Collaboration between educators is considered to be the key issue when implementing inclusive practices within schools. An open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used to extend the current understanding of collaboration between teaching staff. The questionnaire was administrated to 167 classroom teachers, subject teachers, special education teachers and teaching assistants in primary, secondary and special education public schools in Finland. Also, semi-structured interviews with 20 participants were used to deepen the understanding of the elements included in the teaching activity in diverse classrooms. The results indicate coordination, cooperation, and reflective communication as modes of collaborative action in the participants' teaching. By combining the perspectives of the activity theory framework and modes of collaboration, the results illuminate how educators often wished to have collaboration but usually played their traditional positions in the multilayered teaching activity. The implications for preparing educators to enhance reflective collaboration for more effective inclusive practices are discussed.

The increasing concern about ethics and integrity in research communities has brought attention to how students and junior academics can be trained on this regard. Moreover, it is known that ethical behaviour and integrity not only involve individual but also group norms and considerations. Thus, through action research and participant observation, this research investigates the learning processes through which 64 students collaboratively develop research ethics and integrity competencies. The aim was to understand how bachelor, master and PhD students approach ethical dilemma cases through a collaborative process. The data consisted of recorded group work on ethics cases, student group reports, and post-training questionnaires. Later, the analyses considered groups as the unit of analysis. These data were analysed through content analysis utilizing the SOLO taxonomy to identify levels of understanding and assess evolvement of ethical sensitivity during a casebased training session. The results show that all groups reached the level of understanding where the groups demonstrated that concepts had been understood appropriately, but occasionally struggled to make connections between them. Students perceived working collaboratively as beneficial. The results help teachers of research ethics and integrity to make pedagogically justified choices in their teaching. Drawing on the results of this study, we propose a tool for the formative assessment of student learning of research ethics and integrity.

The study focuses on examining elementary pupils' (N = 42, 11-13 years old) reflections on collaborative design processes, team collaboration and their co-inventions. Digital and traditional fabrication technologies were used in a 2-year co-invention project containing approximately 16 sessions during year 1 and 11 sessions in year 2. Between the two project periods, the pupils were asked to write a structured essay about their co-invention and design process, and in year 2 they kept journal notes in each team's design-folder. Each pupil's structured essay was analyzed with qualitative content analysis that focused on three main aspects: (1) description of the co-invention, (2) progress of the co-invention process and (3) quality of collaboration. Based on the essay analysis, we constructed a "Co-invention Table" with five categories: user, conceptual design, technical design, appearance, and construction. The nature of the 13 pupil-teams' co-inventions varied greatly, and these co-inventions were divided according to three main functions: (1) improving cleanliness, (2) providing reminders or (3) addressing well-being. The essays provided information on how creative ideas were generated and how critical thinking and evaluation of ideas were crucial in improving ideas for further development. The collaboration was dependent on everyone's active and equal participation into work and the importance of an adequate division of the labor was highlighted.

Issue trackers, such as Jira, have become the prevalent collaborative tools in software engineering for managing issues, such as requirements, development tasks, and software bugs. However, issue trackers inherently focus on the lifecycle of single issues, although issues have and express dependencies on other issues that constitute issue dependency networks in large complex collaborative projects. The objective of this study is to develop supportive solutions for the improved management of dependent issues in an issue tracker. This study follows the Design Science methodology, consisting of eliciting drawbacks and constructing and evaluating a solution and system. The study was carried out in the context of The Qt Company's Jira, which exemplifies an actively used, almost two-decade-old issue tracker with over 100,000 issues. The drawbacks capture how users operate with issue trackers to handle issue information in large, collaborative, and long-lived projects. The basis of the solution is to keep issues and dependencies as separate objects and automatically construct an issue graph. Dependency detections complement the issue graph by proposing missing dependencies, while consistency checks and diagnoses identify conflicting issue priorities and release assignments. Jira's plugin and service-based system architecture realize the functional and quality concerns of the system implementation. We show how to adopt the intelligent supporting techniques of an issue tracker in a complex use context and a large data-set. The solution considers an integrated and holistic system view, practical applicability and utility, and the practical characteristics of issue data, such as inherent incompleteness.

