116,316 research outputs found
Knowledge Enhanced Notes (KEN)
To aid the creation and through-life support of large complex engineering products, organisations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organisations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. This paper presents an overview of the challenges in creating accurate, re-usable records of synchronous design activities, enhancing the through-life support of engineering products, followed by the development of an information capture software system to address these challenges. The main objectives for the development of the Knowledge Enhanced Notes system are described followed by the techniques chosen to address the objectives, and finally a description of a use-case for the system. Whilst the focus of the KEN System was to aid the creation and through-life support of large complex engineering products through constructing complete and accurate records of design activities, the system is entirely generic in its application to synchronous activities
The Teacher as Servant Leader: Revisited
This essay revisits an original conference proceedings chapter from 1997, examining the biblical and educational underpinnings for the concept of teacher and servant leader
The Teacher as Servant Leader: Revisited
This essay revisits an original conference proceedings chapter from 1997, examining the biblical and educational underpinnings for the concept of teacher and servant leader
Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search
Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of
an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey
of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social
interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main
contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in
sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social
model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in
the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to
individual searchers.Comment: Presented at 1st Intl Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking,
2008 (arXiv:0908.0583
Survey of tools for collaborative knowledge construction and sharing
The fast growth and spread of Web 2.0 environments have demonstrated the great willingness of general Web users to contribute and share various type of content and information. Many very successful web sites currently exist which thrive on the wisdom of the crowd, where web users in general are the sole data providers and curators. The Semantic Web calls for knowledge to be semantically represented using ontologies to allow for better access and sharing of data. However, constructing ontologies collaboratively is not well supported by most existing ontology and knowledge-base editing tools. This has resulted in the recent emergence of a new range of collaborative ontology construction tools with the aim of integrating some Web 2.0 features into the process of structured knowledge construction. This paper provides a survey of the start of the art of these tools, and highlights their significant features and capabilities
Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era
In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society
To Greener Pastures: An Action Research Study on the Environmental Sustainability of Humanitarian Supply Chains
Purpose: While humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) inherently contribute to social sustainability by alleviating the suffering of afflicted communities, their unintended adverse environmental impact has been overlooked hitherto. This paper draws upon contingency theory to synthesize green practices for HSCs, identify the contingency factors that impact on greening HSCs and explore how focal humanitarian organizations (HOs) can cope with such contingency factors. Design/methodology/approach: Deploying an action research methodology, two-and-a-half cycles of collaboration between researchers and a United Nations agency were completed. The first half-cycle developed a deductive greening framework, synthesizing extant green practices from the literature. In the second and third cycles, green practices were adopted/customized/developed reflecting organizational and contextual contingency factors. Action steps were implemented in the HSC for prophylactics, involving an operational mix of disaster relief and development programs. Findings: First, the study presents a greening framework that synthesizes extant green practices in a suitable form for HOs. Second, it identifies the contingency factors associated with greening HSCs regarding funding environment, stakeholders, field of activity and organizational management. Third, it outlines the mechanisms for coping with the contingency factors identified, inter alia, improving the visibility of headquarters over field operations, promoting collaboration and resource sharing with other HOs as well as among different implementing partners in each country, and working with suppliers for greener packaging. The study advances a set of actionable propositions for greening HSCs. Practical implications: Using an action research methodology, the study makes strong practical contributions. Humanitarian practitioners can adopt the greening framework and the lessons learnt from the implementation cycles presented in this study. Originality/value: This is one of the first empirical studies to integrate environmental sustainability and HSCs using an action research methodology
Prosuming, or when customers turn collaborators: coordination and motivation of customer contribution
This article investigates the phenomenon of increasing integration of customers and users into the organizational creation of value, focusing primarily on the dissolving boundaries between production and consumption. Concepts such as "prosuming", the "working customer", "produsing" and "interactive value creation" have been used to describe this phenomenon. Within the framework of a research project at the Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, this debate was investigated theoretically as well as empirically in three case studies. The research question is as follows: Why do customers participate in "new types of prosuming" or "interactive value creation" and how are these processes coordinated by the firms? The results show a considerable range of motives and forms of coordination: The customersâ primary motives to voluntarily assume tasks and activities were both intrinsic and extrinsic in nature. The organizational models identified range from strategies of rationalization to prosuming as a basic business model to the collaborative and interactive value creation between the company and the web-community
A teacherâs voice: Embracing change to make a difference
The challenge to understand the impact and demands of new forms of literacy for teachers with considerable expertise is intensified when making sense of multiple forms of texts. This paper examines how an experienced teacher made changes to her literacy pedagogy when faced with a class problem for which she felt unprepared. The story is told predominantly through the voice of the teacher using her reflective journal. An example of Web 2.0 technology, specifically the construction of a wiki, is planned and implemented to reflect the teacherâs changing views of literacy. The key focus is how this teacher will transition her practice to meet the new demands of literacy teaching, what critical moves are required of her in order to do this and how does she shift from the traditional role of facilitator to designer of online learning. Through such analysis it is proposed that it is possible for an experienced teacher to theorise, implement and adopt a stance that encompasses a broader view of literacy and literacy instruction
Of course we share! Testing Assumptions about Social Tagging Systems
Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in
today's web and have attracted the interest from our research community in a
variety of investigations. The overall vision of our community is that simply
through interactions with the system, i.e., through tagging and sharing of
resources, users would contribute to building useful semantic structures as
well as resource indexes using uncontrolled vocabulary not only due to the
easy-to-use mechanics. Henceforth, a variety of assumptions about social
tagging systems have emerged, yet testing them has been difficult due to the
absence of suitable data. In this work we thoroughly investigate three
available assumptions - e.g., is a tagging system really social? - by examining
live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system
BibSonomy. Our empirical results indicate that while some of these assumptions
hold to a certain extent, other assumptions need to be reflected and viewed in
a very critical light. Our observations have implications for the design of
future search and other algorithms to better reflect the actual user behavior
- âŚ