Not from the Inside Alone but by Hybrid Forms of Activity: Toward an Expansion of School Learning

This article illuminates and analyzes a hybrid educational project as intervention research in Osaka. The intervention research aims to develop a hybrid activity system in schools, based on a partnership between a university and local elementary schools but also involving other social actors and institutions. These parties are involved in designing and implementing such forms of activity as children’s project-based learning and networks of learning to bridge the gap between school activities and the productive practices of everyday life outside the school. Based on the framework of activity theory and the expansive learning approach to school innovation, the idea of this intervention is that expanding school activity is carried out not from the inside alone but by creating hybrid and symbiotic activities in which various involved partners inside and outside the school collaborate and reciprocate with one another; participating organizations and actors potentially share expanded new objects of educational work. In these symbiotic forms of activity, various providers of learning outside schools offer different learning trajectories to teachers and children, and the rules and patterns of instruction/learning are different from those in classroom-based teaching. The notion of ‘negotiated knotworking’ is useful in analyzing this emergence of joint engagement. Knotworking refers to a way of organizing and conducting productive activities in hybrid and distributed fields where different partners operate. The involved partners should be seen as a collective of expansive learners who are willingly generating expansive and powerful learning trajectories that are potentially changing the school

Separating Agent-Functioning and Inter-Agent Coordination by Activated Modules: The DECOMAS Architecture

The embedding of self-organizing inter-agent processes in distributed software applications enables the decentralized coordination system elements, solely based on concerted, localized interactions. The separation and encapsulation of the activities that are conceptually related to the coordination, is a crucial concern for systematic development practices in order to prepare the reuse and systematic integration of coordination processes in software systems. Here, we discuss a programming model that is based on the externalization of processes prescriptions and their embedding in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). One fundamental design concern for a corresponding execution middleware is the minimal-invasive augmentation of the activities that affect coordination. This design challenge is approached by the activation of agent modules. Modules are converted to software elements that reason about and modify their host agent. We discuss and formalize this extension within the context of a generic coordination architecture and exemplify the proposed programming model with the decentralized management of (web) service infrastructures

Object Orientation, Open Regional Science, and Cumulative Knowledge Building

Despite the growing need for an improved understanding of complex relationships among interacting systems, critical air, water, energy and socio-economic system research is carried out independently far too often. When it is comprehensively approached within integrated modeling environments, research teams often must recreate modeling foundations on which to base their own research, often because they are unable to access similar foundations already established by others. Moreover, there is an increasing awareness that energy, water, and environmental issues are best studied at the regional level, and many of the most relevant human-environmental interactions are tied to production and consumption technologies that themselves are tightly bound to regional economic systems that comprise national economies. We need to integrate and model these interacting systems comprehensively, and in an open access environment that promotes interaction among scholars, and database and model sharing to eliminate wasteful and redundant foundation infrastructure building. The pace of new knowledge development can be advanced radically by adopting a common and well-tested integrated systems modeling approach for widespread scientific use and development, supporting a research community that spans a wide range of problem domains. The future of regional science research thus lies in the integrated and comprehensive modeling of interacting systems. This paper describes our vision of this open science future, which we believe will rest on an open source and object-oriented foundation. We describe OASIS, a specific exemplar project now underway designed to fill the current integrated systems science infrastructure void with a framework whose evolutionary character will ultimately reflect the conceptual strengths and contributions of a large community of scholars. The result will be distinguished not only by the collective wisdom of the modeling community, but also by careful attention to the mechanisms that support replication and reproducibility. With the advantage of 21st century technology, object oriented open source open science will deepen our understanding and radically accelerate the pace of knowledge building in coming decades. We see this as a fundamentally new knowledge building paradigm that will dominate future integrated systems research

Designing for experience: Example experience design projects on workspace

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Industrial Design, Izmir, 2006Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 94-95)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxv, 96 leavesThe great experiences can be deliberate and are based upon principles that have been proven. This thesis study explored the most important of these principles before the practical study. After that, the study focused on making a practical study on the workspace domain in three main phases.In the data collecting phase, experience data was collected for a workspace domain by observing workspace activities. Used methods were photographing, informal interviews, field notes and ethnographic observation. In the data modeling phase, a data model were constructed. Pattern language was used as a base for re-modeling the experience data. The data model is simply a framework that allows the designer to document, collect, communicate and understand all design related information quickly and easily. During the design phase, this framework became the design guideline and was used as a roadmap for every single design idea.Framework also gives the opportunity of defining relations from patterns to patterns and from design ideas to patterns. This flexible opportunity lets the designer visualize experience scenarios with design ideas in a higher level of understanding. Framework has a special data encapsulation format which is inherited from pattern language. According to that format, short pattern names, short essence paragraphs and other sections makes easier to remember, communicate and connect the patterns with new ideas. At the end of the design phase, three different products which are actively related with the experience patterns were designed

