A Question of Empowerment: Information Technology and Civic Engagement in New Haven, Connecticut

Extravagant claims have been made for the capacity of IT (information technology) to empower citizens and to enhance the capacity of civic organizations. This study of IT use by organizations and agencies in New Haven, Connecticut, 1998-2004, tests these claims, finding that the use of IT by nonprofits is selective, tending to serve agencies patronized by community elites rather than populations in need. In addition, the study finds that single interest groups are far more effective in using IT than more diverse civic and neighborhood groups.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 30. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Leveraging Diversity in Software Engineering Education through Community Engaged Learning and a Supportive Network

While a lack of diversity is a longstanding problem in computer science and engineering, universities and organizations continue to look for solutions to this issue. Among the first of its kind, we launched INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact, a program at the University of Victoria, Canada, aimed to motivate and empower students from underrepresented groups in computer science and engineering to develop digital solutions for society impactful projects by engaging in experiential learning projects with identified community-partners. The twenty-four students in the program came from diverse backgrounds in terms of academic areas of study, genders, ethnicities, and levels of technical and educational experience. Working with six community partners, these students spent four months learning and developing solutions for a societal and/or environmental problem with potential for local and global impacts. Our experiences indicate that working in a diverse team with real clients on solving pressing issues produces a sense of competence, relatedness, and autonomy which are the basis of self-determination theory. Due to the unique structure of this program, the three principles of self-determination theory emerged through different experiences, ultimately motivating the students to build a network of like-minded people. The importance of such a network is profound in empowering students to succeed and, in retrospect, remain in software engineering fields. We address the diversity problem by providing diverse, underrepresented students with a safe and like-minded environment where they can learn and realize their full potential. Hence, in this paper, we describe the program design, experiences, and lessons learned from this approach. We also provide recommendations for universities and organizations that may want to adapt our approach

Improving design project management in remote learning

Design Thinking has the potential to train the soft skills of preservice teachers who will need to continuously design their future towards sustainable education. However, Design Thinking is intrinsically complex, and managing its learning and projects with large groups is not straightforward, especially in remote situations such as COVID-19. From collaborative work among disciplines, this study introduces a Design Thinking-based board to improve the implementation and management of remote design projects. This board was applied with university-level preservice teachers who worked in teams to design instructional materials for preschool. We assessed the perception of the usefulness of the board by the preservice teachers and the teachers responsible for their training, using mixed methods in two consecutive courses. The board was perceived as helpful in developing design projects and improving collaborative learning. It was beneficial for the management, monitoring, and communication, enriching the project process and outcomes. From the achieved learning, we provide guidelines for designing and using these boards to aid educators and researchers in integrating Design Thinking and developing practical and sustainable solutions. This study contributes to the natural integration of Design Thinking and technology in preservice teachers’ education with a replicable and flexible process, improving the quality of education for future generations

A Cluster-based Recommender System

Introduction: E-commerce is growing rapidly offering a vast number of products and services to the users. Facing with a wide range of options, users cannot decide which one would be the most suitable option. Recommender systems help users to find the most suitable item easier and faster. To do this, recommender systems apply machine learning algorithms to user’s data to build sophisticated models to predict the user’s behavior in the future. There are many recommender systems employed by companies to increase their profitability. Some examples include Amazon, Movielens, Youtube, Facebook, and Linkedin. Objectives: The aim of this project is to provide a cluster-based recommender system which cluster users based on their history (previous interactions with the system) to increase the accuracy of recommendations. Method: The proposed approach consists of two phases: offline and online. In the offline phase, users are clustered using genetic algorithm. In the online phase, the appropriate cluster or clusters and neighborhood are selected for the target user. Then, his/her interesting items (not chosen yet) are determined using interesting items of his/her neighbors. Results: After implementing the proposed approach for the recommender system, it was evaluated in terms of accuracy (the portion of recommended items which have been interesting for the users) and compared it with several existing recommender systems. The results show that our approach outperforms other approaches. Conclusions: Having a good recommender system encourages users to buy new products, find new friends, or watch new videos. On the contrary, an inaccurate recommender system may discourage the users and motivates them to sign out of the system or ignore all recommendations. The approach we proposed for recommendation achieved promising results. We hope by completing the project we can use this approach in developing commercial recommender systems

