Coordination of Dynamic Software Components with JavaBIP

JavaBIP allows the coordination of software components by clearly separating the functional and coordination aspects of the system behavior. JavaBIP implements the principles of the BIP component framework rooted in rigorous operational semantics. Recent work both on BIP and JavaBIP allows the coordination of static components defined prior to system deployment, i.e., the architecture of the coordinated system is fixed in terms of its component instances. Nevertheless, modern systems, often make use of components that can register and deregister dynamically during system execution. In this paper, we present an extension of JavaBIP that can handle this type of dynamicity. We use first-order interaction logic to define synchronization constraints based on component types. Additionally, we use directed graphs with edge coloring to model dependencies among components that determine the validity of an online system. We present the software architecture of our implementation, provide and discuss performance evaluation results.Comment: Technical report that accompanies the paper accepted at the 14th International Conference on Formal Aspects of Component Softwar

Exploring the feasibility of international collaboration and relationship building through a virtual partnership scheme

International collaboration is an under-studied component of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This study sheds light on the process of international collaboration by illustrating an exploratory approach to the process of forming and maintaining collaborative partnerships. Participants in this study were put into pairs (each one comprised of one individual from the University of Glasgow and another from the University of Wisconsin System) and asked to participate in email correspondence over the course of one year. The text of participants’ emails was pooled and analyzed through a general inductive approach using NVivo software. The study, though small in nature, helps to illustrate and further understand international collaborative relationships. We offer suggestions for future international collaborations and discuss the implications of emphasizing such partnerships within SoTL

Administrators Using Technology to Increase Family Engagement

The purpose of this study was to investigate and evaluate what happens when Title 1 administrators implement emerging technologies to facilitate school-home communications. This study explored the affordances and constraints to using technology tools to promote family engagement, determined which characteristics of the tools allowed parents to feel the most informed, measured how many parents attended school events, and evaluated parents’ perceptions of invitations to involvement when administration used technology tools to communicate. Epstein’s Parental Involvement Framework (2002), Epstein’s Overlapping Spheres of Influence (1995), and the Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler Model (1997) served as the theoretical framework. This mixed methods study was conducted at a small, urban, Title 1 elementary school in a Southeastern state. A sequential explanatory design was used. During the quantitative phase a Parent Communication Survey was collected from 51 participants. During the qualitative phase artifacts were collected and focus group interviews were conducted with nine participants. This study revealed affordances and constraints for each of the emerging technology tools. Communication tools that were available on parents’ cell phones were the most effective at informing families about school programs and student success. Systematically scheduled communications aided parents in better planning which enabled them to become more engaged. Administration was able to have an impact on parents’ perceptions of invitations to involvement through the use of technology tools. This study includes recommendations for future research and implications for practice

Emergent Democracy

Version 3.2. Originally published on blog and wiki and then as a chapter in the book, Extreme Democracy. This version edited by Jon Lebkowsky.This essay argues that a new form of democracy — an “Emergent Democracy” — will develop as a result of the use of Internet communication tools and platforms such as blogs. The essay explores a variety of tools available and explores the history of democracy, modern experiments with democracy and how these tools might support democracy. The essay also explores concerns as these new tools emerge. These issues include concerns such as privacy and the societally negative use of these tools by corporations, totalitarian regimes and terrorists

Making the Connection: Moore’s Theory of Transactional Distance and Its Relevance to the Use of a Virtual Classroom in Postgraduate Online Teacher Education

This study explored the use of the Web-based virtual environment, Adobe Connect Pro, in a postgraduate online teacher education programme at the University of Waikato. It applied the tenets of Moore’s Theory of Transactional Distance (Moore, 1997) in examining the efficacy of using the virtual classroom to promote quality dialogue and explored how both internal and external structural elements related to the purpose and use of the classroom affected the sense of learner autonomy. The study provides an illustration of the complexity of the relationship that exists between the elements of Moore’s theory, and how the implementation of an external structuring technology such as the virtual classroom, can have both positive impacts (dialogue creation) and negative impacts (diminished sense of learner autonomy). It also suggests that, although Moore’s theory provides a useful conceptual “lens” through which to analyse online learning practices, its tenets may need revisiting to reflect the move toward the use of synchronous communication tools in online distance learning

WonderFlow: Narration-Centric Design of Animated Data Videos

Creating an animated data video enriched with audio narration takes a significant amount of time and effort and requires expertise. Users not only need to design complex animations, but also turn written text scripts into audio narrations and synchronize visual changes with the narrations. This paper presents WonderFlow, an interactive authoring tool, that facilitates narration-centric design of animated data videos. WonderFlow allows authors to easily specify a semantic link between text and the corresponding chart elements. Then it automatically generates audio narration by leveraging text-to-speech techniques and aligns the narration with an animation. WonderFlow provides a visualization structure-aware animation library designed to ease chart animation creation, enabling authors to apply pre-designed animation effects to common visualization components. It also allows authors to preview and iteratively refine their data videos in a unified system, without having to switch between different creation tools. To evaluate WonderFlow's effectiveness and usability, we created an example gallery and conducted a user study and expert interviews. The results demonstrated that WonderFlow is easy to use and simplifies the creation of data videos with narration-animation interplay

Graduate Students’ Perceptions of Sense of Community and Contributing Factors

Research indicates that a strong sense of community has many benefits for the learner, including increased engagement, persistence, satisfaction, and perceived learning. The growth of online learning requires that effective strategies be identified to establish a strong sense of community in a virtual environment. This mixed method study investigated the following primary and secondary question: What are graduate students’ perceptions regarding sense of community in the online graduate programs at a small, private college? What contributes to graduate students’ sense of community in the online graduate programs at a small, private college? A quantitative survey using Likert-type questions was sent to 305 students in 100% online programs to measure their perceptions of sense of community in their online courses. Fifty-one students responded to the survey, which found that a student’s sense of community is impacted by their gender, age, and the number of online courses they have taken. Six of the survey respondents who volunteered to participate in the qualitative portion of the study were randomly chosen to participate in a semi-structured interview. Results of the interviews found that discussions, synchronous activities, instructor presence, and the opportunity to share information and opinions impact students’ sense of community in online courses