Co-authorship in the age of cyberculture: Open Educational Resources at the Open University of the United Kingdom

Locating Open Educational Resources (OER) as a phenomenon of cyberculture, this paper presents a reflection on the possibilities of co-authorship that are entailed in OER initiatives of different natures and settings within a large organisation. A selection of OER-related projects and activities carried out at the Open University of United Kingdom (UKOU) are examined from the perspective of a comparative framework proposed by Okada (2010). The framework identifies key features and differences between ‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Education, that is, respectively, formal education, which takes place within the constraints of institutional Virtual Learning Environments, and informal education, which is gradually taking place more widely in cyberspace. The paper is introduced with a succinct discussion of the connection between cyberculture and the emergence of OER, followed by a presentation of the comparative framework adopted. The UKOU´s structure and methods are then presented, and various projects are discussed. The article concludes by proposing a brief commentary on the creative potential that is being unleashed at the very boundaries between formal and informal educational spaces that cyberculture is challenging

Understanding Collaborative Sensemaking for System Design — An Investigation of Musicians\u27 Practice

There is surprisingly little written in information science and technology literature about the design of tools used to support the collaboration of creators. Understanding collaborative sensemaking through the use of language has been traditionally applied to non-work domains, but this method is also well-suited for informing hypotheses about the design collaborative systems. The presence of ubiquitous, mobile technology, and development of multi-user virtual spaces invites investigation of design which is based on naturalistic, real world, creative group behaviors, including the collaborative work of musicians. This thesis is considering the co-construction of new (musical) knowledge by small groups. Co-construction of new knowledge is critical to the definition of an information system because it emphasizes coordination and resource sharing among group members (versus individual members independently doing their own tasks and only coming together to collate their contributions as a final product). This work situates the locus of creativity on the process itself, rather than on the output (the musical result) or the individuals (members of the band). This thesis describes a way to apply quantitative observations to inform qualitative assessment of the characteristics of collaborative sensemaking in groups. Conversational data were obtained from nine face-to-face collaborative composing sessions, involving three separate bands producing 18 hours of recorded interactions. Topical characteristics of the discussion, namely objects, plans, properties and performance; as well as emergent patterns of generative, evaluative, revision, and management conversational acts within the group were seen as indicative of knowledge construction. The findings report the use of collaborative pathways: iterative cycles of generation, evaluation and revision of temporary solutions used to move the collaboration forward. In addition, bracketing of temporary solutions served to help collaborators reuse content and offload attentional resources. Ambiguity in language, evaluation criteria, goal formation, and group awareness meant that existing knowledge representations were insufficient in making sense of incoming data and necessitated reformulating those representations. Further, strategic use of affective language was found to be instrumental in bridging knowledge gaps. Based on these findings, features of a collaborative system are proposed to help in facilitating sensemaking routines at various stages of a creative task. This research contributes to the theoretical understanding of collaborative sensemaking during non-work, creative activities in order to inform the design of systems for supporting these activities. By studying an environment which forms a potential microcosm of virtual interaction between groups, it provides a framework for understanding and automating collaborative discussion content in terms of the features of dialogue

Collaborative geographic visualization

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe present document is a revision of essential references to take into account when developing ubiquitous Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with collaborative visualization purposes. Its chapters focus, respectively, on general principles of GIS, its multimedia components and ubiquitous practices; geo-referenced information visualization and its graphical components of virtual and augmented reality; collaborative environments, its technological requirements, architectural specificities, and models for collective information management; and some final considerations about the future and challenges of collaborative visualization of GIS in ubiquitous environment

EDUCATORS’ UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENTIFIC SENSEMAKING AND LITERACY: A CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ACTIVITY THEORY ANALYSIS

