Multi-level port resilience planning in the UK: how can information sharing be made easier?

Port resilience planning is a subset of the wider disaster resilience literature and it is concerned with how port stakeholders work together to make port systems more resilience. Port stakeholders include government departments, the port operator, ship operators, importers, agents and logistics firms. Ports are vital for the operation of cities and whole countries, especial island nations like the UK. Single port systems are multi-level systems with complex operational-level relationships and interdependencies. Additional levels to this include government and the policy-level. Preparing for the crises and disasters that might befall ports requires information sharing between stakeholders about key dependencies and alternative actions. The complexity of ports presents barriers to information sharing; as do commercial and political sensitivities. This paper uses a multi-level case study on the UK's system of ports to propose an approach to information sharing that uses the subjectivity of information from a supplier's perspective and from a user's perspective to reduce barriers of complexity, confidentiality and political sensitivity

Heritage and Hermeneutics: Towards a Broader Interpretation of Interpretation

This article re-examines the theoretical basis for environmental and heritage interpretation in tourist settings in the light of hermeneutic philosophy. It notes that the pioneering vision of heritage interpretation formulated by Freeman Tilden envisaged a broadly educational, ethically informed and transformative art. By contrast, current cognitive psychological attempts to reduce interpretation to the monological transmission of information, targeting universal but individuated cognitive structures, are found to be wanting. Despite growing signs of diversity, this information processing approach to interpretation remains dominant. The article then presents the alternative paradigm of hermeneutics through the works of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, to provide a broader interpretation of interpretation. This not only captures the essence of Tilden’s definition but construes heritage interpretation as a more inclusive, culturally situated, critically reflexive and dialogical practice

Studying innovation ecosystems using ecology theory

This paper proposes a set of perspectives for studying innovation ecosystems that are based on ecological research. Our perspectives are based on fundamental similarities between natural and business systems. We suggest that innovation ecosystems can be defined as pathways of interlinked business models. Pathways are characterised by the flows they convey not the types of business model that support the flows. These pathways convey material and informational resources, as well as value. Like the nutrient and energy pathways in natural ecosystems. Pathways help to recycle scarce resources such as customer attention and customer-derived information. Business model descriptions are similar to an organism’s genome in that they describe limitations on sensing, acting and understanding. We conceptualise this as the ‘umwelt’; the self-world. These limitations have implications for how firms and customers interact with customers. They have other implications for how firms interact with each other in business model communities and how they accommodate each other. We illustrate and test these ecological perspectives using a case study of a healthcare smartphone app’s ecosystem. We find that our perspectives can be used as novel methods of studying interactions between business models; or to study ecosystem building

Towards the Situated Engagement Evaluation Model (SEEM) : making the invisible visible

This thesis explores the multifaceted concept of engagement within online learning environments. Key research aims are to suggest approaches and an extendable model for evaluating, monitoring and developing understanding of online learner engagement. The overall intention is to offer educators insight, practical guidance and tools for supporting timely intervention in fostering learner engagement. This thesis reviews the major theoretical perspectives on learning and highlights the role of student engagement in relation to the research literature. It discusses the limitations of the methods applied in current research and attempts to address this problem by crossing the disciplinary boundaries to draw together a range of perspectives and methodologies. A review of the literature provides a foundation for a learner engagement evaluation model that employs a variety of evaluation methods and accommodates the possible diversity of learning experiences. The proposed ‘Situated Engagement Evaluation Model’ (SEEM) is positioned to reflect the wide theoretical perspective of social learning. It constitutes a comprehensive system of intertwined components (Learning Content; Pedagogical Design Elements; Learning Profiles; and Dialogue and Communication) that learners may interact with, and integrates dynamically changing preferences and predispositions (e.g. cultural, emotional, cognitive) potentially informative in engagement studies. Prior to (and independently of) the development of SEEM, four empirical studies were conducted and reported here. These explored patterns of online engagement with respect to learning content, learning profiles, patterns of communication and elements of pedagogical design. Studies were then revisited to evaluate the usefulness of SEEM for monitoring and evaluating student engagement, and to discuss its potential for guiding intervention to improve learning experiences. The practical relevance for integrated and automated implementation of SEEM in online learning is considered further

Mutually reinforcing systems

Human computation can be described as outsourcing part of a computational process to humans. This technique might be used when a problem can be solved better by humans than computers or it may require a level of adaptation that computers are not yet capable of handling. This can be particularly important in changeable settings which require a greater level of adaptation to the surrounding environment. In most cases, human computation has been used to gather data that computers struggle to create. Games with by-products can provide an incentive for people to carry out such tasks by rewarding them with entertainment. These are games which are designed to create a by-product during the course of regular play. However, such games have traditionally been unable to deal with requests for specific data, relying instead on a broad capture of data in the hope that it will cover specific needs. A new method is needed to focus the efforts of human computation and produce specifically requested results. This would make human computation a more valuable and versatile technique. Mutually reinforcing systems are a new approach to human computation that tries to attain this focus. Ordinary human computation systems tend to work in isolation and do not work directly with each other. Mutually reinforcing systems are an attempt to allow multiple human computation systems to work together so that each can benefit from the other's strengths. For example, a non-game system can request specific data from a game. The game can then tailor its game-play to deliver the required by-products from the players. This is also beneficial to the game because the requests become game content, creating variety in the game-play which helps to prevent players getting bored of the game. Mobile systems provide a particularly good test of human computation because they allow users to react to their environment. Real world environments are changeable and require higher levels of adaptation from the users. This means that, in addition to the human computation required by other systems, mobile systems can also take advantage of a user's ability to apply environmental context to the computational task. This research explores the effects of mutually reinforcing systems on mobile games with by-products. These effects will be explored by building and testing mutually reinforcing systems, including mobile games. A review of existing literature, human computation systems and games with by-products will set out problems which exist in outsourcing parts of a computational process to humans. Mutually reinforcing systems are presented as one approach of addressing some of these problems. Example systems have been created to demonstrate the successes and failures of this approach and their evolving designs have been documented. The evaluation of these systems will be presented along with a discussion of the outcomes and possible future work. A conclusion will summarize the findings of the work carried out. This dissertation shows that extending human computation techniques to allow the collection and classification of useful contextual information in mobile environments is possible and can be extended to allow the by-products to match the specific needs of another system

Trust and Abusability Toolkit: Centering Safety in Human-Data Interactions

If you care about security, you care about safety. So you need to care about abusability and trust. This toolkit will provide information about why centering peoples’ safety in our digital technologies is important. We present the concepts of abusability and trust as two important tenets of building such safer technologies, followed by resources that can help us build safer technologies

Hermeneutics, information and representation

By drawing from semiology, epistemology and philosophical hermeneutics, we discuss the way CSCW models data, situation and activity—information representation. We point out similarities between discourse in hermeneutics and in the anthropology and sociology that predominates in CSCW, and propose that a hermeneutic perspective offers a unifying view on the social science and computer science within CSCW. We discuss formalisation, adaptation, and objectivity in our theories, methodologies and implementations, and offer collaborative filtering and its extension, the path model, as examples of practical approaches to information representation that show, support and adapt with activity in a hermeneutic style