Connecting to Community: Best Practices for Designing a Digital Branch

In this article the authors provide an overview of the concept of a digital branch library and the manner in which it can be used to enhance academic library community engagement. As the front door to the branch, the library's Website is key to going beyond service provision toward sustaining relationships with faculty, students, staff, and community. The authors provide a rationale for increasing interactivity based on the public relations theory of relationship building. A report of research on the characteristics of community college library Websites illustrates the challenges of creating a digital branch. Subsequent conversations with and a survey of Web managers has provided a list of recommendations for implementation strategies that can be employed by academic libraries of all types

Community Rehabilitation Programs and Organizational Change: A Mentor Guide to Increase Customized Employment Outcomes

[Excerpt] For the purpose of this Guide, customized employment is defined as a process for individualizing the employment relationship between an employee and an employer in ways that meet the needs of both. Customized employment is based on an individualized negotiation between the strengths, conditions and interests of the person with a disability and the identified business needs of the employer or the self-employment business chosen by the job seeker. Job negotiation uses job development or restructuring strategies that result in responsibilities being customized and individually negotiated to fit the requirements of the job

Digital assemblages, information infrastructures, and mobile knowledge work

We theorize mobile knowledge workers’ uses of digital and material resources in support of their working practices. We do so to advance current conceptualizations of both “information infrastructures” and “digital assemblages” as elements of contemporary knowledge work. We focus on mobile knowledge workers as they are (increasingly) self-employed (e.g., as freelancers, entrepreneurs, temporary workers, and contractors), competing for work, and collaborating with others: one likely future of work that we can study empirically. To pursue their work, mobile knowledge workers draw together collections of commodity digital technologies or digital assemblages (e.g., laptops, phones, public WiFi, cloud storage, and apps), relying on a reservoir of knowledge about new and emergent means to navigate this professional terrain. We find that digital assemblages are created and repurposed by workers in their infrastructuring practices and in response to mobility demands and technological environments. In their constitution, they are generative to both collaborative and organizational goals. Building from this, we theorize that digital assemblages, as individuated forms of information infrastructure, sustain stability and internal cohesion even as they allow for openness and generativity

Designing a training tool for imaging mental models

The training process can be conceptualized as the student acquiring an evolutionary sequence of classification-problem solving mental models. For example a physician learns (1) classification systems for patient symptoms, diagnostic procedures, diseases, and therapeutic interventions and (2) interrelationships among these classifications (e.g., how to use diagnostic procedures to collect data about a patient's symptoms in order to identify the disease so that therapeutic measures can be taken. This project developed functional specifications for a computer-based tool, Mental Link, that allows the evaluative imaging of such mental models. The fundamental design approach underlying this representational medium is traversal of virtual cognition space. Typically intangible cognitive entities and links among them are visible as a three-dimensional web that represents a knowledge structure. The tool has a high degree of flexibility and customizability to allow extension to other types of uses, such a front-end to an intelligent tutoring system, knowledge base, hypermedia system, or semantic network

Massachusetts Community Mediation Center Grant Program: Fiscal Year 2014 Report & Evaluation

The Community Mediation Center Grant Program, funded by the commonwealth and administered by the state’s office of dispute resolution, was established to “promote the broad use of community mediation in all regions of the state” by awarding operating grants to eligible community mediation centers. This annual report describes the progress made in broadening access to community mediation by the grant program under the challenge of reduced state funding in FY 2014. Due to the funding cut, fewer centers were funded in FY 2014 compared to FY 2013, which reduced the quantity of services provided. However, the amount of money per grant was maintained thereby enabling the 14 funded centers to preserve their level of productivity and maintain their operations. These centers served their communities by providing mediation services to help settle disputes, contributed to the growth of social capacity for conflict resolution in their communities, and engaged in efforts to raise public awareness of community mediation as an alternative approach to resolving conflict. To achieve long-term sustainability and to broaden access to community mediation across the state, however, further effort is needed from community mediation centers and the CMC Grant Program, which in turn, requires continued and increased state funding and support