Using a Work System Metamodel and USDL to Build a Bridge between Business Service Systems and Service Computing

This paper explores the support for more comprehensive modeling of service systems than that possible through modeling methods developed through partial perspectives, with uncertainties about their wider suitability and need for integration with other methods in this domain. It responds to a Dual Call for Papers from INFORMS Service Science and IEEE Transactions on Service Computing requesting contributions that address the barely explored challenge of establishing links between business views of service systems and more technical views from service computing. Competing definitions of service reveal that most business views of service emphasize acts or outcomes produced for others, whereas a service computing view emphasizes encapsulated functionalities that can be discovered and launched by service consumers. This paper uses work system theory (WST) and a related work system metamodel to represent a business view of service systems. It uses the Unified Service Description Language (USDL 2.0) to represent a service computing view of service systems. Application of the business view to the previously defined EU-Rent example illustrates how successively more detailed business-oriented descriptions of a service situation reveal needs for functionality that are well described by USDL. In other words, business service system views and service computing views, as represented by WST and USDL respectively, serve complementary purposes. WST supports modeling and analysis of business situations, while USDL is the basis of detailed descriptions of services as encapsulated functionality

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

Visual world studies of conversational perspective taking: similar findings, diverging interpretations

Visual-world eyetracking greatly expanded the potential for insight into how listeners access and use common ground during situated language comprehension. Past reviews of visual world studies on perspective taking have largely taken the diverging findings of the various studies at face value, and attributed these apparently different findings to differences in the extent to which the paradigms used by different labs afford collaborative interaction. Researchers are asking questions about perspective taking of an increasingly nuanced and sophisticated nature, a clear indicator of progress. But this research has the potential not only to improve our understanding of conversational perspective taking. Grappling with problems of data interpretation in such a complex domain has the unique potential to drive visual world researchers to a deeper understanding of how to best map visual world data onto psycholinguistic theory. I will argue against this interactional affordances explanation, on two counts. First, it implies that interactivity affects the overall ability to form common ground, and thus provides no straightforward explanation of why, within a single noninteractive study, common ground can have very large effects on some aspects of processing (referential anticipation) while having negligible effects on others (lexical processing). Second, and more importantly, the explanation accepts the divergence in published findings at face value. However, a closer look at several key studies shows that the divergences are more likely to reflect inconsistent practices of analysis and interpretation that have been applied to an underlying body of data that is, in fact, surprisingly consistent. The diverging interpretations, I will argue, are the result of differences in the handling of anticipatory baseline effects (ABEs) in the analysis of visual world data. ABEs arise in perspective-taking studies because listeners have earlier access to constraining information about who knows what than they have to referential speech, and thus can already show biases in visual attention even before the processing of any referential speech has begun. To be sure, these ABEs clearly indicate early access to common ground; however, access does not imply integration, since it is possible that this information is not used later to modulate the processing of incoming speech. Failing to account for these biases using statistical or experimental controls leads to over-optimistic assessments of listeners’ ability to integrate this information with incoming speech. I will show that several key studies with varying degrees of interactional affordances all show similar temporal profiles of common ground use during the interpretive process: early anticipatory effects, followed by bottom-up effects of lexical processing that are not modulated by common ground, followed (optionally) by further late effects that are likely to be post-lexical. Furthermore, this temporal profile for common ground radically differs from the profile of contextual effects related to verb semantics. Together, these findings are consistent with the proposal that lexical processes are encapsulated from common ground, but cannot be straightforwardly accounted for by probabilistic constraint-based approaches

Building communities for the exchange of learning objects: theoretical foundations and requirements

In order to reduce overall costs of developing high-quality digital courses (including both the content, and the learning and teaching activities), the exchange of learning objects has been recognized as a promising solution. This article makes an inventory of the issues involved in the exchange of learning objects within a community. It explores some basic theories, models and specifications and provides a theoretical framework containing the functional and non-functional requirements to establish an exchange system in the educational field. Three levels of requirements are discussed. First, the non-functional requirements that deal with the technical conditions to make learning objects interoperable. Second, some basic use cases (activities) are identified that must be facilitated to enable the technical exchange of learning objects, e.g. searching and adapting the objects. Third, some basic use cases are identified that are required to establish the exchange of learning objects in a community, e.g. policy management, information and training. The implications of this framework are then discussed, including recommendations concerning the identification of reward systems, role changes and evaluation instruments