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe a community of middle school science educators’ understandings of scientific sensemaking and literacy during their participation in professional development. Six teachers from Marksboro Middle School initiated and participated in a semester-long book study of Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2018). Three of these science teachers also participated in an interdisciplinary workshop series on sensemaking and literacy across the curriculum with three additional school colleagues from other disciplines conducted by a regional science professional developer and the author, a literacy education scholar. Two professional developers also participated in this study. This study explored two research questions: (1) How were middle school teachers’ and professional development providers’ understandings of scientific sensemaking and literacy demonstrated during their participation in professional development? (2) How were these understandings mediated by the Ambitious Science Teaching book discussion activity system within which this work was situated? Central to this investigation was use of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as both a theoretical and analytical framework. CHAT provided a way to capture the complexity of teachers’ activity and how their understandings were mediated by systemic elements. These elements included social and historical factors of both individuals and educational institutions. This framework was also supported by the use of qualitative research methods and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Educators described their understanding of scientific sensemaking and literacy in similar ways. Descriptions of each included cognitive and social processes of grappling with information, however, what counted as information differed. Sensemaking was generally discussed as a process focused on a scientific phenomenon. Literacy was generally regarded as reading print-based and multi-modal texts. Throughout their work together, teachers also considered students’ equitable engagement in classroom discourse as a feature of sensemaking-oriented instruction. Through their involvement in the activity system, educators demonstrated further understanding of sensemaking as a discrete activity as well as an extended process in which students engage in while learning through science instructional units called storylines. Through their collaborative activity, educators also demonstrated understanding of literacy as incorporating a variety of communicative modes, with student talk serving as the primary vehicle for students’ sensemaking. Literacy was also understood as a set of tools students’ draw upon when engaging in sensemaking. Teachers actions during book discussions demonstrated that considering how to support students’ literacy was a taken for granted component of planning for students’ sensemaking. Teachers’ demonstrations of these understandings were mediated through the community’s use of the pedagogical suggestions provided by Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten, 2018), consideration of performance expectations included in their state standards, and incorporation of resources beyond the focal text. It was bounded and challenged by institutional factors such as time constraints for instruction and the influence of statewide assessments. The findings of this study build on previous research in science education and literacy education and support Hinchman and O’Brien’s (2019) call for literacy scholars to consider a hybridized view of disciplinary literacy. By considering scientific sensemaking and literacy as a dialectic, this study positions literacy as an inherent component of science teaching, rather than as a separate goal for educators to address. It has implications for literacy practitioners working in science spaces and for both science education and literacy education scholars researching sensemaking and disciplinary literacies

Towards a global participatory platform: Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project's own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed. Graphical abstrac

AI Affordances Perception for the Transformation of Mobility Ecosystems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transform organisations, industries, and ecosystems. However, how different organisations in a given ecosystem perceive the action potentials of AI (i.e., AI affordances) has not been researched. To advance the AI affordances research and develop a nomological net of organisational and ecosystem factors that influence the AI affordances perception, this paper contributes a conceptual framework with the context of the mobility ecosystem transformation. The framework draws from two theories: the affordances theory and the social cognitive theory. The paper presents an in-depth interpretation of these theories for the perception of AI affordances and develops propositions to explain two distinct types of affordances perceptions: vicarious and autonomous. Our conceptual work offers a foundation for developing models for prediction and opens new avenues of investigating AI affordances perception. Future research could further test and validate the framework

Mapping Participatory Sensing and Community-led Environmental Monitoring Initiatives: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

This report presents a summary of the state of the art in urban participatory sensing and community-led environmental monitoring, the types of engagement approaches typically followed, contextual examples of current developments in this field, and current challenges and opportunities for successful interventions. The goal is to better understand the field and possible options for reflection and action around it, in order to better inform future conceptual and practical developments inside and outside the Making Sense project.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

One Team Where Worlds Collide: The Development of Transcoherence for Tackling Wicked Problems

This thesis is concerned with teams. In particular, multidisciplinary teams that are exploring complex public policy development in relation to problems identified as wicked; in that they resist existing solutions. The mix of expertise in these teams frequently leads to collisions of conceptual worlds among the team members. In addition, these conflicts may also occur along social faultlines that reflect an individual's membership in other collectives outside the team. The result can be an increase in discordance between team members and a fragmentation of effort, leading to poor team performance. This has been recognised in the literature as a major cause of project failure when addressing wicked problems. I address this phenomenon through the study of the lived experience of a specific heterogeneous team that were working on the wicked problem of reconceptualising access to justice for all Australians. I combined this data with theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines. The findings contribute to the existing body of knowledge in the following ways: Increased understanding of a multidimensional problem My exploration of the rich and entangled nature of the lived experience in heterogeneous teams found a larger mix of conflicts than is usually described in any of the individual streams of literature. In addition, there seemed to be no single term in the literature that adequately described the complexity of the collisions that I observed. In response, I propose an umbrella term, incoherence, to incorporate the multiple terms used to describe the reaction to and result of these collisions. Whereas the disciplinary literature tends to identify social groupings that align with a discipline's academic history, data from my field work uncovers multiple groupings that should all be included as the basis for social faultlines. I therefore propose an umbrella term and concept which can incorporate any of the underlying social groups found in heterogeneous teams: collective coherence. Understanding of a potential desired future state There is agreement in the literature that team conflict should be resolved, but not on how this should be achieved. Instead, proposed solutions are fragmented and often contradictory. My thesis aligns these fragments through the introduction of a third umbrella term, transcoherence, defined in this study as: an individual's ability to consciously straddle different intellectual worlds, and a multidisciplinary group's capacity to reduce social faultlines and develop synergies. Understanding the changes required for heterogeneous teams to move from the current fragmentation to a coherent future state For a team to build a transcoherence capability requires a means of dealing with the sense of incoherence that comes from collisions of worlds. Incorporating learning theory from multiple disciplines, I developed a version of a triple loop learning model as a heuristic to demonstrate the multiple ways in which people respond to and manage incoherence. Each loop of steps starts from and returns to 'coherence in equilibrium', the state of rest in the system. The use of action research I designed the research to be interactive, multilayered, iterative, qualitative, and transdisciplinary. I chose an overarching bricolage methodology, combining multiple methods of data collection, both formal and informal. This was possible as I was embedded in the team for a year as the person tasked with the role of facilitating collaboration. This gave me an opportunity to assess the opportunities and limits of catalytic facilitation in participatory action research. By this I mean that processes in the project were not controlled solely by the head of the project, nor did they function spontaneously. Rather, I was asked to join the team as facilitator of the collaborative process, to act as a catalyst, increasing the potential of the interactions of the various experts connected to the research

