Our door is always open : Aligning Literacy LearningPractices in Writing Programs and Residential LearningCommunities

Writing studies has considered college students\u27 literacy development as a chronological progression and as influenced by their off-campus connections to various cultural and professional communities. This project considers students\u27 literacy development across disciplines and university activity systems in which they\u27re simultaneously involved to look at the (missed) opportunities for fostering transfer across writing courses and residential learning communities as parallel—but rarely coordinated—high-impact practices. Rather than calling for the development of additional programs, I argue for building/strengthening connections between these existing programs by highlighting shared learning outcomes focused on literacy skills development and learning how to learn

e-Commerce fulfillment strategy for luxury brands in South Korea

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-84).Introduction and motivation: From a traditional paradigm, the term "luxury e-commerce" is an oxymoron. The high-volume, hands-off approach of online sales is a direct contradiction to that of the high touch, human relationship-based luxury retail industry. It is for this reason that, until recently, many luxury brands have avoided e-retail - the belief is that it cheapens their image (Okonkwo, 2010). However, the successful experiences of certain companies in specific regions are gradually giving many luxury retailers a reason to reconsider e-commerce. For example, the luxury retailer Ralph Lauren has experienced huge success in e-commerce (see Figure 1), and is on a mission to proliferate their multi-channel sales model across the globe. South Korea is one of the most recent locations in which Ralph Lauren has chosen to roll out an e-retail initiative. Explosive economic growth across Asia has rapidly expanded the market for luxury goods and services. In South Korea, this growth has been particularly strong and consistent, as has South Korean consumers' appetite for luxury. This strong market growth, confluent with the reputation as the world's most wired country, makes South Korea an attractive target for e-commerce implementation. The Ralph Lauren team came to us with a rather broad request: to help them investigate the potential challenges of their e-retail initiative in South Korea. Through our research, we found several interesting and pertinent optimization models that could be modified to plan for Ralph Lauren's e-retail operation in South Korea, but as we delved into these models we realized that they didn't address Ralph Lauren's paramount mission in Korea, which is to "elevate the brand". We took a step back and zeroed in on our focus question: how could Ralph Lauren elevate its brand while simultaneously launching an e-commerce initiative in South Korea? We believe the insights gained from our study will help Ralph Lauren utilize "systems-thinking" to make strategic and operational decisions in South Korea that can elevate their brand image. These insights might also apply to other luxury retailers considering an e-commerce initiative in South Korea or other countries. This thesis presents several thought models that incorporate factors like inventory policy, brand strength, mediation, customization and online sales mix - which may make this research of interest to sales, marketing, operations and supply chain professionals.by Mark F. Vanderbilt and Daniel G. Yunes.M.Eng.in Logistic

Towards Open Smart Services Platform

The landscape of services in the enterprise has changed significantly for both service providers and service clients over the last few years. In the IT services domain, the mega IT outsourcing service deals with a sole provider are diminishing fast. A typical service client is now consuming multiple IT services, from specialized providers, and services contracts has become smaller in size and duration. More importantly the line of business, not the IT, owns the decisions and the relationship for consuming services. This has also shifted the service consumption input from IT requirements into the business requirements. This new world is posing a new and unique set of opportunities and challenges for service providers in offering services, which include third party providers, to their clients, and for service clients to consume services from multiple providers. To facilitate offering and consuming such multi-vendor services, in this paper, we present a conceptual architecture for an open services platform which enables a given server provider (a service integrator) to offer services to its clients that are a mixture of its own and other services from third party providers. It also enables service clients to look for and choose services from multiple vendors in a seamless, integrated and consistent manner

A Review on Framework and Quality of Service Based Web Services Discovery

Selection of Web services (WSs) is one of the most important steps in the application of different types of WSs such as WS composition systems and the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registries. The more available these WSs on the Internet are, the wider the number of these services whose functions match the various service requests is. Selecting WSs with higher quality largely depends on the quality of service (QoS) since it plays a significant role in selecting such services. In achieving this selection of the best WSs, the potential WSs are ranked according to the user’s necessities on service quality. In many cases, the value of QoS ontology is realized by its support for nonfunctional features of WSs. This ontology is also capable of providing solutions to the interoperability of QoS description. Moreover, based on the QoS ontology, it becomes more possible to develop a framework of semantic WS discovery. The framework enhances the automatic discovery of WSs and can improve the users’ efficiency in finding the best web services. Thus, Web Services are software functionalities publish and accessible through the Internet. Different protocols and web mechanism have been defined to access these Services