Agile Learning: Students’ Perceptions of Collaboration

Educators are encouraged to incorporate collaborative learning into their classrooms in order to promote active learning through teamwork. However, students often regard collaboration as lacking coordination and accountability among the team members, thus resulting in fewer opportunities for academic success. Nested within project-based learning, agile learning provides the framework for effective team and workflow regulation which is based on a collaborative, incremental and iterative learning process. With the help of the quasi-experimental method, both quantitative and qualitative data was collected through a series of anonymous surveys. Aimed to investigate whether the incorporation of agile learning has an effect on students’ perception of collaboration opportunities and their academic performance in college-level English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes, the results of the study indicated that the learners did not perceive a correlation between agile learning and the aforementioned notions. The findings are discussed in relation to the learners’ preferences for learning in foreign language classrooms and their own definition of collaboration which is ultimately reduced to the individual work process

Engineering and Technology Careers Fair 2016

Guide to the companies attending the FPSE Careers Fair with stand pla

Towards an industry-collaborative, reflective software learning and development environment

A significant mismatch (88%) has been found between what employers and graduates perceived as important abilities and how universities had prepared graduates for employment. Conventional Teaching and Learning approaches fall short of providing the kind of learning experiences needed to prepare graduates for the realities of professional practice in industry. On the other hand, current students have very different learning styles than their forebears. Their learning preferences are experiential, working in teams, and using technology for learning. One solution to address this mismatch issue is the software development studio. Our aim is to provide an industry-collaborative, reflective learning environment that will effect the students development of holistic skills, such as teamwork, collaboration and communication, together with technical skills, in a discipline context. This paper further describes the design and validation via prototyping for our software development studio, the progress that we have made so far, and presents the preliminary insights gleaned from our studio prototyping. The prototypes raised issues of attitudinal change, communication, reflection, sharing, mentoring, use of process, `doing time, relationships and innovation

IDEASPARK.MY: UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IDEAS VIABILITY PLATFORM

Entrepreneurship has become very crucial to every country ever since the age of globalization due to the growth of entrepreneurial activities that will result in creating jobs for the society, as well as reducing the unemployment rate. Many fresh graduates especially non business students they have the intention to becoming entrepreneur and starting-up own business, however, most of them failed to become one. It may be due to lack of guidance on how to become a successful entrepreneur and lack of awareness on available platform where they could explore more into issues and available programs related to Startup. Even though many students do possess creative and innovative project throughout their studies but they are not aware and expose to the extendibility and viability of their ideas as business prospect. Therefore, in order to help to control this issue, IDEASPARK.MY, crowdsourcing platform specifically for students to validate their project ideas as a viable business prospects. This platform is to provide entrepreneurs with a kick start market validation of their ideas and entrepreneurial pathway of one’s should face to become a successful entrepreneur

The myExperiment Open Repository for Scientific Workflows

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 10:00 AM – 11:30 AMmyExperiment is an open repository solution for the born-digital items arising in contemporary research practice, in particular scientific workflows and experiment plans. Launched in November 2007, the public repository (myexperiment.org) has established a significant collection of scientific workflows, spanning multiple disciplines and multiple workflow systems, which has been accessed by over 16,000 users worldwide. Built according to Web 2.0 design principles, myExperiment demonstrates the success of blending modern social curation methods with the demands of researchers sharing hard-won intellectual assets and research works within a scholarly communication lifecycle. myExperiment is an important component in the revolution in creating, sharing and publishing scientific results, and has already established itself as a valuable and unique repository with a growing international presence.JISC; EPSRC; Microsoft Corporatio

Building an Adaptive Culture where Collaborative Teaching Teams Leverage Data to Improve Student Achievement and Wellbeing

This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) seeks to open up the black box of classroom teaching to data informed collaborative inquiry by teachers for teachers using formative feedback as the model for instructional improvement. Teacher collective efficacy is developed through ongoing professional learning in collaborative teaching teams that use multiple measures of data to limit bias and improve equity of outcomes for students. Such a process is iterative, and the OIP envisions the combined use of adaptive leadership and distributed leadership approaches to support Kotter’s 8-step model for change implementation. The desired outcome is an adaptive and agile school culture where teachers are empowered to use data in collaborative teams. A distributed leadership team will develop a culture of collaborative inquiry and improve data literacy within teaching teams to create school level narratives of student achievement and growth. This OIP applies critical theory frameworks of empowerment and liberation to data generated in schools with the firm belief that teachers and students who generate data must be empowered to analyse and use such data for self-improvement. This shift from the evaluative use of data for school ranking to the use of data by collaborative teams of teacher leaders as formative feedback for self-improvement is an act of resistance to the colonial use of data in 21st century neoliberal accountability regimes. A successful implementation of this OIP seeks to return sense-making of knowledge back to teachers as professionals and students as partners in learning through data-informed, collaborative decision making