Supporting the grow-and-prune model for evolving software product lines

207 p.Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim at supporting the development of a whole family of software products through a systematic reuse of shared assets. To this end, SPL development is separated into two interrelated processes: (1) domain engineering (DE), where the scope and variability of the system is defined and reusable core-assets are developed; and (2) application engineering (AE), where products are derived by selecting core assets and resolving variability. Evolution in SPLs is considered to be more challenging than in traditional systems, as both core-assets and products need to co-evolve. The so-called grow-and-prune model has proven great flexibility to incrementally evolve an SPL by letting the products grow, and later prune the product functionalities deemed useful by refactoring and merging them back to the reusable SPL core-asset base. This Thesis aims at supporting the grow-and-prune model as for initiating and enacting the pruning. Initiating the pruning requires SPL engineers to conduct customization analysis, i.e. analyzing how products have changed the core-assets. Customization analysis aims at identifying interesting product customizations to be ported to the core-asset base. However, existing tools do not fulfill engineers needs to conduct this practice. To address this issue, this Thesis elaborates on the SPL engineers' needs when conducting customization analysis, and proposes a data-warehouse approach to help SPL engineers on the analysis. Once the interesting customizations have been identified, the pruning needs to be enacted. This means that product code needs to be ported to the core-asset realm, while products are upgraded with newer functionalities and bug-fixes available in newer core-asset releases. Herein, synchronizing both parties through sync paths is required. However, the state of-the-art tools are not tailored to SPL sync paths, and this hinders synchronizing core-assets and products. To address this issue, this Thesis proposes to leverage existing Version Control Systems (i.e. git/Github) to provide sync operations as first-class construct

Integrating social media into the marketing mix : the determinants of success

The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how three different companies (Starbucks, Walmart and Hewlett-Packard) are integrating Social Media into their marketing mix. How Social Media is a changing trend and why it is becoming essential for companies to adopt it as a marketing strategy in order to gain competitive advantage. The main Social Media Platforms that will be analysed are; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. The literature review encompasses many different academic researchers’ and allows for the integration of ideas, opinions and insights on the importance of being active in Social Media, Social Media benefits, drawbacks and challenges, the analysis of Social Media data, and how to develop a Social Media strategy by providing guidelines. The conceptual framework is a honeycomb framework of seven building blocks, which is then used to highlight the importance of these different components in each case study. It is used to describe how each company can use different set of tools to position themselves, depending on their overall objectives. The case studies present an overview of each company and describe its main benefits, drawbacks and what each enterprise should adopt as a set of Social Media guidelines. The managerial benefits of discussing these cases will allow to comprehensively evaluate the trade-offs of integrating distinct Social Media tools into a company’s overall marketing mix. In the teaching notes, the main learning objectives, suggested assignment questions and respective answers are presented. Finally, the conclusions, limitations and future research of the study are outlined.O objetivo desta dissertação é demonstrar como três empresas diferentes (Starbucks , Walmart e Hewlett- Packard) estão a integrar as redes sociais no seu Marketing Mix. A introdução da dissertação explica como as redes sociais são uma tendência que está a mudar e que se está a tornar essencial para as empresas adotá-las como uma estratégia de marketing para obter uma vantagem competitiva sobre as suas rivais. As principais plataformas de redes sociais a serem analizadas são: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn e YouTube. Para abordar este tema, vários estudos académicos foram analisados. Obtiveram-se pontos de vista e opiniões diferentes sobre a importância de uma empresa estar ativa nas redes sociais, os benefícios das mesmas, as desvantagens e desafios, a análise de dados das ditas redes , e como desenvolver uma estratégia integrando as redes sociais ao Marketing Mix. A estrutura concetual é constituida por sete blocos que, posteriormente, são utilizados para realçar a importância das diferentes componentes, em cada estudo de caso. Os estudos de caso apresentam uma visão geral de cada empresa e descrevem as suas principais vantagens e desvantagens, assim como as linhas de orientação que cada empresa segue para desenvolver estratégias que englobem as redes sociais. Os benefícios principais de discutir os casos, permitirão a avaliação abrangente de integrar diferentes ferramentas sociais no Marketing Mix de cada empresa. Na seção ‘Notas de Ensino’ são abordados os principais objetivos de aprendizagem dos estudos de caso e questões relevantes. Finalmente, as conclusões, limitações e futuras pesquisas são delineadas

Teacher Decision Making Processes And An Analysis Of The Avatalker Application When Used By Students With Autism

This study was an investigation into the elements that teachers of students with autism use to select apps and an analysis of the Avatalker app to increase verbalizations. Results showed teachers used technology with students with autism. Teachers were unsure of an app selection process, such as a rubric or committee. Results showed that teachers use the elements of ease of use for students, motivation, engagement, flexibility, and relevancy to student needs. The Avatalker app when used with students with autism to increase verbalizations results showed that peer interactions were limited. The study results can be utilized to help implement strategies for selecting apps. The use of a committee based team to review apps using selection criteria can lead to research based apps. The results also shed light on the continued need to find strategies to increase verbalizations, conversational methods, and peer interactions in students diagnosed with autism

Information Outlook, May 2001

Volume 5, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2001/1004/thumbnail.jp