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The Thirteenth Meeting of the International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME-13) convened in Hamburg, Germany, in July, 2016. There were two Topic Study Groups (TSGs) dedicated exclusively to adult learners and the authors of this paper served on the organizing committees of these groups. Arrangements were made by the congress committee for the publication of peer-reviewed papers from each TSG by Springer International Publishing AG in a series of edited books. In this paper we focus on our experiences as editors of the monographs resulting from our two TSGs.

Digital media and digital data processing have substantially influenced public institutions in recent years and changed their efficiency, effectiveness and organisational set-up (nature of organisations). Based on Fountain's Technology Enactment Framework (TEF), this paper argues that, firstly, in a circular process, digital requirements transform the bureaucratic features of school organisation, and that the effects of digital technologies on the performance and efficiency of schools as bureaucratic organisations are ambivalent. We use interview data from a sample of 51% of the head teachers of vocational school centres in the jurisdiction of Bavaria in order to substantiate these assumptions by means of structured qualitative analysis. Email technology seems particularly significant from a quantitative perspective. Indications for the transformative nature of objective digital technologies with regard to the school bureaucracies can be found for all bureaucratic categories under consideration in this analysis, particularly for the feature 'standardisation'. The examples presented here seem to highlight that gains in efficiency or reductions of losses in efficiency caused by digitalisation are mostly caused by the concrete use of digital technology within the respective school organisation.

This paper examines student-faculty communication by email and the lack of clear guidelines that leads to misuse of email in student-faculty interaction, whereby status-incongruent pragmatic markers are employed, resulting in impoliteness and inappropriateness. The main objective is to bridge the gap in research on other than requestive speech acts in this particular type of e-interaction, taking into account various pragmatic markers and cultural determinants of the subjects' email communication styles. The main purpose of the study was to determine whether and to what degree the use of pragmatic markers by students is congruent with the English netiquette in this specific domain. Moreover, the aim was to investigate the relation of the usage of speech acts and pragmatic markers by students to politeness, as well as to cross-culturally compare the data obtained. The research questions were as follows: Which pragmatic markers distinguish students of different nationalities and in different university settings? What are other than requestive purposes for which students deploy email communication? Which pragmatic markers, in general, are associated with student-faculty email? Is there a correlation between the three countries represented in the corpus and (im)politeness based on the data found in all the emails? What are the implications of the study for computer-mediated language learning? The corpus consisted of 1,200 student-faculty emails written in an academic domain by university students from a German university, a Saudi Arabian university, and two Japanese universities (400 emails per country). The research method employed was of mixed qualitative-quantitative nature, with the focus on pragmatic analysis of speech acts with their illocutionary force and functions, as well as on their impact on the receiver (perlocution). It was determined that the impolite acts occurred most frequently in the corpus. This shows that students appear not to be aware of the role their email messages play in creating an impression on faculty and that structured instruction in email writing is required to improve the situation. The lack of pragmatic competence was found in all three groups of students, independent of the proficiency level and seniority; whereby explicit course guidance in email writing and its netiquette had a clear positive effect on the student-faculty interaction in terms of appropriateness and the level of politeness.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer a comparison of how human expertise is perceived by human resource development (HRD) scholars across several Western European countries and in the USA. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative, exploratory approach using electronic mail was used for this study. In total, 36 leading HRD scholars from 11 different countries were interviewed. Findings: There is a propensity of several countries to converge towards common themes. Based on this fact, a European-US definition of expertise is offered: expertise is the combination of knowledge, experience, and skills held by a person in a specific domain. Research limitations/implications: One major limitation is the selection of "experts" to describe "expertise". Second, although all but one European interviewee spoke fluent English, the questions were asked in English. Third, virtual ethnography coupled with traditional interviewing is known to be best. Fourth, the research is deeply embedded in one field. Finally, the rather small sample size underrepresented some countries. Practical implications: The findings provide HRD practitioners with a better understanding of training and development practices and give additional ground for employee development. They shed light on cultural differences and on cross-national communication. As organizations increasingly expand worldwide and outsource, understanding expertise across nations can provide insights into selection and hiring procedures and help with cross-cultural training for expatriates. Expertise can also be used as a performance measure to develop employees for optimal performance. Originality/value: The paper explores a training and development construct internationally. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper presents the findings of a six-week telecollaborative project between sixteen American students enrolled in a second-semester German class at an American university and sixteen German students enrolled in an advanced English course at a high school in Germany. Students discussed various cultural topics with their partner in two e-mails per week. The study strove to reveal the American college students' understanding of their own and of German culture, their interest in cultural learning, and possible changes therein through telecollaboration. Moreover, the study aimed at exploring if intercultural competence can be exhibited, and thus assessed, through an e-mail exchange. For that purpose, Byram's model of intercultural competence (1997) was used for the data analysis. In addition, pre- and post-surveys were administered to help answer one of the research questions. The results of the study revealed that students' interest in cultural learning did not change significantly. Additionally, the results showed that the majority of Byram's objectives can be demonstrated in an e-mail exchange. (Contains 2 notes.)

