This report describes a comparative study about reading- and writing development in ?A-towns school? in The Gambia and in ?Villaskolan? in Sweden.The purpose of this study is to compare two teachers in Sweden with two teachers and two volunteers from the school in Gambia, with focus on their thoughts and methods on teaching reading and writing at each school and in their social context. The aim is also to observe and describe how classroom environment at both schools can encourage students to read and write.The theoretical base of this study is rooted in a sociocultural perspective but I have also chosen to illuminate behaviorism and cognitivism. The study is qualitative and the main research methods are interviews and observations of the classrooms.My conclusions are, even though considerable differences in approach and conditions, teachers in both schools work hard and show dedication towards their students.Another finding is that teachers use different techniques and working methods to achieve the same goal -to teach their students to read and write based on what is required of them in their cultural and social context. The different ways of teaching have been caused by the existence of different perceived needs based on culture and tradition.One conclusion is also that read and write requirements for students in the Gambia and Sweden are different from each other.

Idre Fjäll currently has not full control of how visitors experience their site or if it has good usability. I have helped the company to do a usability test on their website to see how and where any improvements can be made on the page before the winter season 2010. I have also done a survey to investigate how users perceive Idre Fjälls website. Ten people of various ages participated in the survey. All test subjects was recorded with both audio and screen activity during the tests.

The aim with this study is to explore if and how linguistic learning takes places when four pairs ofstudents in grade one writes on the computer. Observations of eight students took place duringtwelve lessons to investigate what happened during their writing processes. This study isimportant because students? computer writing is a relatively new phenomenon in the Swedishprimary school.It is clear that the peer collaboration creates a complex interaction that becomes the platform, andalso the prerequisite, for successful language training. The method can clearly give students profitsin their linguistic development.

The construction industry has not undergone the same logistical development as the manufacturing industry; this, in combination with increased material price, leads to the fact that the construction industry must be improved. This master thesis is a part of the research cooperation Brains & Bricks goal of reducing production costs for the construction sector by 25 percent. Brains & Bricks is a cooperation between Linköping University, Peab and Katrineholms municipality. The master thesis aims to identify improvements in the flow of material, the Supply chain operation reference, SCOR, model has been used and the work has been carried out on one of Peab?s construction sites. At present the business is characterized by bad communication both between the construction site and the office as well as between the construction site and suppliers.

In this study I have examined how narrative techniques can be used to promote the reading value and readability in information. My focus has been on the communication-agency Mandoly?s information-brochure which function is to inform other companies about their own potential for development in collaboration with Mandoly. The purpose with this study is to examine how it is possible to increase the reading value in order to engage the target group. In my study I have used four methods: analysis of Mandoly?s old information-brochure, literature studies, a qualitative interview, and an user test.

The primary focus of this Master thesis is to study how industrial house building can be implemented during production of rental flats under the terms of public procurement. In order to determine a suitable working process as well as presenting a possible architectonic result of the process, a case study is carried through.A housing projekt is designed on a site i Malmö, where the commisioner is MKB Fastighets AB and the contractor is NCC Komponent with the industrial building system NCC Komplett. The focus of the design is to accomplish high quality apartments to a resonable price, as well as solving the overall scheme for the site.The housing projekt, Kv. Flaggskepparen, built on the consept of a single house model, used to handle the entire site, shows that the building system is well suited to accomodate the commisioners demands.In order to reach the best possible architectonic result with the building system, cooperation initiatded in an early stage of the process is neccesary.A model is proposed to handle the situation under the terms of public procurement. The model suggest that the geometrical design is mainly carried out after inquiry and that architectonic qualities should mainly be defined in a non geometrial way for inquiry..

The aim of this thesis is to study librarians attitudes towards fiction and reading. I have examined librarians fiction reading habits and how they handle the expectations that users may have regarding their knowledge in fiction literature. There have been many studies concerning the librarians information literacy. This work explores librarians competence in fiction literature. The primary question posted in this thesis is: What kind of fiction are librarians reading and how do they feel that they can correspond to the users expectations? The data collection is based on literature on the subject and qualitative interviews with eight librarians from different kinds of libraries.

This Masters thesis is a study of the truck-driver profession and their use of libraries located in gas-stations and restaurants along the highways in Sweden. The reason for this interest is the positive trend that has occurred concerning men without any university education and their reading-habits, that is due to their increased interest in listening to audio books. This challenges the general opinion that this group is not particularly interested in reading literature. Questions posed in this study are: How do the truck-drivers relate to the activity of reading literature, what part does the road-libraries play, and how can the services that the road-libraries offer be improved according to the truck-drivers. The method used in the study is interviews made by telephone.

