspectives, and meanings that are part of mathematical practices...