In 2004 as many as 25% of teachers in Sweden, Denmark, and England were willing to leave their profession immediately; in the United States much effort has been invested in studying why teachers leave the profession. In this paper, four teachers who left the profession were interviewed from within the life-story tradition. In the narratives, which were rendered in a poetic style during the analysis, colleagues were mentioned both positively and negatively. The theme of having colleagues, and especially trust or mistrust between colleagues, was thus explored. The existence or non-existence of lateral trust between teachers can be connected both to school development and to student learning outcomes.

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To date, most of the research on group cohesion has focused on team sports, with little known about how this body of knowledge relates to individual sports. The case of the male French whitewater slalom canoe and kayak team was chosen because of the success of the team at World Championships and Olympic Games. The purpose of the present case study was to investigate how the coaches and athletes of this highly successful team worked together in training and competition within a highly competitive environment. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with six athletes and four coaches. Three themes, each containing numerous sub-themes, emerged from the analysis: (a) the nature of collaboration within the team environment, (b) coach leadership, and (c) the fragility of collaboration. The results of the present study have advanced our understanding of what collaboration within an individual sport team may look like. For a period of time, the leadership skills of the coaches, as well as their technical coaching expertise, and the willingness of the talented and driven athletes to work together, contributed significantly to a collaborative environment for this team. Then a change in the Olympic entry rules, the departure of an influential coach, and the inevitable change in the ages and experiences of the athletes themselves all combined to erode the foundation of that productive and collaborative environment.

This thesis explores the innovation and development of the Canadian wine industry. The main objectives are to present the key development factors, innovation, and collaborations, with particular emphasis on collaborations with higher education institutes. It also empirically assesses the extent to which there are differences among the wine producing regions of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. The empirical analysis is based on a firm-level survey of 146 firms. The results show that the Canadian wine production is highly innovative and knowledge intensive. Despite that the wine industry in Canada has developed differently according to its regional context, the pattern of innovation is rather similar among firms.

Health care education is developing and simulations, in different guises, are gaining increasing attention as a means of overcoming tensions between instructional models and educational objectives. The role of simulations is, however, yet to be fully defined and will be dependent on the actual impact simulations on educational practice. Research need to better understand this impact and contribute to developing simulation practices. There is, therefore, a strong need for research that can balance scientific stringency and practical utility. This presents a challenge in a field that is biased in favor of laboratory experiments where theoretical accounts are also rare. This thesis explores a new theoretical and methodological approach, as a means of meeting this challenge. It draws upon Rose Luckin's Ecology of Resources framework for redesigning learning contexts (2010) and it attempts to explore relations between learning context, learner interactions, and learning outcomes, in order to identify opportunities for the development of educational simulation practice. In researching different types of health care simulations in their own right, arguments have been made that it is necessary to strive for smaller and more useful generalizations. In response to this challenge, this thesis delineates one type of simulation context: collaborative educational computer-assisted simulation (ECAS) in health care education. After reviewing previous research on related topics, a model of this type of context has been developed. Based on this general model, the particular subfield of collaborative radiology in ECAS has been analyzed and researched. Four articles on this topic present empirical contributions that address different relations between context, learner interactions, and learning outcomes in collaborative radiology in ECAS. The first one explores how moving from a static tool to an ECAS changes what learners talk about, how they talk about it, and how they develop during training. The second one explores in more detail relations between the features of ECAS, the content of learner interactions, and the impact on learning. The third one explores how context design impacts peer interaction, and the fourth compares more and less successful groups in order to identify needs and opportunities for development of the learning context. The empirical data are used to discuss relations between learning context, learner interactions, and learning outcomes, and how collaborative scripts may be potentially useful in the development of collaborative ECAS in health care education. Such scripts could support for instance explicit dialogue about relations between context-dependent doing and subject-specific principles, thorough engagement with simulation feedback and inclusion of all simulations participants. A new path for health care simulation research is suggested, including a move beyond laboratory experiments towards dealing with the messiness of actual educational practice, a move beyond universal generalizations towards smaller-scale context considerate and more practically useful generalizations. / Learning Radiology in Simulated Environments