Achieving holistic sustainability in Chinese and New Zealand business partnerships : an integrative approach : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Tensions in sustainability are a relatively new area and largely unexplored empirically between firms in collaborative business partnerships, particularly drawing from paradox theory and organisational ambidexterity theory. If these tensions cannot be understood and addressed adequately, it will not only have negative impacts on individuals’ interests, but also on the development of organisations and ultimately the prosperity of the society. Hence, this study examines empirically how tensions in addressing divergent sustainability issues arise, and are perceived and managed between Chinese and New Zealand firms in business partnerships. Guided by an interpretivist philosophy, this research adopts a qualitative and abductive approach as the preferred research method. In doing so, 33 in-depth individual interviews alongside one informal group discussion were carried out at 16 relatively large Chinese and NZ firms known for their commitment to sustainability that are in business partnerships. This thesis includes three empirical chapters. The first findings chapter identifies tensions in sustainability between Chinese and New Zealand firms and discovers the reasons for them. The findings reveal that the Chinese and New Zealand firms in business partnership are faced with complex and multiple sustainability tensions which are thus more difficult and challenging for them to address simultaneously. This chapter also shows that the tensions are caused by an integration of multiple reasons from individual, organisational and national levels. The second findings chapter explores how managers make sense of these tensions. The results delineate four kinds of managerial logic – paradoxical, contradictory, business and defensive – which are applied to make sense of different kinds of tensions. In contrast to prior studies, the findings reveal that paradoxical logic is the most common logic adopted by the managers at Chinese and NZ companies in business partnerships; as the other types – contradictory, business and defensive logic – are not commonly used. The third findings chapter investigates the strategies that Chinese and NZ firms adopted to manage the tensions in their business partnerships. The findings show two main approaches: trade-off and integrative. This research highlights that working through sustainability tensions using integrative approaches can bring proactive outcomes which will help these companies to advance their sustainability practice through inter-organisational learning, to enhance their mutual understanding and to strengthen their business partnerships over time, thus achieving holistic sustainability. This research contributes to scholarly understanding of tensions in sustainability between firms in collaborative business partnerships in relation to the nature of the tensions, reasons for the tensions, managerial sensemaking of tensions and the strategies for managing the tensions. This also adds value to paradox theory and organisational ambidexterity theory including structural and contextual ambidexterity, and their theoretical and practical implications for tensions in sustainability research

Sensemaking for Equity and Agency : STEM Teacher Learning Through a Community of Practice Model

The current vision for science education is to improve learning for all students by enacting teaching practices that make rigorous science content accessible to diverse learners. Science education, as a field, is shifting focus to be practice-based and equity-centered as students and their ideas become the focal point of the profession. The enactment of this vision calls for professional learning opportunities for teachers that support sensemaking and enactment of reform-based practices. This design-based study is an exploration of how ten science teachers negotiate issues of equity and professional agency in their teaching of the science and engineering practices through identified problems of practice. Using qualitative methodology, I describe a critical professional learning model, a collaborative online community of practice, and the productive tensions that emerged. Some participants demonstrated that they could focus on the Science and Engineering Practices with attention to equity when they made purposeful decisions to center their students in the everyday decisions of teaching. Those with the autonomy to enact shifts to their teaching selected high leverage practices as tools for centering student ideas and cultural experiences. This study contributes to the gap in understanding about support for in-service teachers taking up equity practices in their work and responds to the call for teachers to explore innovations to their teaching in collaborative spaces