Virtual teams are developing rapidly in organisations of the new economy. As educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that our students are appropriately prepared for work in the virtual workspace, where teams may cross time, geographical, and cultural boundaries. In this article, the culturally sensitive theory of sociocultural learning is combined with GSS (Group Support Systems) to illu...

This essay examines, in Ben Highmore’s words, the implications of “a materialist turn towards the immaterial, towards affect, towards thinglyness, the senses” and how this might be determined by “the social world that produced them.” In viewing the “social,” or “sociocultural,” as always affective, and in viewing the significance of landscape in terms of how people define themselves and their r...

This paper considers how independent and interdependent learning can be fostered through a process approach to the teaching of writing. It does so by presenting the theoretical rational which underlies a university academic skills programme. Drawing on reports of this programme which have been published elsewhere (e.g., Brine & Campbell, 2002), it is a case study illustrating how scaffolding ca...

As a part of a larger-scale research, the present study aimed to use the main tenets of sociocultural perspective; namely, mediation, internalization, zone of proximal development, and the activity theory, to analyze the novice and expert teachers’ professional development through personal practical theorizing as an awareness raising technique. Furthermore, the study attempted to identify the c...

Through analysis of the medical charts from an institution for treatment of the insane run by an association of Kardecist spiritists, it is possible to identify the various perceptions and strategies for treatment and social control of insanity developed by different sectors of the Brazilian population in the first half of the twentieth century in the Brazilian countryside. The multidimensional...

Most accounts of thresholds between alternate regimes involve a single, dominant shift defined by one, often slowly changing variable in an ecosystem. This paper expands the focus to include similar dynamics in social and economic systems, in which multiple variables may act together in ways that produce interacting regime shifts in social-ecological systems. We use four different regions in th...

1. introduction the issue of translation equivalence has received increasing attention from translation theorists and translators, but it seems that this issue can be investigated at different levels and from different perspectives. reception theory which appeared from the second half of the 20th century as an opposition to new criticism, was to re-define the author-reader-text relation in diff...

This paper presents an overview of the field of distributed development of software systems and applications (DD). Based on an analysis of the published literature, including its use in different industrial contexts, we provide a preliminary analysis that structures existing DD knowledge, indicating opportunities but identifying threats to communication, coordination, and control caused by temp...

The commitment of sociocultural linguistics to the cause of social justice has been central to the discipline since its foundation. This commitment is nowhere more evident than in the educational domain and particularly in the development of sociolinguistically informed curricula and teacher preparation programs. Such programs help ensure that students who speak politically subordinated linguis...