Impacts of virtual communication on business travel: the Finnish perspective

Objectives The main objectives of this study were to compare the manager’s perceptions of costs and benefits of business travel with virtual communications, to understand companies’ perspective and preferences to business travel and virtual communications in terms of cost and environmental implications and to identify the impacts of virtual communication on business travel in Finland/Finnish companies. Summary During the last decades virtual communication has improved and the methods for virtual communication play a big role in today’s business environment. While better methods for communication in the virtual environment have been adopted in companies around the globe, also the amount of business travel have increased significantly. This thesis identifies from a managerial perspective what impacts the virtual communication has on travel. The study focuses on the perceptions of managers at four international companies operating in Finland. Conclusions Virtual and physical methods for interaction are both available in today’s business environment. The viewpoints of the managers interviewed for the thesis, as well as the scholarly literature in the field, supports the complementary relationship between the two, as both have the potential to benefit the companies from economic, social and environmental aspects

Desktop multimedia environments to support collaborative distance learning

Desktop multimedia conferencing, when two or more persons can communicate among themselves via personal computers with the opportunity to see and hear one another as well as communicate via text messages while working with commonly available stored resources, appears to have important applications to the support of collaborative learning. In this paper we explore this potential in three ways: (a) through an analysis of particular learner needs when learning and working collaboratively with others outside of face-to-face situations; (b) through an analysis of different forms of conferencing environments, including desktop multimedia environments, relative to their effectiveness in terms of meeting learner needs for distributed collaboration; and (c) through reporting the results of a formative evaluation of a prototype desktop multimedia conferencing system developed especially for the support of collaborative learning. Via these analyses, suggestions are offered relating to the functionalities of desktop multimedia conferencing systems for the support of collaborative learning, reflecting new developments in both the technologies available for such systems and in our awareness of learner needs when working collaboratively with one other outside of face-to-face situations

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Telepresence-Enabled Cognitive Apprenticeship Model of Teacher Professional Development

This exploratory research used a mixed-methods design to compare the effectiveness of a telepresence-enabled cognitive apprenticeship model of teacher professional development (TEAM-PD) to that of a traditional workshop model by examining outcomes in teacher pedagogy and student achievement. Measures of the lll degree to which teachers in both groups enacted mathematics pedagogy provided mixed results. Both groups demonstrated similar patterns of behavior and cognition, indicating modest levels of pedagogy implementation. Although the experimental group demonstrated higher levels of enactment of the mathematics pedagogy, the comparison group demonstrated a faster rate of growth. Student outcome data were clear: students of teachers in the experimental group scored substantially higher on a test of relevant mathematics content than students of teachers in the comparison group. Collectively the results suggest that TEAM-PD has potential to be an effective model of teacher professional development

A Retrospect on Robotic Telepresence

Determination of response times of the communicating distributed processes is presented as a fundamental problem i n time - critical applications. A lot of research has been done on the analysis of communication protocols. Todays distributed real ti me systems grow more and more complex. Telecommunication has introduced RTC (real time communication) as a method of informa tion exchange with a negligible latency. A fundamental requirement of all real time systems is that all the tasks should have a deadline to estimate their worst execution times (WET) reliably. Real time communications may include telephony, amateur radio, instant messaging (IM), voice over internet protocol (VoIP), live video conference communications, live teleconference communications and robotic telepresence. In this paper, we are going to discuss the applications of robotic telepresence whereby an agent acts as a surrogate for a remote user