TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2006

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

ALEX: Improving SIP Support in Systems with Multiple Network Addresses

The successful and increasingly adopted session initiation protocol (SIP) does not adequately support hosts with multiple network addresses, such as dual-stack (IPv4-IPv6) or IPv6 multi-homed devices. This paper presents the Address List Extension (ALEX) to SIP that adds effective support to systems with multiple addresses, such as dual-stack hosts or multi-homed IPv6 hosts. ALEX enables IPv6 transport to be used for SIP messages, as well as for communication sessions between SIP user agents (UAs), whenever possible and without compromising compatibility with ALEX-unaware UAs and SIP servers

Technology Mediated Dispute Resolution (TMDR): A New Paradigm for ADR

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

'First Portal in a Storm': A Virtual Space for Transition Students

The lives of millennial students are epitomised by ubiquitous information, merged technologies, blurred social-study-work boundaries, multitasking and hyperlinked online interactions (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). These characteristics have implications for the design of online spaces that aim to provide virtual access to course materials, administrative processes and support information, all of which is required by students to steer a course through the storm of their transition university experience. Previously we summarised the challenges facing first year students (Kift & Nelson, 2005) and investigated their current online engagement patterns, which revealed three issues for consideration when designing virtual spaces (Nelson, Kift & Harper, 2005). In this paper we continue our examination of students’ interactions with online spaces by considering the perceptions and use of technology by millennial students as well as projections for managing the virtual learning environments of the future. The findings from this analysis are informed by our previous work to conceptualise and describe the architecture of a transition portal

Technology Mediated Dispute Resolution (TMDR): A New Paradigm for ADR

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Digital Urban - The Visual City

Nothing in the city is experienced by itself for a city’s perspicacity is the sum of its surroundings. To paraphrase Lynch (1960), at every instant, there is more than we can see and hear. This is the reality of the physical city, and thus in order to replicate the visual experience of the city within digital space, the space itself must convey to the user a sense of place. This is what we term the “Visual City”, a visually recognisable city built out of the digital equivalent of bricks and mortar, polygons, textures, and most importantly data. Recently there has been a revolution in the production and distribution of digital artefacts which represent the visual city. Digital city software that was once in the domain of high powered personal computers, research labs and professional software are now in the domain of the public-at-large through both the web and low-end home computing. These developments have gone hand in hand with the re-emergence of geography and geographic location as a way of tagging information to non-proprietary web-based software such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, ESRI’s ArcExplorer, and NASA’s World Wind, amongst others. The move towards ‘digital earths’ for the distribution of geographic information has, without doubt, opened up a widespread demand for the visualization of our environment where the emphasis is now on the third dimension. While the third dimension is central to the development of the digital or visual city, this is not the only way the city can be visualized for a number of emerging tools and ‘mashups’ are enabling visual data to be tagged geographically using a cornucopia of multimedia systems. We explore these social, textual, geographical, and visual technologies throughout this chapter

Technology Mediated Dispute Resolution (TMDR): A New Paradigm for ADR

Technology is changing the way that children are communicating (particularly elementary and pre-school aged children), and these changes have significant implications for alternative dispute resolution processes and practices. Although ADR practitioners and theorists are not ignoring technology, we have focused almost exclusively on the question of how we can use technology to enhance our existing practices. We are not paying sufficient attention to the fact that young children are communicating differently than we communicate. Insufficient energy is being dedicated to the question of how those differences in communication inevitably influence the way that those children resolve disputes. The article analyzes social science research that describes and documents how technology is changing the ways in which children are communicating. The successes of software and hardware developers are coming so quickly that it is difficult for those of us outside the technology fields to stay informed. Dispute resolvers are not asking how new technologies, technologies of which we may not even be aware (or at least not fully understand), are changing the way that our children are communicating. We also are not asking how those changes affect alternative dispute resolution. The article suggests ways in which ADR will change as a result of the ways children are communicating. It also discusses the future of current theories and approaches to ADR, such as mindfulness meditation (frequently discussed by Professor Leonard Riskin, among others)