Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium for engineering education ISEE2010: Educating engineers for a changing world - leading transformation from an unsustainable global society

The twenty first century and beyond will present human society with a set of unprecedented challenges emanating from the unsustainable nature of the current societal model. Clearly society must find a transformative model to a sustainable future, and fast. Engineers, with their technical know-how and systems approach to problem solving, are well placed to lead this necessarily multidisciplinary and collaborative endeavour. However, engineering education must provide twenty first century engineers with the necessary tools to undertake the massive challenges ahead. The 3rd International Symposium of Engineering Education took place at University College Cork on 30th June - 2nd July 2010. This significant international conference explored a number of key issues pertaining to engineering education in the twenty first century. These include sustainability in engineering education, IT applications, pedagogical approaches & assessment for learning outcomes, Bologna and industry perspectives

Linking Research and Policy: Assessing a Framework for Organic Agricultural Support in Ireland

This paper links social science research and agricultural policy through an analysis of support for organic agriculture and food. Globally, sales of organic food have experienced 20% annual increases for the past two decades, and represent the fastest growing segment of the grocery market. Although consumer interest has increased, farmers are not keeping up with demand. This is partly due to a lack of political support provided to farmers in their transition from conventional to organic production. Support policies vary by country and in some nations, such as the US, vary by state/province. There have been few attempts to document the types of support currently in place. This research draws on an existing Framework tool to investigate regionally specific and relevant policy support available to organic farmers in Ireland. This exploratory study develops a case study of Ireland within the framework of ten key categories of organic agricultural support: leadership, policy, research, technical support, financial support, marketing and promotion, education and information, consumer issues, inter-agency activities, and future developments. Data from the Irish Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Teagasc), and other governmental and semi-governmental agencies provide the basis for an assessment of support in each category. Assessments are based on the number of activities, availability of information to farmers, and attention from governmental personnel for each of the ten categories. This policy framework is a valuable tool for farmers, researchers, state agencies, and citizen groups seeking to document existing types of organic agricultural support and discover policy areas which deserve more attention

Adding Causal Relationships to DL-based Action Formalisms

In the reasoning about actions community, causal relationships have been proposed as a possible approach for solving the ramification problem, i. e., the problem of how to deal with indirect effects of actions. In this paper, we show that causal relationships can be added to action formalisms based on Description Logics without destroying the decidability of the consistency and the projection problem

Change management in higher education: an exploration of a cross-organisational change initiative and the development of a framework to support such endeavours

This action research project was based on the leadership of a collaborative change initiative which sought to effect changes across a consortium of higher education institutions in Ireland. The changes sought were defined and agreed with the Higher Education Authority as funding agency for the initiative. The changes sought to ensure that the higher education provision was more relevant and accessible to learners in the work place. Four specific strands of activity formed the basis of the initiative and in all cases the change processes were informed through an exploration and sharing of current practice and a collective agreement on priorities and actions arising from the exploration stages. A variety of research techniques was used in the collection of information on the existing practice and these were distilled into guidelines for the improvement of practice generally. In the case of each of the strands of activity the major outcome, in the form of a report, was widely disseminated throughout the Irish higher education sector and has had a significant impact on practice within the nine higher education institutions which formed the consortium and beyond. The particular leadership challenges associated with leading a collaborative project such as this are addressed. An analysis of the extant literature points to the lack of a suitable framework to support this type of cross-organisational change management initiative. Through an action research approach and the inclusion of a number of different perspectives in building a three dimensional focus of informed enquiry, a revised Framework for Change is developed. The Framework is informed by the analysis of in-depth interviews with participants in the change initiative and it is developed as a re-usable framework which will inform the design and leadership of broad, collaborative, cross-organisational change endeavours generally

European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN). Conference Proceedings

Erasmus+ Programme of the European UnionThe powerful combination of the information age and the consequent disruption caused by these unstable environments provides the impetus to look afresh and identify new models and approaches for education (e.g. OERs, MOOCs, PLEs, Learning Analytics etc.). For learners this has taken a fantastic leap into aggregating, curating and co-curating and co-producing outside the boundaries of formal learning environments – the networked learner is sharing voluntarily and for free, spontaneously with billions of people.Supported by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Unioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history