15,443 research outputs found

    Semantic web learning technology design: addressing pedagogical challenges and precarious futures

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    Semantic web technologies have the potential to extend and transform teaching and learning, particularly in those educational settings in which learners are encouraged to engage with ‘authentic’ data from multiple sources. In the course of the ‘Ensemble’ project, teachers and learners in different disciplinary contexts in UK Higher Education worked with educational researchers and technologists to explore the potential of such technologies through participatory design and rapid prototyping. These activities exposed some of the barriers to the development and adoption of emergent learning technologies, but also highlighted the wide range of factors, not all of them technological or pedagogical, that might contribute to enthusiasm for and adoption of such technologies. This suggests that the scope and purpose of research and design activities may need to be broadened and the paper concludes with a discussion of how the tradition of operaismo or ‘workers’ enquiry’ may help to frame such activities. This is particularly relevant in a period when the both educational institutions and the working environments for which learners are being prepared are becoming increasingly fractured, and some measure of ‘precarity’ is increasingly the norm

    Information and communication in a networked infosphere: a review of concepts and application in social branding

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    This paper aims at providing a contribution to the comprehensive review of the impact of information and communication, and their supporting technologies, in the current transformation of human life in the infosphere. The paper also offers an ex- ample of the power of new social approaches to the use of information and commu- nication technologies to foster new working models in organizations by presenting the main outcomes of a research project on social branding. A discussion about some trends of the future impact of new information and communication technologies in the infosphere is also included

    E-democracy as the frame of networked public discourse : information, consensus and complexity

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    The quest for democracy and the political reflection about its future are to be understood nowadays in the horizon of the networked information revolution. Hence, it seems difficult to speak of democracy without speaking of e-democracy, the key issue of which is the re-configuration of models of information production and concentration of attention, which are to be investigated both from a political and an epistemological standpoint. In this perspective, our paper aims at analyzing the multi-agent dimension of networked public discourse, by envisaging two competing models of structuring this discourse (those of dialogue and of claim) and by suggesting to endorse the epistemic idea of complementarity as a guidance principle for elaborating a form of partnership between traditional and electronic media

    Configuring the Networked Citizen

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    Among legal scholars of technology, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that the design of networked information technologies has regulatory effects. For the most part, that discussion has been structured by the taxonomy developed by Lawrence Lessig, which classifies code as one of four principal regulatory modalities, alongside law, markets, and norms. As a result of that framing, questions about the applicability of constitutional protections to technical decisions have taken center stage in legal and policy debates. Some scholars have pondered whether digital architectures unacceptably constrain fundamental liberties, and what public design obligations might follow from such a conclusion. Others have argued that code belongs firmly on the private side of the public/private divide because it originates in the innovative activity of private actors. In a forthcoming book, the author argues that the project of situating code within one or another part of the familiar constitutional landscape too often distracts legal scholars from more important questions about the quality of the regulation that networked digital architectures produce. The gradual, inexorable embedding of networked information technologies has the potential to alter, in largely invisible ways, the interrelated processes of subject formation and culture formation. Within legal scholarship, the prevailing conceptions of subjectivity tend to be highly individualistic, oriented around the activities of speech and voluntary affiliation. Subjectivity also tends to be understood as definitionally independent of culture. Yet subjectivity is importantly collective, formed by the substrate within which individuality emerges. People form their conceptions of the good in part by reading, listening, and watching—by engaging with the products of a common culture—and by interacting with one another. Those activities are socially and culturally mediated, shaped by the preexisting communities into which individuals are born and within which they develop. They are also technically mediated, shaped by the artifacts that individuals encounter in common use. The social and cultural patterns that mediate the activities of self-constitution are being reconfigured by the pervasive adoption of technical protocols and services that manage the activities of content delivery, search, and social interaction. In developed countries, a broad cross-section of the population routinely uses networked information technologies and communications devices in hundreds of mundane, unremarkable ways. We search for information, communicate with each other, and gain access to networked resources and services. For the most part, as long as our devices and technologies work as expected, we give little thought to how they work; those questions are understood to be technical questions. Such questions are better characterized as sociotechnical. As networked digital architectures increasingly mediate the ordinary processes of everyday life, they catalyze gradual yet fundamental social and cultural change. This chapter—originally published in Imagining New Legalities: Privacy and Its Possibilities in the 21st Century, edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (2012)—considers two interrelated questions that flow from understanding sociotechnical change as (re)configuring networked subjects. First, it revisits the way that legal and policy debates locate networked information technologies with respect to the public/private divide. The design of networked information technologies and communications devices is conventionally treated as a private matter; indeed, that designation has been the principal stumbling block encountered by constitutional theorists of technology. The classification of code as presumptively private has effects that reach beyond debates about the scope of constitutional guarantees, shaping views about the extent to which regulation of technical design decisions is normatively desirable. This chapter reexamines that discursive process, using lenses supplied by literatures on third-party liability and governance. Second, this chapter considers the relationship between sociotechnical change and understandings of citizenship. The ways that people think, form beliefs, and interact with one another are centrally relevant to the sorts of citizens that they become. The gradual embedding of networked information technologies into the practice of everyday life therefore has important implications for both the meaning and the practice of citizenship in the emerging networked information society. If design decisions are neither merely technical nor presumptively private, then they should be subject to more careful scrutiny with regard to the kind of citizen they produce. In particular, policy-makers cannot avoid engaging with the particular values that are encoded

