Custom-built environments for Communities of Online Informal Learning: an exploratory study of tools, structures, and strategies

This qualitative, exploratory study grouped together and explored custom-built environments for communities of online informal learning (COILs) with a special lens on the socio-technical relationship of platform tools, structures, and strategies that lead to social learning. The study was conducted through a three-phase process. First, a list of possible candidate sites was analyzed for appropriate fit based on the defining terms of a custom-built COIL environment. Second, an observational content analysis was implemented on 10 of the sites to aggregate a list of the tools, structures, and strategies used in the sites. Lastly, the same 10 sites and the lists of tools, structures, and strategies were researched through both pre-established codes for sociability, usability, and community-building designs and an open exploratory observation of their uses with a focus on the way these features support COILs. Social learning and informal learning were also purposefully scrutinized while themes regarding personalized learning and sustainability also emerged from the exploration. All design themes were found represented within the sites, as were social learning, informal learning, personalized learning, and efforts toward sustainability

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education

This review focuses on the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. It provides a synthesis of the research literature in the field and a series of illustrative examples of how these tools are being used in learning and teaching. It draws out the perceived benefits that these new technologies appear to offer, and highlights some of the challenges and issues surrounding their use. The review forms the basis for a HE Academy funded project, ‘Peals in the Cloud’, which is exploring how Web 2.0 tools can be used to support evidence-based practices in learning and teaching. The project has also produced two in-depth case studies, which are reported elsewhere (Galley et al., 2010, Alevizou et al., 2010). The case studies focus on evaluation of a recently developed site for learning and teaching, Cloudworks, which harnesses Web 2.0 functionality to facilitate the sharing and discussion of educational practice. The case studies aim to explore to what extent the Web 2.0 affordances of the site are successfully promoting the sharing of ideas, as well as scholarly reflections, on learning and teaching

Educating the Net Generation

Edited by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger. Includes a chapter by former College at Brockport faculty member Joan K. Lippincott: Net generation students and libraries. The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised—one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up. This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/1278/thumbnail.jp

Creativity and Information Systems: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation of Creativity in IS

Be productive. Since the industrial revolution, managers have had an almost singular focus on equipping employees with productivity tools in productivity-supportive environments. Information technologies—systems designed to increase productivity—entered the marketplace in the 1980\u27s and were initially credited with the subsequent boom. Eventually, innovation was shown to be the primary spark, and the managerial focus shifted. Increasingly, the imperative is: be creative. This dissertation investigates how a technology environment designed to be fast and mechanistic influences the slow and organic act of creativity. Creativity—the production of novel and useful solutions—can be an elusive subject and has a varied history within Information Systems (IS) research so the first essay is devoted to conducting an historical analysis of creativity research across several domains and developing a holistic, technologically-aware framework for researching creativity in modern organizations. IS literature published in the Senior Scholar\u27s journals is then mapped to the proposed framework as a means of identifying unexplored regions of the creativity phenomenon. This essay concludes with a discussion of future directions for creativity research within IS. The second essay integrates task-technology fit and conservation of resources theory and employs an experimental design to explore the task of being creative with an IS. Borrowing from fine arts research, the concept of IS Mastery is introduced as a resource which, when deployed efficiently, acts to conserve resources and enhance performance on cognitively demanding creative tasks. The third essay investigates an expectedly strong but unexpectedly negative relationship between technology fit and creative performance. This finding launches an exploration into alternate study designs, theoretical models and performance measures as we search for the true nature of the relationship between creativity and technology fit. The essay concludes with an updated map of the technology-to-performance chain. These essays contribute to IS research by creating a technology-aware creativity framework for motivating and positioning future research, by showing that the IS is neither a neutral nor frictionless collaborator in creative tasks and by exposing the inhibiting effects of a well-fitting technology for creative performance

