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

New forms of collaborative innovation and production on the internet

The Internet has enabled new forms of large-scale collaboration. Voluntary contributions by large numbers of users and co-producers lead to new forms of production and innovation, as seen in Wikipedia, open source software development, in social networks or on user-generated content platforms as well as in many firm-driven Web 2.0 services. Large-scale collaboration on the Internet is an intriguing phenomenon for scholarly debate because it challenges well established insights into the governance of economic action, the sources of innovation, the possibilities of collective action and the social, legal and technical preconditions for successful collaboration. Although contributions to the debate from various disciplines and fine-grained empirical studies already exist, there still is a lack of an interdisciplinary approach

New forms of collaborative innovation and production on the internet : an interdisciplinary perspective

Contents Introduction 1 New forms of collaborative innovation and production on the Internet : Volker Wittke and Heidemarie Hanekop Interdisciplinary perspectives on collaborative innovation and production: Conceptual debates 2 Customer Co-Creation: Open Innovation with Customers : Frank Piller, Christoph Ihl and Alexander Vossen 3 Governing Social Production : Niva Elkin-Koren 4 Trust Management in Online Communities : Audun Jøsang 5 Building a reputation system for Wikipedia : Christian Damsgaard Jensen 6 Cooperation in Wikipedia from a Network Perspective : Christian Stegbauer Firm driven collaborative innovation and production: Case studies 7 Managing a New Consumer Culture: “Working Consumers” in Web 2.0 as a Source of Corporate Feedback : Sabine Hornung, Frank Kleemann and G. Günter Voß 8 Prosuming, or when customers turn collaborators: coordination and motivation of customer contribution : Birgit Blättel-Mink, Raphael Menez, Dirk Dalichau, Daniel Kahnert 9 Role Confusion in Open Innovation Intermediary Arenas : Tobias Fredberg, Maria Elmquist, Susanne Ollila, Anna Yström List of Contributor

Exploring Societal Computing based on the Example of Privacy

Data privacy when using online systems like Facebook and Amazon has become an increasingly popular topic in the last few years. This thesis will consist of the following four projects that aim to address the issues of privacy and software engineering. First, only a little is known about how users and developers perceive privacy and which concrete measures would mitigate their privacy concerns. To investigate privacy requirements, we conducted an online survey with closed and open questions and collected 408 valid responses. Our results show that users often reduce privacy to security, with data sharing and data breaches being their biggest concerns. Users are more concerned about the content of their documents and their personal data such as location than about their interaction data. Unlike users, developers clearly prefer technical measures like data anonymization and think that privacy laws and policies are less effective. We also observed interesting differences between people from different geographies. For example, people from Europe are more concerned about data breaches than people from North America. People from Asia/Pacific and Europe believe that content and metadata are more critical for privacy than people from North America. Our results contribute to developing a user-driven privacy framework that is based on empirical evidence in addition to the legal, technical, and commercial perspectives. Second, a related challenge to above, is to make privacy more understandable in complex systems that may have a variety of user interface options, which may change often. As social network platforms have evolved, the ability for users to control how and with whom information is being shared introduces challenges concerning the configuration and comprehension of privacy settings. To address these concerns, our crowd sourced approach simplifies the understanding of privacy settings by using data collected from 512 users over a 17 month period to generate visualizations that allow users to compare their personal settings to an arbitrary subset of individuals of their choosing. To validate our approach we conducted an online survey with closed and open questions and collected 59 valid responses after which we conducted follow-up interviews with 10 respondents. Our results showed that 70% of respondents found visualizations using crowd sourced data useful for understanding privacy settings, and 80% preferred a crowd sourced tool for configuring their privacy settings over current privacy controls. Third, as software evolves over time, this might introduce bugs that breach users' privacy. Further, there might be system-wide policy changes that could change users' settings to be more or less private than before. We present a novel technique that can be used by end-users for detecting changes in privacy, i.e., regression testing for privacy. Using a social approach for detecting privacy bugs, we present two prototype tools. Our evaluation shows the feasibility and utility of our approach for detecting privacy bugs. We highlight two interesting case studies on the bugs that were discovered using our tools. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first technique that leverages regression testing for detecting privacy bugs from an end-user perspective. Fourth, approaches to addressing these privacy concerns typically require substantial extra computational resources, which might be beneficial where privacy is concerned, but may have significant negative impact with respect to Green Computing and sustainability, another major societal concern. Spending more computation time results in spending more energy and other resources that make the software system less sustainable. Ideally, what we would like are techniques for designing software systems that address these privacy concerns but which are also sustainable - systems where privacy could be achieved "for free", i.e., without having to spend extra computational effort. We describe how privacy can indeed be achieved for free an accidental and beneficial side effect of doing some existing computation - in web applications and online systems that have access to user data. We show the feasibility, sustainability, and utility of our approach and what types of privacy threats it can mitigate. Finally, we generalize the problem of privacy and its tradeoffs. As Social Computing has increasingly captivated the general public, it has become a popular research area for computer scientists. Social Computing research focuses on online social behavior and using artifacts derived from it for providing recommendations and other useful community knowledge. Unfortunately, some of that behavior and knowledge incur societal costs, particularly with regards to Privacy, which is viewed quite differently by different populations as well as regulated differently in different locales. But clever technical solutions to those challenges may impose additional societal costs, e.g., by consuming substantial resources at odds with Green Computing, another major area of societal concern. We propose a new crosscutting research area, Societal Computing, that focuses on the technical tradeoffs among computational models and application domains that raise significant societal issues. We highlight some of the relevant research topics and open problems that we foresee in Societal Computing. We feel that these topics, and Societal Computing in general, need to gain prominence as they will provide useful avenues of research leading to increasing benefits for society as a whole

