Detailed empirical studies of student information storing in the context of distributed design team-based project work

This paper presents the findings of six empirical case studies investigating the information stored by engineering design students in distributed team-based Global Design Projects. The aim is to understand better how students store distributed design information in order to prepare them for work in today‟s international and global context. This paper outlines the descriptive element of the work, the qualitative and quantitative research methods used and the results. It discusses the issues around the emergent themes of information storing; information storing systems; information storing patterns; and information strategy, making recommendations; establishing that there is a need for more prescriptive measures to supporting distributed design information management. This work will be of great value to industry also

Learning in Social Networks: Rationale and Ideas for Its Implementation in Higher Education

The internet has fast become a prevalent medium for collaboration between people and social networks, in particular, have gained vast popularity and relevance over the past few years. Within this framework, our paper will analyse the role played by social networks in current teaching practices. Specifically, we focus on the principles guiding the design of study activities which use social networks and we relate concrete experiences that show how they contribute to improving teaching and learning within a university environment

System upgrade: realising the vision for UK education

A report summarising the findings of the TEL programme in the wider context of technology-enhanced learning and offering recommendations for future strategy in the area was launched on 13th June at the House of Lords to a group of policymakers, technologists and practitioners chaired by Lord Knight. The report – a major outcome of the programme – is written by TEL director Professor Richard Noss and a team of experts in various fields of technology-enhanced learning. The report features the programme’s 12 recommendations for using technology-enhanced learning to upgrade UK education

A Hybrid Recommender Strategy on an Expanded Content Manager in Formal Learning

The main topic of this paper is to find ways to improve learning in a formal Higher Education Area. In this environment, the teacher publishes or suggests contents that support learners in a given course, as supplement of classroom training. Generally, these materials are pre-stored and not changeable. These contents are typically published in learning management systems (the Moodle platform emerges as one of the main choices) or in sites created and maintained on the web by teachers themselves. These scenarios typically include a specific group of students (class) and a given period of time (semester or school year). Contents reutilization often needs replication and its update requires new edition and new submission by teachers. Normally, these systems do not allow learners to add new materials, or to edit existing ones. The paper presents our motivations, and some related concepts and works. We describe the concepts of sequencing and navigation in adaptive learning systems, followed by a short presentation of some of these systems. We then discuss the effects of social interaction on the learners’ choices. Finally, we refer some more related recommender systems and their applicability in supporting learning. One central idea from our proposal is that we believe that students with the same goals and with similar formal study time can benefit from contents' assessments made by learners that already have completed the same courses and have studied the same contents. We present a model for personalized recommendation of learning activities to learners in a formal learning context that considers two systems. In the extended content management system, learners can add new materials, select materials from teachers and from other learners, evaluate and define the time spent studying them. Based on learner profiles and a hybrid recommendation strategy, combining conditional and collaborative filtering, our second system will predict learning activities scores and offers adaptive and suitable sequencing learning contents to learners. We propose that similarities between learners can be based on their evaluation interests and their recent learning history. The recommender support subsystem aims to assist learners at each step suggesting one suitable ordered list of LOs, by decreasing order of relevance. The proposed model has been implemented in the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS), and we present the system’s architecture and design. We will evaluate it in a real higher education formal course and we intend to present experimental results in the near future

Why Invest in Collaborative Leadership Development? Summary Report

The Casey Foundation values skillful leadership in creating sustained social change. The Foundation partnered with the University of Maryland, School of Public Policy in sculpting a new approach to match leadership ability with constructive results for children, families and communities -- a collaborative leadership style for complex social issues. Readers, especially other foundations and nonprofit investors, get a look at the findings, lessons learned and recommendations from three years of collaborative leadership capacity-building effort

MORMED: towards a multilingual social networking platform facilitating medicine 2.0

The broad adoption of Web 2.0 tools has signalled a new era of "Medicine 2.0" in the field of medical informatics. The support for collaboration within online communities and the sharing of information in social networks offers the opportunity for new communication channels among patients, medical experts, and researchers. This paper introduces MORMED, a novel multilingual social networking and content management platform that exemplifies the Medicine 2.0 paradigm, and aims to achieve knowledge commonality by promoting sociality, while also transcending language barriers through automated translation. The MORMED platform will be piloted in a community interested in the treatment of rare diseases (Lupus or Antiphospholipid Syndrome)

Family at the Center

To better understand how family engagement supports school readiness in Los Angeles County, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the LA Partnership for Early Childhood Investment convened an advisory group of early childhood leaders and stakeholders to provide advice and explore opportunities to strengthen parent engagement. This report summarizes key insights and recommendations that emerged through these discussions and additional research about parent engagement programs and practices