THE POTENTIAL OF MOVING PICTURES DOES PARTICIPATORY VIDEO ENABLE LEARNING FOR LOCAL INNOVATION?

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceLearning is essential for local innovation and enhancing the ability of the rural clients to discover new solutions to prevailing challenges. Equally, the growing complexities of the challenges in the theatre of agriculture and rural development require multi-actor learning process. Participatory communication through face-to-face interaction remains an important approach to support local people's innovation capacity. Is there any mean other than face-to-face interaction that enables learning for innovations? Video has been used for several decades, however, in most cases instrumentally as a mass media for expert information dissemination. In recent years the interest in the alternative use of video, mostly known as participatory video, has grown. This study attempts to understand the potential of participatory video to support learning for local innovation by reviewing available literature about the cases of participatory video in the field of agriculture and natural resource management. A deductive coding approach was employed in order to identify the potentials of participatory video. The documented cases we found in the literature suggest that participatory video has a substantial role for both vertical and horizontal flow of local knowledge and information in a multi-actor setting. It creates a ‘safe space' for communication where different actors are able to articulate their perceptions. What follows, actors get an opportunity for reciprocal learning process. Participatory video facilitates communication for the marginalized segment of developing nations in Asia and Africa to represent their knowledge and skills and to link these to other knowledge bodies such as scientific, formal, managerial and bureaucratic. Participatory video stimulates reflection and experimentation by creating new impetus for learning within and across stakeholder (actor) groups. Nevertheless, potentials of participatory video depend on careful analysis of social competencies of facilitators, institutional ambience and role of intermediaries and facilitating organizations. We also proposed future research angles on these issues

A Survey on Sensor Networks from a Multiagent Perspective

Sensor networks (SNs) have arisen as one of the most promising technologies for the next decades. The recent emergence of small and inexpensive sensors based upon microelectromechanical systems ease the development and proliferation of this kind of networks in a wide range of actual-world applications. Multiagent systems (MAS) have been identified as one of the most suitable technologies to contribute to the deployment of SNs that exhibit flexibility, robustness and autonomy. The purpose of this survey is 2-fold. On the one hand, we review the most relevant contributions of agent technologies to this emerging application domain. On the other hand, we identify the challenges that researchers must address to establish MAS as the key enabling technology for SNs.This work has been funded by projects IEA(TIN2006-15662-C02-01), Agreement Technologies (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010), EVE (TIN2009-14702-C02-01,TIN2009-14702-C02-02) and Generalitat de Catalunya under the gran t2009-SGR-1434. Meritxell Vinyals is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU grant AP2006-04636)Peer Reviewe

From a Distance: a Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experience of Telecommuters Working Remotely in Virtual Teams

In this dissertation, the social and emotional experience of telecommuters working remotely in interdependent virtual teams is explored through their lived experiences. The problem this study addresses is a lack of understanding about the process by which individuals subjectively experience remote work in virtual teams. The research methodology for this study is phenomenological—drawing data from interviews of 10 participants. The participants for this study represented a variety of industries and organizations. They were telecommuters who worked remotely more than 80% of the time, had a minimum of one year’s experience, and collaborated with others to develop a shared work product. This study drew directly from the words and expressions of the participants through in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were transcribed and thematically coded through a process of phenomenological reduction, using an analytical framework based upon the Learning in Work Life Framework (Illeris, 2011) and the Being There for the Online Learner Model (Lehman & Conceição, 2010). The findings of this study contribute to the literature with five aspects of working remotely in virtual teams: 1. Telecommuters perceive time as an elastic, boundless aspect of how they work. 2. Telecommuters perceive increased effectiveness as a result of their work arrangements. 3. Individual initiative mediates the challenges of the social and emotional experience of telecommuting. 4. The social and emotional experience of telecommuting in virtual teams is impacted by the perception of others. 5. The emotional experience of presence is enhanced by informal interactions