New forms of collaborative innovation and production on the internet - an interdisciplinary perspective

The Internet has enabled new forms of large-scale collaboration. Voluntary contributions by large numbers of users and co-producers lead to new forms of production and innovation, as seen in Wikipedia, open source software development, in social networks or on user-generated content platforms as well as in many firm-driven Web 2.0 services. Large-scale collaboration on the Internet is an intriguing phenomenon for scholarly debate because it challenges well established insights into the governance of economic action, the sources of innovation, the possibilities of collective action and the social, legal and technical preconditions for successful collaboration. Although contributions to the debate from various disciplines and fine-grained empirical studies already exist, there still is a lack of an interdisciplinary approach

New forms of collaborative innovation and production on the internet

The Internet has enabled new forms of large-scale collaboration. Voluntary contributions by large numbers of users and co-producers lead to new forms of production and innovation, as seen in Wikipedia, open source software development, in social networks or on user-generated content platforms as well as in many firm-driven Web 2.0 services. Large-scale collaboration on the Internet is an intriguing phenomenon for scholarly debate because it challenges well established insights into the governance of economic action, the sources of innovation, the possibilities of collective action and the social, legal and technical preconditions for successful collaboration. Although contributions to the debate from various disciplines and fine-grained empirical studies already exist, there still is a lack of an interdisciplinary approach

Digital technology-based solutions for enhanced effectiveness of secured transactions law:the road to perfection?

This article has two objectives. First, the article examines how the incorporation of specific digital technologies to the different stages of secured transactions could mitigate the imperfections of the secured transactions system and enhance its effectiveness. To begin with, an envisioned integrated ecosystem of smart property and self-executed smart contracts for security agreements could effectively reduce verification and monitoring costs. Next, a fully automatic electronic—maybe, blockchain-based—registry fed by a (IoT) network of interconnected assets would dramatically improve the accuracy of consistently-updated registered information. Furthermore, implanted AI-based solutions could be used to detect changes of circumstances and deviations from agreed provisions. Finally, AI-guided smart contracts could assist in decisionmaking to prevent breaches and automatically enforce remedies.8 Second, given this backdrop, the article focuses on some of the legal implications for secured transactions legal system and assesses whether the current legal framework is prepared to face the challenges inherent to these new technologies, to exploit the multitude of opportunities presented by the technologies, and to manage the involved risks. Alternatively, if the current system is incapable of taking on this challenge, this article will consider an appropriate legal response.Research Project Reform of Spanish Laws of Security Rights in an international context (DER201677695-P)

The future of social is personal: the potential of the personal data store

This chapter argues that technical architectures that facilitate the longitudinal, decentralised and individual-centric personal collection and curation of data will be an important, but partial, response to the pressing problem of the autonomy of the data subject, and the asymmetry of power between the subject and large scale service providers/data consumers. Towards framing the scope and role of such Personal Data Stores (PDSes), the legalistic notion of personal data is examined, and it is argued that a more inclusive, intuitive notion expresses more accurately what individuals require in order to preserve their autonomy in a data-driven world of large aggregators. Six challenges towards realising the PDS vision are set out: the requirement to store data for long periods; the difficulties of managing data for individuals; the need to reconsider the regulatory basis for third-party access to data; the need to comply with international data handling standards; the need to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies; and the need to future-proof data gathering against the evolution of social norms. The open experimental PDS platform INDX is introduced and described, as a means of beginning to address at least some of these six challenges