Language attitudes and language shift among ethnic migrants in Khartoum

This paper investigates language attitudes among ethnic migrant groups in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan. A questionnaire was used to collect data on language preference, language parents prefer their children to learn, and reasons for language preference. Results suggest that while positive attitude played a significant role in learning Arabic among some of the groups under investigation, it proved to be of no help in maintaining the groups’ ethnic languages. Arabic was reported as very important for education, religious activities, economic privileges and social interaction. Ethnic languages, on the other hand, were preferred for purely symbolic reasons (symbolizing groups’ ethnic identity).

Seniors in Society. Strategies to Retain Individual Autonomy

The research project on "Seniors in Society. Strategies to Retain Individual Autonomy" (2002 - 2004) is supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic. It's importance is empha-sized by the relevance of social and economic aspects of demographic ageing of the popula-tion and that of fundamental changes associated with the transformation of Czech society. The objectives of the research are (1) to find out seniors' material and social resources sup-porting their relative autonomy in everyday life, (2) to record their personal expectations from state, community, or formal and informal support and aid institutions, respectively, and (3) to uncover their engagement in social interaction and individual experiencing of the integration into social groups. The data acquired become the base for (4) identifying the typologies corre-sponding to the levels of seniors' social integration (i.e. groups of relatives, friends, neighbours, special-interest and professional groups). By applying qualitative methods, we explore (5) strategies of everyday life and coping with life cycle events and crisis within par-ticular types. Special attention is paid to the family background of the seniors, including rela-tives in the vertical line. Specifically, we focus on (6) conditions under which family is capa-ble and willing to help or actually is helping it's oldest members, as well as on their interpre-tation within (7) identified types of the relatives supportive systems.

The TViews Table Role-Playing Game

The TViews Table Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) is a digital tabletop role-playing game that runs on the TViews table, bridging the separate worlds of traditional role-playing games with the growing area of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The TViews table is an interactive tabletop media platform that can track the location of multiple tagged objects in real-time as they are moved around its surface, providing a simultaneous and coincident graphical display. In this paper we present the implementation of the first version of TTRPG, with a content set based on the traditional Dungeons & Dragons rule-set. We also discuss the results of a user study that used TTRPG to explore the possible social context of digital tabletop role-playing games.

The Design of Networked Exertion Games

Incorporating physical activity and exertion into pervasive gaming applications can provide health and social benefits. Prior research has resulted in several prototypes of pervasive games that encourage exertion as interaction form; however, no detailed critical account of the various approaches exists. We focus on networked exertion games and detail some of our work while identifying the remaining issues towards providing a coherent framework. We outline common lessons learned and use them as the basis for generalizations for the design of networked exertion games. We propose possible directions of further investigation, hoping to provide guidance for future work to facilitate greater awareness and exposure of exertion games and their benefits.

(Lifelong) learning in your pocket?

Der Beitrag fokussiert die Entwicklung, den Einsatz und die Nutzung von innovativen Technologien zur Unterstützung von Bildungsszenarien in Schule, Hochschule und Weiterbildung. Ausgehend von den verschiedenen Phasen des Corporate Learning, Social Learning, Mobile Learning und Intelligent Learning wird in einem ersten Abschnitt das Nutzungsverhalten von Technologien durch Kinder, Jugendliche und (junge) Erwachsene in Schule, Studium und Lehre betrachtet. Es folgt die Darstellung technologischer Entwicklungen auf Basis des Technology Life Cycle und die Konsequenzen von unterschiedlichen Entwicklungszuständen und Reifegraden von Technologien wie Content Learning Management, sozialen Netzwerken, mobilen Endgeräten, multidimensionalen und -modalen Räumen bis hin zu Anwendungen augmentierter Realität und des Internets der Dinge, Dienste und Daten für den Einsatz und die Nutzung in Bildungsszenarien. Nach der Darstellung von Anforderungen an digitale Technologien hinsichtlich Inhalte, Didaktik und Methodik wie etwa hinsichtlich der Erstellung von Inhalten, deren Wiederverwendung, Digitalisierung und Auffindbarkeit sowie Standards werden methodische Hinweise zur Nutzung digitaler Technologien zur Interaktion von Lernenden, von Lehrenden, sozialer Interaktion, kollaborativem Autorieren, Kommentierung, Evaluation und Begutachtung gegeben. Abschließend werden - differenziert für Schule und Hochschule - Erkenntnisse zu Rahmenbedingungen, Einflussgrößen, hemmenden und fördernden Faktoren sowie Herausförderungen bei der Einführung und nachhaltigen Implementation digitaler Technologien im schulischen Unterricht, in Lehre, Studium und Weiterbildung im Überblick zusammengefasst.

Turkey. A Generalist Approach in Social Work Education

A global review of social work education reveals considerable similarity among countries as well as significant differences. Historically, programs of social work education are informed by humanistic values and encompass knowledge of social problems, an understanding of individuals and their environment in interaction, and method of intervention into social and human difficulties. At the same time, structure of social work within the educational system and the length of training vary considerably from country to country. There is no serious international standards' setting for social work education, programs, educators and students around the world. Education programs exist at differing levels of education and for differing periods of time. There are no worldwide data on the number and qualifications of teachers of social work, the number and characteristics of social work students, variations in curricula and type of practicum (Hokeenstad and Kendall, 2001; Hokenstad, Midgley, 1998). North American and European models have had a major influence on social work educational programs in most parts of the world, especially developing countries. Still, the amount of western influence on social work education in developing countries is an issue that continues to be discussed (Hockenstad, Khinduka and Midgley, 1992; Frumkin, Lloyd, 2001). The programs in practice in Europe and North America have influenced the implementation of social work education programs. In recent years this influence has had a big part in the acceptance of the generalist approach. It is very important that social work education programs must be planned in accordance with the social structure and the development process of the society. Because of this, information on the social indicators and social welfare services will be given first then social work education will be stressed upon.