Modeling Deception for Cyber Security

In the era of software-intensive, smart and connected systems, the growing power and so- phistication of cyber attacks poses increasing challenges to software security. The reactive posture of traditional security mechanisms, such as anti-virus and intrusion detection systems, has not been sufficient to combat a wide range of advanced persistent threats that currently jeopardize systems operation. To mitigate these extant threats, more ac- tive defensive approaches are necessary. Such approaches rely on the concept of actively hindering and deceiving attackers. Deceptive techniques allow for additional defense by thwarting attackers’ advances through the manipulation of their perceptions. Manipu- lation is achieved through the use of deceitful responses, feints, misdirection, and other falsehoods in a system. Of course, such deception mechanisms may result in side-effects that must be handled. Current methods for planning deception chiefly portray attempts to bridge military deception to cyber deception, providing only high-level instructions that largely ignore deception as part of the software security development life cycle. Con- sequently, little practical guidance is provided on how to engineering deception-based techniques for defense. This PhD thesis contributes with a systematic approach to specify and design cyber deception requirements, tactics, and strategies. This deception approach consists of (i) a multi-paradigm modeling for representing deception requirements, tac- tics, and strategies, (ii) a reference architecture to support the integration of deception strategies into system operation, and (iii) a method to guide engineers in deception mod- eling. A tool prototype, a case study, and an experimental evaluation show encouraging results for the application of the approach in practice. Finally, a conceptual coverage map- ping was developed to assess the expressivity of the deception modeling language created.Na era digital o crescente poder e sofisticação dos ataques cibernéticos apresenta constan- tes desafios para a segurança do software. A postura reativa dos mecanismos tradicionais de segurança, como os sistemas antivírus e de detecção de intrusão, não têm sido suficien- tes para combater a ampla gama de ameaças que comprometem a operação dos sistemas de software actuais. Para mitigar estas ameaças são necessárias abordagens ativas de defesa. Tais abordagens baseiam-se na ideia de adicionar mecanismos para enganar os adversários (do inglês deception). As técnicas de enganação (em português, "ato ou efeito de enganar, de induzir em erro; artimanha usada para iludir") contribuem para a defesa frustrando o avanço dos atacantes por manipulação das suas perceções. A manipula- ção é conseguida através de respostas enganadoras, de "fintas", ou indicações erróneas e outras falsidades adicionadas intencionalmente num sistema. É claro que esses meca- nismos de enganação podem resultar em efeitos colaterais que devem ser tratados. Os métodos atuais usados para enganar um atacante inspiram-se fundamentalmente nas técnicas da área militar, fornecendo apenas instruções de alto nível que ignoram, em grande parte, a enganação como parte do ciclo de vida do desenvolvimento de software seguro. Consequentemente, há poucas referências práticas em como gerar técnicas de defesa baseadas em enganação. Esta tese de doutoramento contribui com uma aborda- gem sistemática para especificar e desenhar requisitos, táticas e estratégias de enganação cibernéticas. Esta abordagem é composta por (i) uma modelação multi-paradigma para re- presentar requisitos, táticas e estratégias de enganação, (ii) uma arquitetura de referência para apoiar a integração de estratégias de enganação na operação dum sistema, e (iii) um método para orientar os engenheiros na modelação de enganação. Uma ferramenta protó- tipo, um estudo de caso e uma avaliação experimental mostram resultados encorajadores para a aplicação da abordagem na prática. Finalmente, a expressividade da linguagem de modelação de enganação é avaliada por um mapeamento de cobertura de conceitos

An Overlay Architecture for Personalized Object Access and Sharing in a Peer-to-Peer Environment

Due to its exponential growth and decentralized nature, the Internet has evolved into a chaotic repository, making it difficult for users to discover and access resources of interest to them. As a result, users have to deal with the problem of information overload. The Semantic Web's emergence provides Internet users with the ability to associate explicit, self-described semantics with resources. This ability will facilitate in turn the development of ontology-based resource discovery tools to help users retrieve information in an efficient manner. However, it is widely believed that the Semantic Web of the future will be a complex web of smaller ontologies, mostly created by various groups of web users who share a similar interest, referred to as a Community of Interest. This thesis proposes a solution to the information overload problem using a user driven framework, referred to as a Personalized Web, that allows individual users to organize themselves into Communities of Interests based on ontologies agreed upon by all community members. Within this framework, users can define and augment their personalized views of the Internet by associating specific properties and attributes to resources and defining constraint-functions and rules that govern the interpretation of the semantics associated with the resources. Such views can then be used to capture the user's interests and integrate these views into a user-defined Personalized Web. As a proof of concept, a Personalized Web architecture that employs ontology-based semantics and a structured Peer-to-Peer overlay network to provide a foundation of semantically-based resource indexing and advertising is developed. In order to investigate mechanisms that support the resource advertising and retrieval of the Personalized Web architecture, three agent-driven advertising and retrieval schemes, the Aggressive scheme, the Crawler-based scheme, and the Minimum-Cover-Rule scheme, were implemented and evaluated in both stable and churn environments. In addition to the development of a Personalized Web architecture that deals with typical web resources, this thesis used a case study to explore the potential of the Personalized Web architecture to support future web service workflow applications. The results of this investigation demonstrated that the architecture can support the automation of service discovery, negotiation, and invocation, allowing service consumers to actualize a personalized web service workflow. Further investigation will be required to improve the performance of the automation and allow it to be performed in a secure and robust manner. In order to support the next generation Internet, further exploration will be needed for the development of a Personalized Web that includes ubiquitous and pervasive resources