The Collective Building of Knowledge in Collaborative Learning Environments

The intention of this chapter is to investigate how collaborative learning environments (CLEs) can be used to elicit the collective building of knowledge. This work discusses CLEs as lively cognitive systems and looks at some strategies that might contribute to the improvement of significant pedagogical practices. The study is supported by rhizome principles, whose characteristics allow us to understand the process of selecting and connecting what is relevant and meaningful for the collective building of knowledge. A brief theoretical and conceptual approach is presented and major contributions and difficulties about collaborative learning environments are discussed. New questions and future trends about the collective building of knowledge are suggested

Managing Customer Services: Human Resource Practices, Turnover, and Sales Growth

This study examines the relationship between human resource practices, employee quit rates, and organizational performance by drawing on a unique nationally representative sample of 354 customer service and sales establishments in the telecommunications industry. Multivariate analyses show that quit rates are lower and sales growth is higher in establishments that emphasize high skills, employee participation in decision-making and in teams, and HR incentives such as high relative pay and employment security. Quit rates partially mediate the relationship between human resource practices and sales growth. These relationships also are moderated by the customer segment that frontline employees serve

Mktg

A new approach to learning the principles of marketing, MKTG is the Asia–Pacific edition of a proven, innovative solution to enhance the students' learning experience. Concise, yet complete, coverage supported by a suite of online learning aids equips students with the tools required to successfully undertake an introductory marketing course. Paving a new way to both teaching and learning, MKTG is designed to truly connect with today's busy tech-savy student. Students have access to online interactive quizzing, videos, podcasts, flashcards, marketing plans, games and more. An accessible, easy-to-read text along with tear out review cards complete a package which helps students to learn important concepts faster

Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications. 2nd Northumbria Witness Seminar Conference, 24-25 Oct 2007 Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.

These proceedings capture the content of the second Witness Seminar hosted by Northumbria University’s School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences. It followed the success of the first witness seminar in terms of its format and style but differed in that it focused on one topic - managing email and other electronic communications technologies from a records perspective. As before the witnesses were invited to share their views and opinions on a specific aspect taking as their starting point a pertinent published article(s). Three seminars explored the business, people and technology perspectives of email and e-communications, asking the following questions: What are the records management implications and challenges of doing business electronically? Are people the problem and the solution? Is technology the problem or panacea? The final seminar, 'Futurewatch', focused on moving forward, exploring new ways of working, potential new technologies and what records professionals and others need to keep on their radar screens

Challenges and Solutions in Online Usability Mining for End-to-End Content Management and Global Mass Personalization

At the current pace of growth and innovation, electronic commerce sites will find it increasingly difficult to give customers the feeling of a personal and directed service that will ultimately make the difference. Content management and personalisation pose some of the most important challenges for online businesses, E-Society, Egovernance and E-government. The increasing need in the design of advanced interactive hypertext systems such as closed corpus (eg multimedia courseware) and open corpus (eg WWW) is for the user to access and manipulate large heterogeneous digitised resource bases efficiently, effectively and comfortably. Research in content management, usability mining, personalisation models and ontologies will crucially underpin the 21st century personal and business computing environment for knowledge discovery, access, manipulation, learning and management. To cope with the massive rates of information exchange in the new digital economy, the emergent IS environment will need to be able to rely on efficient contextually aware navigation, retrieval and transaction systems. These capabilities will have to be made available on both multicasted or on-demand media services, to serve a wide variety of social and business needs such as Electronic and Mobile Learning and Commerce as well as life-long e-foraging for leisure, cultural and general interests by anyone, anywhere through any terminal world-wide. We outline the central technical, social and ethical issues in capturing, managing and interpreting usability data intelligence on the roots of, and the routes to, user (dis)satisfaction. We describe the current technical shortcomings of browser, navigation and traffic management technology. We present our research focus in seeking to take a transformative step towards the development of a new IS persona for computer-aided navigation systems (eg CAIN, Lamas et al ’99) or Workflow-embedded document retrieval systems (eg SmartDoc, Badii ’97) as integrated with our online usability evaluation systems (PopEval_MB, WebEval_AB, Badii & Murphy ’99, Badii, ’99b, 2000 a,b,c)