Process Based Management and the Central Role of Dialogical Collective Activity in Organizational Learning. The Case of Work Safety in the Building Industry

The notion of “process”, which describes the cooperation of heterogeneous practices and competences for a given output, has gained a major position in managerial practices for the last twenty years. This paper presents three ideas about organizational dynamics and processes and tests their applicability in the case of work safety improvement in a building company. The first idea is that the success of the process notion shows the central role of “conjoint” (as opposed to “common”) collective activity in organizational learning. Conjoint collective activity is dialogical (“acts speak”) and mediated by the utilization of semiotic systems (languages and technical and managerial tools). The second idea is that organizational learning is neither based on the actors’ individual subjectivity nor on the technological and objective artefacts engaged in the processes, but rather on the reflexive understanding and ongoing redesign of processes by the process actors themselves, in the frame of a reflexive inquiry, a “collective activity about collective activity” which is triggered and kept in motion by axiological judgments (process evaluation). The third idea is that the possibilities to configure processes in a given organization are multiple. The reflexive inquiry enacts a specific social, spatial and time configuration of the process, its “chronotope” in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, which plays a major role in the way actors can make sense of their collective activity and transform it. A longitudinal case study about work safety on the building yards shows that it is difficult to “control out” risk at work once designs have been established, in the frame of the “project execution” process, but it is easier to “design out” risk, when the actors of the process collectively design and redesign their collective activity, from the very first phases of a building project to the end. Therefore a major way to improve safety consists in extending the chronotope of the collective activity under consideration, overcoming the traditional separation between “design / planning” and “execution”. The conclusion summarizes the main theoretical, epistemological and practical issues involved in this research about conjoint collective activity.Business Process; Chronotope; Collective Activity; Collective Sense Making; Dialogism; Inquiry; Process-based Management; Safety Management

The lived experience of an American expatriate in Ghana: A rhetorical analysis of facebook postings to understand a cross-cultural behavior

Using rhetorical analyses of the Facebook updates and postings, the lived experience of an American Expatriate in Ghana is told through the lenses of a Ghanaian living in the United States. The study reviews the contemporary understanding and importance of expatriation to organizations and provides detailed description and analysis of different models with theoretical base from cognitive and social psychology and sociology including models developed by Fons Trompenaars, Geert Hofstede, Harry Triandis, and E.T. Hall to understand the thinking and behavior of this expatriate as revealed through postings on his Facebook page. The paper concludes by re-affirming the importance of pre-departure cultural sensitivity training and the significant role of HRD professionals even in non-typical HRD –related organizations.Cross-Cultural; facebook; expatriation; social psychology

Stewardship of the evolving scholarly record: from the invisible hand to conscious coordination

The scholarly record is increasingly digital and networked, while at the same time expanding in both the volume and diversity of the material it contains. The long-term future of the scholarly record cannot be effectively secured with traditional stewardship models developed for print materials. This report describes the key features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discusses some practical implications of implementing these models. Key highlights include: As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Past stewardship models were built on an "invisible hand" approach that relied on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections. Future stewardship of the evolving scholarly record requires conscious coordination of context, commitments, specialization, and reciprocity. With conscious coordination, local stewardship efforts leverage scale by collecting more of less. Keys to conscious coordination include right-scaling consolidation, cooperation, and community mix. Reducing transaction costs and building trust facilitate conscious coordination. Incentives to participate in cooperative stewardship activities should be linked to broader institutional priorities. The long-term future of the scholarly record in its fullest expression cannot be effectively secured with stewardship strategies designed for print materials. The features of the evolving scholarly record suggest that traditional stewardship strategies, built on an “invisible hand” approach that relies on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections, is no longer suitable for collecting, organizing, making available, and preserving the outputs of scholarly inquiry. As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Conscious coordination calls for stewardship strategies that incorporate a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access. Stewardship strategies based on conscious coordination involve an acceleration of an already perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation across many organizations, within and outside the traditional cultural heritage community

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications