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In this paper, I describe an innovative assignment for teaching undergraduate students cross-cultural understanding. The Outsider/Insider assignment simultaneously teaches facts about cultural difference and skills for managing cross-cultural encounters. Briefly, the assignment is to write two short papers, one in which the student describes a situation in which he or she was the outsider, and the other a situation in which he or she observed a newcomer to a group where that person was an insider. The paper begins by reviewing previous research on cross-cultural interaction and its relevance for pedagogy, and describing the course, its goals, and the "Outsider/Insider" assignment. The effectiveness of the assignment is demonstrated through an analysis of excerpts from student papers. This analysis shows how the assignment can accomplish learning on a range of dimensions. The main themes that will be addressed are the following: (a) being seen as the outsider; (b) challenges related to outsider status; (c), the relevance of social class, poverty, and wealth on insider/outsider status; (d) strategies for coping in cross-cultural encounters; and (e) benefits to the student of being willing to cross boundaries. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the assignment facilitates student learning and its relevance for a range of undergraduate courses.

Transformative dialogue and mediation (TD/M) is an approach to conflict resolution used in mediation and inter-group dialogues about social justice and race, political polarization, and ethnopolitical conflict. TD/M practitioners believe their approach supports the agency of participants and helps them interact with greater confidence, self-awareness, and understanding of the perspectives of others. However, previous research on TD/M has not yet addressed how it achieves those outcomes. This pilot study works to fill that gap by investigating how reflection, the most commonly used TD/M technique, is utilized in a facilitated meeting of the steering committee of a non-profit organization. We conduct a qualitative sequential analysis of a video-recorded interaction to investigate how TD/M reflection is done. We show how the TD/M facilitator of the meeting reflects participants' statements with the techniques of mirroring, substituting, and omitting and how the participants respond to those reflections with agreement or repair. The results of the analysis are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding how TD/M facilitation works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do people enjoy jigsaw puzzles, which--challenging and time-consuming as they are--might be considered more like work than play? The author investigates the motivations, preferences, and satisfactions of individuals working on jigsaw puzzles, and she explores how these elements of play relate to the procedures and strategies puzzlers use to assemble their jigsaws. She identifies four general approaches to completing these puzzles: the Explorer, Detective, Matchmaker, and Lion Tamer. She then describes how those who use these approaches differ in their openness to serendipity and flexibility, their attraction to the aesthetics of the puzzle picture, the degree of difficulty they embrace, and their relative interest in the process of puzzle assembly or in producing a finished puzzle. She concludes that the study of jigsaw puzzling helps us better understand leisure activities in general by allowing us more effectively to distinguish serious from casual leisure, explore the relationship of work to play, assess the importance of rules, investigate the relationship between product and process in play, and identify some of the intrinsic rewards that motivate play.

Sending help when needed is a central role for emergency service call takers, but providing help during the call is also an important part of the job. The "care work" call takers do may assist callers with physical and emotional safety and enhance their resilience as they deal with ongoing emergencies prior to the arrival of the police. This conversational analytic study of a collection of 24 emergency telephone calls reveals the interactional techniques the call takers use to accomplish care work and shows how they integrate care work into their communication within the call. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares the turn-taking systems in computer-mediated communication (CMC) and oral conversation. The study is based on quasisynchronous CMC conversations between students in a college classroom.(Author/VWL)

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01186.x Byline: Gary C. David (1), Angela Cora Garcia (1), Anne Warfield Rawls (1), Donald Chand (2) Keywords: medical transcription; health information systems; medical records; speech recognition technology Abstract: Abstract Medical records have become central to nearly all aspects of healthcare. However, little research exists on their creation. Using data from an ongoing ethnographic study of healthcare documentation production, this paper examines the process of medical record creation through the use of speech recognition technology (SRT) and subsequent editing by medical transcriptionists (MTs). Informed by ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), the results demonstrate the professional knowledge involved in the work of medical transcription, which includes a combination of skilled worksite practices and an orientation toward the social order properties of recorded dictation. Furthermore, we examine how the advantages and limitations of SRTs can impact the work of transcription. We conclude with strategic recommendations for using SRTs to support medical records production and recommend against total automation. Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Sociology, Bentley University, Waltham MA, USA (2)Department of Information and Process Management, Bentley University, Waltham MA, USA Article note: Address for correspondence: Gary C. David, Department of Sociology, Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, Massachusetts 02452, USA, e-mail: gdavid@bentley.edu

In this article we review ethnographic research on the Internet and computer-mediated communication. The technologically mediated environment prevents researchers from directly observing research participants and often makes the interaction anonymous. In addition, in the online environment direct interaction with participants is replaced by computer-screen data that are largely textual, but may include combinations of textual, visual, aural, and kinetic components. We show how the online environment requires adjustments in how ethnographers define the setting of their research, conduct participant observation and interviews, obtain access to settings and research subjects, and deal with the ethical dilemmas posed by the medium. Keywords: ethnography; computer-mediated communication; Internet; participant observation; interviewing

In this paper I use a conversation analytic approach to investigate the relationship between the location of advice within a mediation session and the mediator's construction of a neutral stance. I find that while mediator advice is often placed after disputant disagreements, problem statements, or position statements, these locations may present challenges for mediator neutrality. On the other hand, the placement of advice within a mediator's extended turn or monologue may insulate it from disputants' prior utterances so that the advice can be given without challenging the mediator's neutral stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I describe an innovative assignment for teaching undergraduate students cross-cultural understanding. The Outsider/Insider assignment simultaneously teaches facts about cultural difference and skills for managing cross-cultural encounters. Briefly, the assignment is to write two short papers, one in which the student describes a situation in which he or she was the outsider, and the other a situation in which he or she observed a newcomer to a group where that person was an insider. The paper begins by reviewing previous research on cross-cultural interaction and its relevance for pedagogy, and describing the course, its goals, and the "Outsider/Insider" assignment. The effectiveness of the assignment is demonstrated through an analysis of excerpts from student papers. This analysis shows how the assignment can accomplish learning on a range of dimensions. The main themes that will be addressed are the following: (a) being seen as the outsider; (b) challenges related to outsider status; (c), the relevance of social class, poverty, and wealth on insider/outsider status; (d) strategies for coping in cross-cultural encounters; and (e) benefits to the student of being willing to cross boundaries. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the assignment facilitates student learning and its relevance for a range of undergraduate courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]