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This paper explores how the use of smartphones vs. laptops influences students' engagement, behaviour and experience watching academic videos in a collaborative classroom. Experiments were run in authentic teaching sessions with a total of 483 first-year higher education students. The methodology applied is a quasi-experimental design with post-test-only, being the independent variable, the device used to visualise the academic videos. Results indicate that the use of laptops has provided better results in terms of student's engagement with the videos, their collaborative behaviour and satisfaction with the device. Hence, the findings of this research suggest that the type of mobile device used in activities that consider the use of videos in a collaborative class need to be carefully chosen to maximise the student's comfortability – and in consequence, their engagement with the video-based learning activity and their positive behaviour and experience within the collaborative context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking up the notion of engineering as social experimentation, this paper argues that engineering research laboratory directors have a responsibility to inform graduate engineering students who participate in their research projects of the potential broader social dimensions of those projects. Informing engineers-in-the-making of the broader social dimensions of the research they are learning to conduct would help ensure their future capacity to act as ethically responsible social experimenters. The paper also argues that graduate engineers have a right to be informed participants in activities that may have broader social dimensions than are recognized by formal research evaluation or educational processes. The process of obtaining the informed consent of graduate engineering students, if implemented effectively, would thus help ensure both their capacity to act as moral agents and their own moral integrity. Since the eventual outcomes of research can be uncertain, complex, and contested, most traditional institutional frameworks—such as principle-based codes of conduct and risk-benefit frameworks—provide an insufficient basis to inform engineers and citizens. Rather, we recommend an ongoing discursive process that explores a number of different actors, contexts, and scenarios, and that evolves with the social context of the engineering research in question. While this may seem burdensome to the engineering research process, it can be integrated directly into the group research meetings and mentorship activities that typically already go on. Moreover, it can actually be seen to benefit engineering practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the challenge laid down over 15 years ago that ergonomics needs to report on the reliability and validity of its methods if it is to maintain its standing amongst the engineering community. Unfortunately, a review of books reporting on ergonomics methods since that time shows very little change. The theoretical constructs of reliability and validity are presented together with the rationale for conducting studies of training in ergonomics methods. Revisiting the original study shows the way in which such validation work can be undertaken and data reported. It is hoped that this article provides the stimulus for more studies of this nature now the approach has been demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research investigated Internet-based knowledge search patterns of engineers and scientists working in R&D for companies in the pharmacological and information technology sectors in Israel. Building on earlier work that considers the multidimensional nature of the relative advantage construct, we examine how perceptions of learning, informational convenience, and trust affected intentions to use the Internet to acquire new knowledge. In particular, these perceptions were studied with regard to both active and passive modes of interaction. We also considered here which types of technological knowledge are acquired by researchers, and how that differs across two professional communities of practice – scientists and engineers. This study sheds light on how R&D workers perceive the relative advantage of acquiring necessary knowledge through passive and active modes of communication with other researchers that are facilitated by the Internet. Findings are of interest to the literature on knowledge spillover because the capability of an organisation to acquire, disseminate, and exploit knowledge is crucial to R&D efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]