This essay deals with the ideas of social change in the Iron Gates Gorge site of Lepenski Vir during the Mesolithic. The change from a mainly fish-based subsistence strategy to a strategy that came to rely more on hunting and later domesticated animals could have been the onset of the social change that is noticeable in the material culture from the site. Theessay is divided in two main segments. The first consists of a case-study based on three themes that describes and searches for changes in the subsistence-, settlement- and burialpractises during the Mesolithic and beginning of the Neolithic phases, and the second part analyses the results from the case-study. It is primarily the idea of transformations and reproductions of traditions that will be dealt with in the analysis which is facilitated by a theoretic structure based on and inspired by the works of Emilé Durkheim and Anthony Giddens..

Quality assurance of construction projects and create effective ways of working, is intoday's pressed position, major objectives for building contractor companies. This thesis is an attempt to see if it is possible to achieve these goals with the new modern tool iPad.The author of this thesis has during the latter half of his one year practice work in Uppsala for the Swedish building construction company NCC Construction Sverige AB, conducted a study on the possibility of using the iPad on an construction site. This has been done with active field studies in which applications have been tested and also the supervisors receptive. The usability of the iPad has always been in focus since it is important that the applications are easy to use and easy to learn.The results of the work, as presented in this report, points at opportunities in efficiency if the iPad is introduced and used on construction site. There are many useful applications for the iPad, and with a system that can handle the synchronization between the iPad and the computer, the workflow will be streamlined significantly..

A geographical position and its social, cultural and political context as well as climate and specific physical characteristics define the scope for a landscape design project. This has become clearer for us in our master project where we have made a Design Program for the outdoor environment of Wollo University in Dessie, Ethiopia and analysed and reflected on the work and process. The aim for the project has been to design an attractive and functional outdoor environment for the Campus, based on the inventories and the needs and wishes of clients and users. But, the aim has also been for us as landscape architect students to gain a greater knowledge about landscape architecture and the design process by position ourselves outside our usual context. The method has been open and seeking where the site, literature studies, dialogues with people and our own experiences from the field study in Ethiopia has influenced the work. Wollo University is situated 400 kilometers north of Addis Ababa, in a mountainous landscape. It faces problems of heavy rainfall during the summer, soil erosion, a lack of essential facilities, and is still a construction site with empty spaces in-between buildings and infrastructure.

The purpose of this study is to describe some primary school teachers understanding of language development and approach of first and second language speakers with Arne Tragetons Writing to reading, for pupils in early ages.By using a qualitative method with interviews and participant observations and informal conversations, the basis for the survey was collected. Four teachers in three schools participated. The proportion of second-language pupils at each school was 35%, 17% and 0%. My theoretical starting point in the study was the hermeneutic research tradition, which has been used to interpret and understand the collected material. Theories of behaviorism, constructivism and socio-cultural perspective has been used in the analysis part of this study.

The purpose of this thesis was to create a communication interface which insures that all the right hardware is in its right place in the IS-node before Ericsson AB delivers it to their customers. One of the first parts of this work was to make sure it is possible to create such an interface for IS. This thesis then explains how to construct an interface that retrieves information from the IS-node into a C#-application. One important part of this project was to collect information and transform it to an XML output with the purpose of then being used in other applications in the future. The application created within the scope of the thesis exports the information retrieved from the IS-node in an XML-file or a text-file.

This thesis is an investigation of Iranian immigrants and their use of libraries in Sweden. It isbased on a combination of a qualitative and a·quantitative method.Using a qualitative method, I give an outline of the history of lran from ancient times up to the present, as well as the different ethnological groups in Iran and their cultures. The main objective of this part is to clarify the contrasts between Iranian and Swedish cultural, social, linguistic and family structures, and also the characteristics of the crisis that most immigrants go through on their arrival in the new country. The qualitative method also involves structured telephone interviews with eight highly educated Iranians.This method was supplemented by a quantitative study through questionnaires of the attitudes· of lranian immigrants to libraries and reading. Iranians in Sweden turned out to be frequent Iibrary users.

This essay is an investigation of the level- and importance of interactivity on YouTube for the active user. YouTube is a great example of a user-friendly Internet environment which enables the users to take part in a virtual community where they can create the content and, with the various functions the site has to offer, interact with each other. With Uses and Gratifications as a tool for this research we look at the motivations and needs of the user and how they come into play on the most popular video distribution site in the world today. Qualitative interviews on Swedish respondents give us insight in how the YouTube-users with their own words perceive this relatively new highly interactive era. We focus on a narrow group of the most popular age-group of YouTube-users to go deeper - not to expand.