    Emerging technologies for learning report (volume 3)

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    City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

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    Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework. We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201

    e-Science Infrastructure for the Social Sciences

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    When the term „e-Science“ became popular, it frequently was referred to as “enhanced science” or “electronic science”. More telling is the definition ‘e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it’ (Taylor, 2001). The question arises to what extent can the social sciences profit from recent developments in e- Science infrastructure? While computing, storage and network capacities so far were sufficient to accommodate and access social science data bases, new capacities and technologies support new types of research, e.g. linking and analysing transactional or audio-visual data. Increasingly collaborative working by researchers in distributed networks is efficiently supported and new resources are available for e-learning. Whether these new developments become transformative or just helpful will very much depend on whether their full potential is recognized and creatively integrated into new research designs by theoretically innovative scientists. Progress in e-Science was very much linked to the vision of the Grid as “a software infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources’ and virtually unlimited computing capacities (Foster et al. 2000). In the Social Sciences there has been considerable progress in using modern IT- technologies for multilingual access to virtual distributed research databases across Europe and beyond (e.g. NESSTAR, CESSDA – Portal), data portals for access to statistical offices and for linking access to data, literature, project, expert and other data bases (e.g. Digital Libraries, VASCODA/SOWIPORT). Whether future developments will need GRID enabling of social science databases or can be further developed using WEB 2.0 support is currently an open question. The challenges here are seamless integration and interoperability of data bases, a requirement that is also stipulated by internationalisation and trans-disciplinary research. This goes along with the need for standards and harmonisation of data and metadata. Progress powered by e- infrastructure is, among others, dependent on regulatory frameworks and human capital well trained in both, data science and research methods. It is also dependent on sufficient critical mass of the institutional infrastructure to efficiently support a dynamic research community that wants to “take the lead without catching up”.

    CHORUS Deliverable 4.3: Report from CHORUS workshops on national initiatives and metadata

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    Minutes of the following Workshops: ‱ National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval, Geneva, October 10th, 2007. ‱ Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving, Munich, IRT, 21st – 22nd November 2007 Workshop in Geneva 10/10/2007 This highly successful workshop was organised in cooperation with the European Commission. The event brought together the technical, administrative and financial representatives of the various national initiatives, which have been established recently in some European countries to support research and technical development in the area of audio-visual content processing, indexing and searching for the next generation Internet using semantic technologies, and which may lead to an internet-based knowledge infrastructure. The objective of this workshop was to provide a platform for mutual information and exchange between these initiatives, the European Commission and the participants. Top speakers were present from each of the national initiatives. There was time for discussions with the audience and amongst the European National Initiatives. The challenges, communalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impact, success criteria, etc. were tackled. This workshop addressed how these national initiatives could work together and benefit from each other. Workshop in Munich 11/21-22/2007 Numerous EU and national research projects are working on the automatic or semi-automatic generation of descriptive and functional metadata derived from analysing audio-visual content. The owners of AV archives and production facilities are eagerly awaiting such methods which would help them to better exploit their assets.Hand in hand with the digitization of analogue archives and the archiving of digital AV material, metadatashould be generated on an as high semantic level as possible, preferably fully automatically. All users of metadata rely on a certain metadata model. All AV/multimedia search engines, developed or under current development, would have to respect some compatibility or compliance with the metadata models in use. The purpose of this workshop is to draw attention to the specific problem of metadata models in the context of (semi)-automatic multimedia search
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