Creating virtual communities of practice for learning technology in higher education: Issues, challenges and experiences

The need for a Web portal to support the rapidly growing field of learning technology has been well established through a number of national surveys and scoping studies over recent years. The overarching vision has been the provision of a virtual environment to assist in informing and developing professional practice in the use of learning technologies. This paper outlines the issues and challenges in creating such a portal through the experiences of developing the RESULTs Network. In the paper, design and participation issues are considered within the wider context of online and networked approaches to supporting practice and professional development. User participation methodologies and technical developments for RESULTs are described in relation to a review of existing representations of practice and a comprehensive survey amongst the learning technology users’ community. An outline of key achievements and experiences is presented, followed by some conclusions regarding the cultural and political issues in creating a viable and sustainable facility and suggestions for possible future direction in national provision

Exploiting synergy between ontologies and recommender systems

Recommender systems learn about user preferences over time, automatically finding things of similar interest. This reduces the burden of creating explicit queries. Recommender systems do, however, suffer from cold-start problems where no initial information is available early on upon which to base recommendations.Semantic knowledge structures, such as ontologies, can provide valuable domain knowledge and user information. However, acquiring such knowledge and keeping it up to date is not a trivial task and user interests are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain. This paper investigates the synergy between a web-based research paper recommender system and an ontology containing information automatically extracted from departmental databases available on the web. The ontology is used to address the recommender systems cold-start problem. The recommender system addresses the ontology's interest-acquisition problem. An empirical evaluation of this approach is conducted and the performance of the integrated systems measured

Profiling business support provision for small, medium and micro-sized enterprises in London’s fashion sector

The primary aim of this paper is to build a profile of the business support landscape that exists for fashion SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and MSEs (micro-sized enterprises) in London. In the face of multiple challenges, fashion sector SME/MSEs benefit from the services provided by business support organisations. We have identified 21 fashion support organisations that exist in London. They can be broadly divided into two types of business support organisations: fashion incubators and partial-support organisations, both of which play an equally important role in the sector

Overview of Business-Facing Arts Audience Research

This report is a review of public-domain research conducted specifically in order to inform arts organisations about their audiences. The research covered is driven by the demands of the arts industry to understand its audiences and to develop and broaden audiences for the arts. The report includes links to key publications and research organisations, and an overview of the key offerings