Suchergebnisse

With a variety of smart technologies on the market, health technologies have become an increasingly everyday phenomenon. This paper focuses on customer training in the use of a new technological device, a digital mobility stick, which is an exercise stick with a built-in haptic component. It can be used as a measuring and training tool to analyze the body's ability to balance, bend, and rotate and to guide the trajectory of one's exercise movements. We focus on the mobility stick as a training tool, investigating how the haptic technology is introduced to the customer in instructional interaction, and what roles the technology obtains in the process. The paper uses video-recorded customer training interaction data from a health technology company. It draws on multimodal conversation analytic research on instructions and instructed actions, objects, technologies, and touch in interaction. We show that the company representative's specific orientation to the mobility stick was consequential to the instructed actions of the customers and their learning. The analyzed cases also illustrate that the mobility stick gained different roles in the interaction, ranging from a technological and sensorial object to a technology representing information to an active participant in interaction guiding human action. The study thus contributes to our understanding of the multimodality of instructional interaction and the potentially varied roles of technology in such interaction.

This chapter focuses on questions surrounding universities' societal responsibility in connection to language use, going beyond the national language(s) versus English dichotomy. As a result of university internationalisation and increased migration, both student and faculty populations at Nordic universities have diversified. Nordic universities are currently facing multiple challenges: to maintain academic autonomy and freedom of thought, to protect democratic ideals, to prove the validity of scientific findings, and to conduct most of their activities with the support of digital media. Drawing on findings from recent research conducted in Sweden and Finland and the latest Nordic language policy document (Gregersen et al. 2018), our chapter critically discusses how researchers and students with transnational trajectories perceive their language use. In particular, we consider the role of English vis-à-vis the national language(s) and other languages for purposes of research outreach and widening participation. We argue that there is a mismatch between university policies assuming that societal responsibility concerning language use is largely limited to local national and (to a lesser extent) minority languages, and the translocal experience of university stakeholders who often deal with a range of linguistic resources on a daily basis. ; Peer reviewed