School counselors have a duty to formulate strategies that aid in the detection and prevention of child sexual abuse (ASCA, 2003). This may be accomplished in a number of ways, such as designing programs, providing training to teachers regarding recognizing and reporting abuse indicators, and collaborating with child protection and other mental health professionals to provide additional aftercare for sexually abused children in the school setting. Much can be learned about trauma symptomology from a clinical sample of sexually abused children. The Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children (TSCC; Briere, 1996) is a 54-item self-report instrument for children and adolescents 8-16 years of age which assesses the frequency of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to traumatic events they have experienced. To understand better the trauma symptomology of children and adolescents, the author analyzed an existing data set of TSCC protocols from children who received treatment for sexual abuse from a children’s advocacy center in a metropolitan area near a large city in the southeastern United States. Although a large number of potential participants were lost to follow up (N = 54), T2 analyses revealed significant differences between the groups only on the length of time in therapy. A repeated measures analysis of variance was performed on data from children and adolescents who completed therapy (N = 31) to test whether differences on Depression and Posttraumatic Stress scale scores would exist across the course of therapy. Although no statistically significant findings emerged, implications for clinical practice and research became apparent. Specifically, differences in cutoff T-scores on TSCC scales may be more useful to clinicians for treatment and termination planning purposes than statistically significant differences. In addition, assessing clients at intervals measured by session number, rather than by length of time, may provide more generalizable results for within- and between-participants clinical and research comparisons. These implications may aid clinical and school counselors and researchers to recognize and serve the specific needs of sexually abused children in their respective settings.

As a result of today`s competitive situation, the demand on the rapid development of research has increased. Both universities and companies are realizing the importance of a functioning and well-developed cooperation. A close collaboration and communication between universities and the business community has in many studies been shown to be very important for business development and knowledge transfer. The purose was to examine how communication and collaboration between universities and industry can be developed and strenghthen on the basis of innovative thinking. In order to initially identify the perceived problems the authors studied how communication and cooperation manifests itslelf today between the two parties, what does not work and how the existing tools for communication and collaboration look like today. The study was conducted based on a qualitative approach and the empirical data have primarily been based on interviews with represantatives from both universities and industry, but also by a smaller invironmental scanning and the authors own experience. The results indicate that the perceived deficiencies concem the establishment of cooperation but also the communication quality, for instance the feedback on the performed. There also appears to be difficult to achieve a high degree of win-win situtation as a result of cooperation. The part that belives that it does not work is the students. None of the responding seems to see the full potential of interacting with each other; Although there are many reasons and much to gain from a partnership the empirical data shows that the parties focus on only two motives for cooperation. The students focus on the opportunity for jobs after graduation and the representatives from the companies see the universities as a recruitment channel. The existing tools for communcation seem to work in a very limited extent. The authors have as a result of this thesis generated a proposal of how communication could be improved in order to respond to the perceived problems. These ideas are presented in the section of suggestions for improvement.