Semiotic Analysis in the Study of Social Work

Research and professional practices have the joint aim of re-structuring the preconceived notions of reality. They both want to gain the understanding about social reality. Social workers use their professional competence in order to grasp the reality of their clients, while researchers’ pursuit is to open the secrecies of the research material. Development and research are now so intertwined and inherent in almost all professional practices that making distinctions between practising, developing and researching has become difficult and in many aspects irrelevant. Moving towards research-based practices is possible and it is easily applied within the framework of the qualitative research approach (Dominelli 2005, 235; Humphries 2005, 280). Social work can be understood as acts and speech acts crisscrossing between social workers and clients. When trying to catch the verbal and non-verbal hints of each others’ behaviour, the actors have to do a lot of interpretations in a more or less uncertain mental landscape. Our point of departure is the idea that the study of social work practices requires tools which effectively reveal the internal complexity of social work (see, for example, Adams & Dominelli & Payne 2005, 294 – 295). The boom of qualitative research methodologies in recent decades is associated with much profound the rupture in humanities, which is called the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). The idea that language is not transparently mediating our perceptions and thoughts about reality, but on the contrary it constitutes it was new and even confusing to many social scientists. Nowadays we have got used to read research reports which have applied different branches of discursive analyses or narratologic or semiotic approaches. Although differences are sophisticated between those orientations they share the idea of the predominance of language. Despite the lively research work of today’s social work and the research-minded atmosphere of social work practice, semiotics has rarely applied in social work research. However, social work as a communicative practice concerns symbols, metaphors and all kinds of the representative structures of language. Those items are at the core of semiotics, the science of signs, and the science which examines people using signs in their mutual interaction and their endeavours to make the sense of the world they live in, their semiosis. When thinking of the practice of social work and doing the research of it, a number of interpretational levels ought to be passed before reaching the research phase in social work. First of all, social workers have to interpret their clients’ situations, which will be recorded in the files. In some very rare cases those past situations will be reflected in discussions or perhaps interviews or put under the scrutiny of some researcher in the future. Each and every new observation adds its own flavour to the mixture of meanings. Social workers have combined their observations with previous experience and professional knowledge, furthermore, the situation on hand also influences the reactions. In addition, the interpretations made by social workers over the course of their daily working routines are never limited to being part of the personal process of the social worker, but are also always inherently cultural. The work aiming at social change is defined by the presence of an initial situation, a specific goal, and the means and ways of achieving it, which are – or which should be – agreed upon by the social worker and the client in situation which is unique and at the same time socially-driven. Because of the inherent plot-based nature of social work, the practices related to it can be analysed as stories (see Dominelli 2005, 234), given, of course, that they are signifying and told by someone. The research of the practices is concentrating on impressions, perceptions, judgements, accounts, documents etc. All these multifarious elements can be scrutinized as textual corpora, but not whatever textual material. In semiotic analysis, the material studied is characterised as verbal or textual and loaded with meanings. We present a contribution of research methodology, semiotic analysis, which has to our mind at least implicitly references to the social work practices. Our examples of semiotic interpretation have been picked up from our dissertations (Laine 2005; Saurama 2002). The data are official documents from the archives of a child welfare agency and transcriptions of the interviews of shelter employees. These data can be defined as stories told by the social workers of what they have seen and felt. The official documents present only fragmentations and they are often written in passive form. (Saurama 2002, 70.) The interviews carried out in the shelters can be described as stories where the narrators are more familiar and known. The material is characterised by the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. The levels of the story and the telling of the story become apparent when interviews or documents are examined with the use of semiotic tools. The roots of semiotic interpretation can be found in three different branches; the American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics in Paris and the so called formalism in Moscow and Tartu; however in this paper we are engaged with the so called Parisian School of semiology which prominent figure was A. J. Greimas. The Finnish sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Jukka Törrönen (1997a; 1997b) have further developed the ideas of Greimas in their studies on socio-semiotics, and we lean on their ideas. In semiotics social reality is conceived as a relationship between subjects, observations, and interpretations and it is seen mediated by natural language which is the most common sign system among human beings (Mounin 1985; de Saussure 2006; Sebeok 1986). Signification is an act of associating an abstract context (signified) to some physical instrument (signifier). These two elements together form the basic concept, the “sign”, which never constitutes any kind of meaning alone. The meaning will be comprised in a distinction process where signs are being related to other signs. In this chain of signs, the meaning becomes diverged from reality. (Greimas 1980, 28; Potter 1996, 70; de Saussure 2006, 46-48.) One interpretative tool is to think of speech as a surface under which deep structures – i.e. values and norms – exist (Greimas & Courtes 1982; Greimas 1987). To our mind semiotics is very much about playing with two different levels of text: the syntagmatic surface which is more or less faithful to the grammar, and the paradigmatic, semantic structure of values and norms hidden in the deeper meanings of interpretations. Semiotic analysis deals precisely with the level of meaning which exists under the surface, but the only way to reach those meanings is through the textual level, the written or spoken text. That is why the tools are needed. In our studies, we have used the semiotic square and the actant analysis. The former is based on the distinctions and the categorisations of meanings, and the latter on opening the plotting of narratives in order to reach the value structures.