Better abstractions for reusable components & architectures

Software architecture (SA) is a crucial component of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), since it eases the communication and reuse of designs and components. However, existing languages (e.g., UML, AADL, SysML) are lacking many needed features. In particular, they provide rudimentary support for connectors, a first-class element in the components and connectors (C&C) architectural view and one of the most reusable architectural elements. This is unfortunate, since the difficult properties that need to be guaranteed for complex systems are mainly the non-functional properties, like throughput, security and dependability, which are greatly influenced by the employed connectors. This work reviews the basic abstractions of the C&C view of SA and examines extra architectural elements which can support the detailed, explicit and separate description of behaviour, interaction and control logic

Envisioning Futures of Design Education: An Exploratory Workshop with Design Educator

The demand for innovation in the creative economy has seen the adoption and adaptation of design thinking and design methods into domains outside design, such as business management, education, healthcare, and engineering. Design thinking and methodologies are now considered useful for identifying, framing and solving complex, often wicked social, technological, economic and public policy problems. As the practice of design undergoes change, design education is also expected to adjust to prepare future designers to have dramatically different demands made upon their general abilities and bases of knowledge than have design career paths from years past. Future designers will have to develop skills and be able to construct and utilize knowledge that allows them to make meaningful contributions to collaborative efforts involving experts from disciplines outside design. Exactly how future designers should be prepared to do this has sparked a good deal of conjecture and debate in the professional and academic design communities. This report proposes that the process of creating future scenarios that more broadly explore and expand the role, or roles, for design and designers in the world’s increasingly interwoven and interdependent societies can help uncover core needs and envision framework(s) for design education. This approach informed the creation of a workshop held at the Design Research Society conference in Brighton, UK in June of 2016, where six design educators shared four future scenarios that served as catalysts for conversations about the future of design education. Each scenario presented a specific future design education context. One scenario described the progression of design education as a core component of K-12 curricula; another scenario situated design at the core of a network of globally-linked local Universities; the third scenario highlighted the expanding role of designers over time; and the final scenario described a distance design education context that made learning relevant and “close” to an individual learner’s areas of interest. Forty participants in teams of up to six were asked to collaboratively visualize a possible future vision of design education based on one of these four scenarios and supported by a toolkit consisting of a set of trigger cards (with images and text), along with markers, glue and flipcharts. The collaborative visions that were jointly created as posters using the toolkit and then presented by the teams to all the workshop participants and facilitators are offered here as a case study. Although inspired by different scenarios, their collectively envisioned futures of what design education should facilitate displayed some key similarities. Some of those were: Future design education curricula will focus on developing collaborative approaches within which faculty and students are co-learners; These curricula will bring together ways of learning and knowing that stem from multiple disciplines; and Learning in and about the natural environment will be a key goal (the specifics of how that would be accomplished were not elaborated upon.) In addition, the need for transdisciplinarity was expressed across the collaborative visions created by each of the teams, but the manner that participants chose to express their ideas about this varied. Some envisioned that design would evolve by drawing on other disciplinary knowledge, and others envisioned that design would gradually integrate with other disciplines

Inspiring practice: a guide to developing an integrated approach to supervision in children’s trusts

CWDC would like to thank Fran McDonnell and Harry Zutshi for their work on this guide

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

A systemic framework for managing e-learning adoption in campus universities: individual strategies in context

There are hopes that new learning technologies will help to transform university learning and teaching into a more engaging experience for twenty-first-century students. But since 2000 the changes in campus university teaching have been more limited than expected. I have drawn on ideas from organisational change management research to investigate why this is happening in one particular campus university context. My study examines the strategies of individual lecturers for adopting e-learning within their disciplinary, departmental and university work environments to develop a conceptual framework for analysing university learning and teaching as a complex adaptive system. This conceptual framework links the processes through which university teaching changes, the resulting forms of learning activity and the learning technologies used – all within the organisational context of the university. The framework suggests that systemic transformation of a university’s learning and teaching requires coordinated change across activities that have traditionally been managed separately in campus universities. Without such coordination, established ways of organising learning and teaching will reassert themselves, as support staff and lecturers seek to optimise their own work locally. The conceptual framework could inform strategies for realising the full benefits of new learning technologies in other campus universities

The institutional character of computerized information systems

We examine how important social and technical choices become part of the history of a computer-based information system (CB/SJ and embedded in the social structure which supports its development and use. These elements of a CBIS can be organized in specific ways to enhance its usability and performance. Paradoxically, they can also constrain future implementations and post-implementations.We argue that CBIS developed from complex, interdependent social and technical choices should be conceptualized in terms of their institutional characteristics, as well as their information-processing characteristics. The social system which supports the development and operation of a CBIS is one major element whose institutional characteristics can effectively support routine activities while impeding substantial innovation. Characterizing CBIS as institutions is important for several reasons: (1) the usability of CBIS is more critical than the abstract information-processing capabilities of the underlying technology; (2) CBIS that are well-used and have stable social structures are more difficult to replace than those with less developed social structures and fewer participants; (3) CBIS vary from one social setting to another according to the ways in which they are organized and embedded in organized social systems. These ideas are illustrated with the case study of a failed attempt to convert a complex inventory control system in a medium-sized manufacturing firm

ICT–supported reforms of service delivery in Flemish cities: testing the concept of 'information ecology'

This paper explores organizational reforms in Flemish cities related to making the cities’ individual service delivery more efficient, customer orientated, customer friendly and integrated. The paper is the first one of a recently started research project and PhD research about the complexity of managing ICT-supported change of ‘individual’ service delivery. The overall objective of this paper is to set the stage for the research project’s research design in terms of its theoretical framework. Therefore, we report about our first explorative, inductive and descriptive findings related to this type of change within one city. We firstly inductively report about the objectives and the objects of change. Secondly, we develop a provisional theoretical framework. We therefore take the notion of an information ecology as a conceptual starting point and use a combination of elements of neo-institutional theory, system theory and a political perspective on organizational development. In order to explore the potentialities of this approach, we test the framework’s value for understanding the changes within the city. The framework enabled us to describe and analyze this type of reforms without neglecting the complexity of these changes. It tries to link some important public administration theories to the study of the e-government phenomenon that is still an important challenge. The most important lesson is that further refinement of the conceptual framework is needed. Although the analysis shows that the framework offers a conceptual basis to analyze front and back office reforms within public organizations, it still lacks a full and straightforward operationalization of its components, constructs, relations, etc

Leadership for Learning Improvement in Urban Schools

Examines urban school leaders' efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning by supporting progress for diverse students, sharing leadership work, and aligning resources. Analyzes school environments and coordination of various leadership roles