A short history off-line

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring the history of ICT in education and the lessons we can learn from the pas

Beyond prototypes: Enabling innovation in technology-enhanced learning

The TEL research programme, which ran from 2007 to 2013, has generated some substantial gains in our understanding of how to design and deploy technologies for learning. These findings, together with the growing field of technology-enhanced learning internationally, are witnessing the growth of TEL research into a vibrant academic field, extending throughout the UK and beyond. Yet there is a surprising failure to translate the findings, prototypes and outputs of projects into commercial products and services that individually and collectively achieve radical change in the quality of teaching and learning. This difficulty seems part of a general problem of translating innovation in the laboratory (or classroom or school) into commercial gain: A key recurring issue that has been raised in the Science and Technology Committee’s previous inquiries is the difficulty of translating research into commercial application, particularly the lack of funding—the so-called “valley of death”. (Commons Select Committee, 2011 ). The field of Technology Enhanced Learning, despite some notable exceptions, is rife with results that never made it across the valley of death. In the TEL research programme, there were some exciting and innovative examples of working prototypes that solved significant research problems. Yet few of these projects have successfully taken their prototypes to market. Three of the eight funded TEL projects achieved success in gaining follow-on funding from the ESRC specifically earmarked for the achievement of “impact”, although it is too soon to know if and how such impact will be achieved, and more generally, the relationship between impact and the commercial exploitation of projects’ outputs. In general, despite the fact that all projects successfully designed and built effective prototypes of systems: the question is how to move from prototype to product. This report addresses this issue head-on from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together experts in diverse relevant fields including educational technology, organizational behavior, innovation dynamics

NEOREG : design and implementation of an online neonatal registration system to access, follow and analyse data of newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus infection

Today's registration of newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) infection is still performed on paper-based forms in Flanders, Belgium. This process has a large administrative impact. It is imortant that all screening tests are registered to have a complete idea of the impact of cCMV. Although these registrations are usable in computerised data analysis, these data are not available in a format to perform electronic processing. An online Neonatal Registry (NEOREG) System was designed and developed to access, follow and analyse the data of newborns remotely. It allows patients' diagnostic registration and treatment follow-up through a web interface and uses document forms in Portable Document Format (PDF), which incorporate all the elements from the existing forms. Forms are automatically processed to structured EHRs. Modules are included to perform statistical analysis. The design was driven by extendibility, security and usability requirements. The website load time, throughput and execution time of data analysis were evaluated in detail. The NEOREG system is able to replace the existing paper-based CMV records

Industrial Training as Gateway to Engineering Career: Experience Sharing

AbstractToday's engineering education demands in-depth theoretical knowledge as well as hands-on exposure to the profession. Traditionally, theoretical engineering education is achieved in campus through direct teaching and laboratory learning. However, hands-on exposure or real world confrontation provides engineering students with on-the-job experience. This helps them to decide whether their skills and industry are a good match. For specialised industries, such as manufacturing, aerospace and electronics, industrial training provides the opportunity for students to gain the most rewarding and enlightening working experience in related companies. This paper examines the industrial training experience gained by the students through a 12-week attachment period specifically looking at whether the companies have been successful in providing a relevant engineering workplace experience. A few industrial training experiences by students will be shared highlighting the positive and negative aspects. This study also suggests some steps that can be taken to ensure companies run industrial training programs that do meet the faculty's expectation

Selling Technology: The Changing Shape of Sales in an Information Economy

[Excerpt] This book describes and explains the changing nature of sales through the daily experiences of salespeople, engineers, managers, and purchasing agents who construct markets for emergent technologies through their daily engagement in sales interactions… [It] provides a grounded empirical account of sales work in an area that has been the subject of insufficient study, namely contemporary industrial markets where firms trade with other firms

The New Technologies: An Integrated view, July, 1986

This paper is an English translation, by the author herself, of a paper that until now has only been published in Spanish. The editors of this working paper series are of the opinion that the paper - although written 24 years ago - represents such an important element in the writings of Carlota Perez that it should be made available also to the English-speaking research community. The paper presents an early notion of a techno-economic paradigm and - although internet was years away from being available - it is indeed an outline of the paradigm we presently live in. Many of the issues raised here, like alternative sources of energy and biotechnology, are still with us today, and many of the predictions have proved to be based on accurate perceptions.

Measurement with Persons: A European Network

The European ‘Measuring the Impossible’ Network MINET promotes new research activities in measurement dependent on human perception and/or interpretation. This includes the perceived attributes of products and services, such as quality or desirability, and societal parameters such as security and well-being. Work has aimed at consensus about four ‘generic’ metrological issues: (1) Measurement Concepts & Terminology; (2) Measurement Techniques: (3) Measurement Uncertainty; and (4) Decision-making & Impact Assessment, and how these can be applied specificallyto the ‘Measurement of Persons’ in terms of ‘Man as a Measurement Instrument’ and ‘Measuring Man.’ Some of the main achievements of MINET include a research repository with glossary; training course; book; series of workshops;think tanks and study visits, which have brought together a unique constellation of researchers from physics, metrology,physiology, psychophysics, psychology and sociology. Metrology (quality-assured measurement) in this area is relativelyunderdeveloped, despite great potential for innovation, and extends beyond traditional physiological metrology in thatit also deals with measurement with all human senses as well as mental and behavioral processes. This is particularlyrelevant in applications where humans are an important component of critical systems, where for instance health andsafety are at stake

Time scheduling in a peer-to-peer remote access laboratory for STEM education

Remote Access Laboratories (RAL) are online environments that allow users to access instruments through the Internet. Such environments enable users to control equipment and collect data without being present in the laboratory. This also means that users work in a disjoint manner and cannot co-ordinate equipment usage directly with each other, as they would do in regular on-site laboratories. Remote laboratory management systems deal with scheduling users, as most instruments cannot process multiple users' requests at the same time. Two scheduling strategies are predominantly used in RALs: time slotting and the queuing. This is straightforward in centralised, service-oriented environments, in particular, when instruments are available continuously throughout the day. In this paper, time scheduling in the context of a Distributed Peer-to-peer Remote laboratory featuring quest-based learning, is discussed. Here interaction with the entire system is organised around a set of learning activities or quests. This includes the experiments designed by users and the sharing of experiments by users. The providers of the experiments have the flexibility to put their systems online as per their capabilities. As such, the experiments availability become scarcer and must be judiciously assigned to the users who need them most

Nordic small countries in the global high-tech value chains: the case of telecommunications systems production in Estonia

In this paper we focus on the electronics industry, and more specifically on the production of telecommunications systems, which is characterised both by very rapid growth of the global trade and very high ratio of R&D investments in the sales revenues (Moncada-Paternoo-Castello et al 2010). More specifically, we analyse the distinctly different development paths of the three major telecommunications systems producers in the Nordic countries: Ericsson, Elcoteq and Skype. Ericsson was established in 1876, and has been a well-known brand name for decades. By contrast, Elcoteq grew from a small company into a global multinational corporation in less than a decade only in the 1990s. As a global company, Skype is still less than ten years old, but it facilitates today more international calls than any other telecommunications operator on the planet.