Earlier studies have indicated that mood boards have notable potential. The impact of collectively created mood boards on individual ideation, however, has not been thoroughly studied. This article demonstrates how to bring together collaborative and individual elements in design education. We analysed the role of specific, collectively created, mood boards in student-level conceptual design and how students describe this role. We asked the eleven craft education students participating in this study to develop shared mood boards in team design sessions, and to individually design an outfit utilizing a mood board. The data (i.e. video-recorded interviews, students' visual and material artefacts, notes) were analysed qualitatively. The results indicated that the shared mood boards played an active role in the students' processes by expanding their creative idea space and providing a context for their idea development. Our findings could be beneficial for developing craft education by combining collaborative and individual efforts.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore a formative intervention project that was developed for the Municipal Secretariat of Education in São Paulo, Brazil for the broad development of all levels of educational management (teacher educators, coordinators, principals, teachers and students). Thus, the creative chain of activities is a key theoretical framework for promoting critical collaboration in order to cross the boundaries of educational management organization. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data from the Management in Creative Chains Project (Liberali, 2012), as a way to enable the wide development of all levels of educational management. Data comprise formative meetings in which different educational managers system take part in two settings, the regional board with 25 schools and one of the participating schools. The analysis is based on thematic content and argumentative organization, and on critical situations and the potentials they entailed. Findings The study guides to the conclusions of the process of creative chain as a possibility to expand management in the educational system and its community. Research limitations/implications Every time there is a change in the mayors, there are changes in the way of addressing school management in the city. However, after the project, considerations about the needs of the communities became part of the public policy regardless of who is in charge of the city and its educational system. Practical implications This study can be used for transformation in the management and teaching and learning activities and improvement of the school-community relation. Social implications Socially this study can lead to improvement in the quality of life in the community and at school. Originality/value Differently from a top down educational management, which enables a reproductive chain, educational management in a creative chain, considering the community needs, enables subjects to become interdependent to expand and transform the activities in the educational system and hence the communities’ reality.

We study the effects of goal-awareness in artistic agent societies creating evolutionary art. Particularly, we examine how goal-awareness may be utilized in modeling agent's peers when the aesthetic goals of the agent and its peers are subject to change. The agents use the learned peer models to choose their collaboration partners, and may alter their own aesthetic goal for the duration of the collaboration in order to enhance the potential of the collaboration outcomes. In addition, we demonstrate how goal-awareness can be used to guide the aesthetic goal change. The empirical evaluation indicates that agents which can adapt to their collaboration partners are more likely to reach favorable collaboration outcomes, even when their partners perceive fundamentally different properties from the artifacts.

Objective. In today’s workplaces an increasing number of tasks is completed in teams. Hence, to understand the psychological processes affecting interaction within and success of teams in different environments is of great importance. To study these processes, a new TT10 questionnaire (84 questions, 10 separate subscales) was created. The aim of this thesis was to study the validity and reliability of the TT10 by studying multiple literature-based hypotheses about connections between the subscales of the TT10 in two separate studies. Methods. In study 1 (n=49) 10 teams from two Finnish technology companies filled the TT10 and basic demographic information online. In study 2 (n=124) there were 62 pairs consisting of an employee of a Finnish insurance company and a customer. The counterparts in each pair were anonymously in contact with each other in an online chat for 20 minutes during which their task was to solve puzzles together. After the experiment they were asked to review the interaction of their pair with a shortened version (27 questions) of the TT10. Results. Almost all of the hypotheses gained support. Different subscales were in connection with each other mostly in the hypothesized ways. Conclusions. The most promising subscales of the TT10 were psychological safety, social cohesion, collaboration, and co-flow. However, limitations such as a very limited number of participants in study 1 made some of the results a bit unclear. However, according to these preliminary results, the TT10 seems to be a promising questionnaire that still needs fine-graining.