The loss of memory can have a profound and disabling effect on individuals. People who acquire memory impairments are often unable to live independent lives because they cannot remember what they need to do. In many cases, they rely on family members who live with them. When I carried out ethnographic fieldwork to explore this domain, I observed that individuals with amnesia were surrounded by family members who provided extensive memory support (e.g. reminders). I found that such families very worked closely together to accomplish everyday activities, such as coordinating a family outing or planning a doctor’s appointment. However, these activities were often undermined by family members forgetting. This led me to view memory aids as collaboration technology, rather than as tools that only support an individual’s memory. My dissertation explores this idea and how it can lead to more appropriate designs of assistive technology. To design collaborative assistive technology, I involved persons with amnesia and their family members in a process of participatory design. The design team included six individuals with amnesia, two neuropsychologists, and myself. Five family members were also involved in later stages. This team envisioned the design of a shared calendar application, called Family-Link, that I implemented for Palm mobile devices. I evaluated Family-Link by comparing it to the commercially available Palm Calendar in a six-month study with four families. I found that participants had significantly more shared events when using Family-Link than when using Palm Calendar. Qualitative evidence suggests that Family-Link increased all participants’ awareness of other family members’ schedules, provided caregivers with a greater a sense of security by enabling them to track their family member with amnesia, and reduced the amount of effort that caregivers needed to coordinate. Family-Link also fulfilled the individual needs of persons with amnesia by providing an information storage and retrieval mechanism. However, persons with amnesia and caregivers differed in their opinions about which features were useful. Family-Link can be a particularly important tool for families where members are not co-located throughout the day.

This dissertation discusses research on Canada’s collaboration with emerging economies, specifically Brazil and India, in the field of health biotechnology. In recent years Canada has shown interest in engaging with emerging economies including Brazil and India in S&T fields. However, little is known about the levels and characteristics of such collaboration. Without greater understanding of this phenomenon it is difficult to inform public policy on how to best encourage collaboration. In this dissertation, the levels of Canada-emerging economies research and entrepreneurial collaboration are gauged. The motivations driving Canada-emerging economies research as well as entrepreneurial collaboration, its challenges and outcomes are examined. The roles of wider institutional actors – funding agencies, intellectual property experts, regulators, etc – in both Canada and the two emerging economies that support international collaboration are analyzed. The research reveals that north-south collaboration in health biotechnology has the potential to lead to a wide range of scientific and commercial benefits for both partners. They include access to expertise, technologies, biodiversity, as well as increasing potential to publish in high impact journals. The benefits are mutual. Northern academics and entrepreneurs are not necessarily in a dominant position in the partnerships, thus contradicting stereotypical notions of partners in north-south relationships. The systems of innovation conceptual framework is useful to uncover how institutions in both the north and the south shape S&T collaboration, and also to develop multi-pronged policy approaches to promote such partnerships and mitigate risks. The framework enables moving away from a donor-recipient, linear model of S&T interactions between the north and the south, and towards conceptualizing north-south collaboration as complex interplay of two innovation systems.

The loss of memory can have a profound and disabling effect on individuals. People who acquire memory impairments are often unable to live independent lives because they cannot remember what they need to do. In many cases, they rely on family members who live with them. When I carried out ethnographic fieldwork to explore this domain, I observed that individuals with amnesia were surrounded by family members who provided extensive memory support (e.g. reminders). I found that such families very worked closely together to accomplish everyday activities, such as coordinating a family outing or planning a doctor’s appointment. However, these activities were often undermined by family members forgetting. This led me to view memory aids as collaboration technology, rather than as tools that only support an individual’s memory. My dissertation explores this idea and how it can lead to more appropriate designs of assistive technology. To design collaborative assistive technology, I involved persons with amnesia and their family members in a process of participatory design. The design team included six individuals with amnesia, two neuropsychologists, and myself. Five family members were also involved in later stages. This team envisioned the design of a shared calendar application, called Family-Link, that I implemented for Palm mobile devices. I evaluated Family-Link by comparing it to the commercially available Palm Calendar in a six-month study with four families. I found that participants had significantly more shared events when using Family-Link than when using Palm Calendar. Qualitative evidence suggests that Family-Link increased all participants’ awareness of other family members’ schedules, provided caregivers with a greater a sense of security by enabling them to track their family member with amnesia, and reduced the amount of effort that caregivers needed to coordinate. Family-Link also fulfilled the individual needs of persons with amnesia by providing an information storage and retrieval mechanism. However, persons with amnesia and caregivers differed in their opinions about which features were useful. Family-Link can be a particularly important tool for families where members are not co-located throughout the day.