A comparative study of process mediator components that support behavioral incompatibility

Most businesses these days use the web services technology as a medium to allow interaction between a service provider and a service requestor. However, both the service provider and the requestor would be unable to achieve their business goals when there are miscommunications between their processes. This research focuses on the process incompatibility between the web services and the way to automatically resolve them by using a process mediator. This paper presents an overview of the behavioral incompatibility between web services and the overview of process mediation in order to resolve the complications faced due to the incompatibility. Several state-of the-art approaches have been selected and analyzed to understand the existing process mediation components. This paper aims to provide a valuable gap analysis that identifies the important research areas in process mediation that have yet to be fully explored.Comment: 20 Pages, 9 figures and 8 Tables; International Journal on Web Service Computing (IJWSC), September 2011, Volume 2, Number

Harmony and Technology Enhanced Learning

New technologies offer rich opportunities to support education in harmony. In this chapter we consider theoretical perspectives and underlying principles behind technologies for learning and teaching harmony. Such perspectives help in matching existing and future technologies to educational purposes, and to inspire the creative re-appropriation of technologies

Mediators of Inequity: Online Literate Activity in Two Eighth Grade English Language Arts Classes

This comparative case study, framed by Cultural Historical Activity Theory and sociocultural understandings of literacy, investigated students’ online literate activity in two eighth grade English Language Arts classes taught by the same teacher - one with a scripted literacy curriculum and the other without. During a year-long research project, we used ethnographic methods to explore the nature of middle school students’ literate activity in each of these classes, with particular attention to the mediators evident as students engaged in online literate activity. Specifically, this article addresses the following research question: What mediators were evident within and across each of the classes and how did these mediators influence students’ online literate activity? In addressing this question, we illustrate how particular configurations of mediators – even those operating within the context of the same school and same teacher – significantly influenced the nature of students’ online literate activity and the literate identities available to students. This study reinforces the importance of attending to the influence of offline mediators in school settings. Without such attention, students’ formal education is likely to be transferred online rather than transformed online

Multimodal integration of disparate information sources with attribution

Cover title.Includes bibliographical references (p. [9]-[10]).Thomas Y. Lee & Stephane Bressan

Interaction protocols for cross-organisational workflows

Workflow technologies are widely used in industry and commerce to assist in the specification, execution and completion of well defined processes within organisations. As industrial and commercial relations have evolved, based on advances on information and communications technologies, cross-organisational workflow integration has become an important issue. Since organisations can have very different workflows, the creation of compatible workflows so that organisations can collaborate and/or carry out mutual transactions automatically in an integrated fashion can be a very complex and time consuming process. As a consequence, the development of technologies to support the creation and execution of compatible workflows is a most relevant issue. In the present article we introduce the JamSession coordination platform as a tool to implement cross-organisational workflow integration. JamSession is declarative and based on algebraic specification methods, and therefore workflow integration implemented using this platform can profit from formal behavioural analysis, based on which desired features and properties can be verified and/or obtained

Are sexual media exposure, parental restrictions on media use and co-viewing TV and DVDs with parents and friends associated with teenagers' early sexual behaviour?

Sexual content in teenagers' media diets is known to predict early sexual behaviour. Research on sexual content has not allowed for the social context of media use, which may affect selection and processing of content. This study investigated whether sexual media content and/or contextual factors (co-viewing, parental media restrictions) were associated with early sexual behaviour using 2251 14–15 year-olds from Scotland, UK. A third (<i>n</i> = 733) reported sexual intercourse. In multivariable analysis the likelihood of intercourse was lower with parental restriction of sexual media and same-sex peer co-viewing; but higher with mixed-sex peer co-viewing. Parental co-viewing, other parental restrictions on media and sexual film content exposure were not associated with intercourse. Findings suggest the context of media use may influence early sexual behaviour. Specific parental restrictions on sexual media may offer more protection against early sex than other restrictions or parental co-viewing. Further research is required to establish causal mechanisms

A Microgenetic Analysis of the Development of Thematic Coherence Between the Topic Sentence and Supporting Ideas in the English Academic Paragraph: A Case Study of a Saudi Female Writer

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This thesis explores the developmental pathway of thematic coherence among one Saudi female student in a foundational second language (L2) writing composition course, contributing to the field of L2 academic writing by offering a rich description of writing development. Despite a rapid increase in enrollment in the past 10 years, students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) remain an understudied L2 learner population. In addition, although a number of studies have explored coherence among L2 learners of English, such research focuses either on the linguistic features utilized by learners to ensure cohesion or on the contrast between L2 learners’ cohesive devices and that of professional standards. To date, no studies offer insight into learners’ developmental trajectory toward greater competency in producing coherent academic paragraphs. The present study proposes an alternative approach by analyzing academic paragraphs in light of the definition of thematic coherence as a general-to-particular structure of ideas, i.e., a flow of information to form a superordinate-subordinate structure in which subordinate ideas support the abstract, overarching assertion. Further, the study uses the methodology of a microgenetic analysis to facilitate the tracing of the history of mediation and micro-changes in the focal learner’s written production over time as it relates to the proposed definition of thematic coherence. Each of the written drafts of paragraphs produced by the focal student is analyzed in sequence. An analysis of qualitative data is presented to contextualize and describe the focal learner’s experience in the instructional context and how this is interconnected to the development of her written paragraphs. The results showed an increase in the student’s ability to produce academic paragraphs with a general-to-particular structure, particularly during mediation that was rich with metalinguistic terminology that also created opportunities to collaboratively construct meanings of such terms. A main contribution to L2 academic writing this study offers is a rich description of a student’s developing skills in producing academic paragraphs. An implication is that to nurture academic writing skills, such as thematic coherence among students from KSA, instruction must be attentive to the developmental stages this student population progresses through

A Microgenetic Analysis of the Development of Thematic Coherence Between the Topic Sentence and Supporting Ideas in the English Academic Paragraph: A Case Study of a Saudi Female Writer

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This thesis explores the developmental pathway of thematic coherence among one Saudi female student in a foundational second language (L2) writing composition course, contributing to the field of L2 academic writing by offering a rich description of writing development. Despite a rapid increase in enrollment in the past 10 years, students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) remain an understudied L2 learner population. In addition, although a number of studies have explored coherence among L2 learners of English, such research focuses either on the linguistic features utilized by learners to ensure cohesion or on the contrast between L2 learners’ cohesive devices and that of professional standards. To date, no studies offer insight into learners’ developmental trajectory toward greater competency in producing coherent academic paragraphs. The present study proposes an alternative approach by analyzing academic paragraphs in light of the definition of thematic coherence as a general-to-particular structure of ideas, i.e., a flow of information to form a superordinate-subordinate structure in which subordinate ideas support the abstract, overarching assertion. Further, the study uses the methodology of a microgenetic analysis to facilitate the tracing of the history of mediation and micro-changes in the focal learner’s written production over time as it relates to the proposed definition of thematic coherence. Each of the written drafts of paragraphs produced by the focal student is analyzed in sequence. An analysis of qualitative data is presented to contextualize and describe the focal learner’s experience in the instructional context and how this is interconnected to the development of her written paragraphs. The results showed an increase in the student’s ability to produce academic paragraphs with a general-to-particular structure, particularly during mediation that was rich with metalinguistic terminology that also created opportunities to collaboratively construct meanings of such terms. A main contribution to L2 academic writing this study offers is a rich description of a student’s developing skills in producing academic paragraphs. An implication is that to nurture academic writing skills, such as thematic coherence among students from KSA, instruction must be attentive to the developmental stages this student population progresses through