Instructors rely on asynchronous exchanges to provide learners with authentic input and opportunities to communicate in the TL. While most practitioners recognize the advantages of e-mail exchanges, learner benefits are not an automatic byproduct of participation in an exchange. This paper presents findings from an e-mail exchange carried out between university students in a German language class and native and near-native speakers of German in a methodology seminar at a university in Germany. The content of the e-mails produced by the FL learners was analyzed qualitatively to explore the role of topic initiation, frequency, and dyad dynamics in sustaining an intercultural exchange.

Intercultural competence has acquired an important role in the foreign language classroom. However, we must also come to terms with assessing this highly complex construct if we consider it as a superordinate learning objective. Therefore the components of intercultural communicative competence that go beyond knowledge, especially attitudes, deserve closer attention. On the basis of Byram's (1997) model of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), an attempt has been made to trace the development of attitudes as part of ICC in computer-mediated intercultural communication. Data was drawn from three e-mail projects that took place between 2001 and 2002. Three different upper-secondary classes at a vocational school in Mainz, Germany (n=64) exchanged e-mails with two groups of US-American undergraduate students in Ohio (n=57) and one group of undergraduate students of English from Tokyo (n=30). Preliminary findings from a telecollaborative seminar with US-American undergraduate teacher students at a German teacher training institution were used to support the data. The main question addressed in the paper is whether attitudinal components of ICC can be measured quantitatively in telecollaborative environments. To do this, specifications and implementation of learning objectives for attitudes as put forward by Byram (1997) are applied to different instruments within the framework of the e-mail projects, including a triangulation of instruments. Instruments include e-mails, critical incidents, essays and interaction journals. When data was ambiguous or incomplete, follow-up interviews were conducted with pupils. Results of the study suggest that it is not possible to measure attitudes with the instruments described, but that they can help teachers to describe evidences of attitudes in interaction and trace developments to provide a basis for feedback.

Not long ago forensic aspects where the major driving force to complete and correct medical documentation. Diagnosis related groups becoming basic data for billing of hospital treatment in Germany now extremely extend the need for complex administrative documentation over-ruling all medical documentary needs. Due to unchanged personnel resources in hospitals and due to a lack of comfortable tools supporting these documentary needs medical personnel in most hospitals is confronted with an annoying effort to fulfill these needs. As a result innumerable hours of working time have to be shifted from patient focused to administrative work. This paper introduces a computer system based on a hospital-wide documentation concept and clinical workflow allowing to derive administrative data straight from medical documents so that redundant documentation and discrepancies between medical and administrative documentation can be avoided.

Writing E-mail is the most popular Internet activity. Meanwhile, many people have more than one E-mail address. The question how people manage their E-mail addresses, more specifically, whether they use them deliberately for different purposes, is the central question of this paper. E-mail addresses vary in the amount of identifying information they convey (e.g., name, gender, status). It is proposed that the amount of identifying information an email address contains is a predictor of usage for a specific purpose. However, it is assumed that not all people choose email addresses in a rational way, according to the optimal fit between amount of identifying information and purpose of the E-mail. Thus, the role of other factors is tested as well. An online survey on German Internet users showed that it is common to have more than one E-mail address. Especially free webmail addresses (freemail) are extremely popular. People used more anonymous E-mail addresses when they expected spam or were concerned about privacy. However, there were also interindividual differences in the management of E-mail addresses.

Communication between hospitals and general practitioners is often restricted to paper-based discharge letters. In order to meet the growing need for improved data communication between various actors in the healthcare domain, it is necessary to overcome the barriers of software heterogeneity and lack of standards. HL7's clinical document architecture (CDA) is a new tool to exchange clinical documents. In this paper we show how CDA can be used to share electronic discharge letters generated in the hospital information system with general practitioners. Ease-of-use and data security and integrity were the main design principles. Although there still remain technical and organizational issues to be solved, this is a promising method in order to enhance data exchange between hospital and primary care and to move towards an electronic patient record (EPR) crossing institutional borders.