NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition

The NMC Horizon Report > 2017 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This 14th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology are placed directly in the context of their likely impact on the core missions of universities and colleges. The three key sections of this report constitute a reference and straightforward technology-planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists. It is our hope that this research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in higher education across the globe. All of the topics were selected by an expert panel that represented a range of backgrounds and perspectives

6G Vision, Value, Use Cases and Technologies from European 6G Flagship Project Hexa-X

While 5G is being deployed and the economy and society begin to reap the associated benefits, the research and development community starts to focus on the next, 6th Generation (6G) of wireless communications. Although there are papers available in the literature on visions, requirements and technical enablers for 6G from various academic perspectives, there is a lack of joint industry and academic work towards 6G. In this paper a consolidated view on vision, values, use cases and key enabling technologies from leading industry stakeholders and academia is presented. The authors represent the mobile communications ecosystem with competences spanning hardware, link layer and networking aspects, as well as standardization and regulation. The second contribution of the paper is revisiting and analyzing the key concurrent initiatives on 6G. A third contribution of the paper is the identification and justification of six key 6G research challenges: (i) “connecting”, in the sense of empowering, exploiting and governing, intelligence; (ii) realizing a network of networks, i.e., leveraging on existing networks and investments, while reinventing roles and protocols where needed; (iii) delivering extreme experiences, when/where needed; (iv) (environmental, economic, social) sustainability to address the major challenges of current societies; (v) trustworthiness as an ingrained fundamental design principle; (vi) supporting cost-effective global service coverage. A fourth contribution is a comprehensive specification of a concrete first-set of industry and academia jointly defined use cases for 6G, e.g., massive twinning, cooperative robots, immersive telepresence, and others. Finally, the anticipated evolutions in the radio, network and management/orchestration domains are discussed

The creation of public value through e-government in the Sultanate of Oman

Public value (PV) is a debatable topic with different definitions across the public administration literature and e-government literature. Public value is seen as the last paradigm of both public administration and e-government studies, redefining the definition of e-government, its aims, success indicators and evaluation frameworks. Existing implementations are typically biased towards the realisation of efficiency and service effectiveness, with far less attention being paid to the delivery of PV. In addition, PV-related e-government studies have not presented a comprehensive and holistic framework to investigate e-government PV. This study seeks to address this gap by investigating how e-government facilitates the creation of PV. [Continues.

Decentralization of public-sector agricultural extension in India: The case of the district-level Agricultural Technology Management Agency (ATMA)

agricultural extension reform, Decentralization, demand-driven, organizational capacity,

Segment Routing: a Comprehensive Survey of Research Activities, Standardization Efforts and Implementation Results

Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g. huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being adopted and deployed. SR architecture is based on the concept of source routing and has interesting scalability properties, as it dramatically reduces the amount of state information to be configured in the core nodes to support complex services. SR architecture was first implemented with the MPLS dataplane and then, quite recently, with the IPv6 dataplane (SRv6). IPv6 SR architecture (SRv6) has been extended from the simple steering of packets across nodes to a general network programming approach, making it very suitable for use cases such as Service Function Chaining and Network Function Virtualization. In this paper we present a tutorial and a comprehensive survey on SR technology, analyzing standardization efforts, patents, research activities and implementation results. We start with an introduction on the motivations for Segment Routing and an overview of its evolution and standardization. Then, we provide a tutorial on Segment Routing technology, with a focus on the novel SRv6 solution. We discuss the standardization efforts and the patents providing details on the most important documents and mentioning other ongoing activities. We then thoroughly analyze research activities according to a taxonomy. We have identified 8 main categories during our analysis of the current state of play: Monitoring, Traffic Engineering, Failure Recovery, Centrally Controlled Architectures, Path Encoding, Network Programming, Performance Evaluation and Miscellaneous...Comment: SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIAL

The e-Government Development Discourse

research agenda for e-Government. When e-Government was first conceived, it was designed upon basic technologies where the emphasis was only on the simple display of government information for citizens to read. Nowadays, e-Government design comprises many complicated modules such as upload and download consoles, two-way interaction consoles between citizens and government agents, integrated government business processes presenting the whole of government, and it does not depend solely on technology. The complexity of e-Government has now evolved to include political, cultural, economic, social and technical dimensions. Bringing all these difficult aspects together is so complicated that it needs carefully planned strategies informed by local contextual characteristics. Rather than giving formulaic definitions and conceptual standpoints on many aspects of e-Government, as is the case in many e-Government publications, this book will explore the frontiers of global knowledge value chains by discussing current and future dimensions of e-Government. For example, the book discusses the concept of data governance by exploring how actual opening up of government data can be achieved, especially in a developing world context. Further, the book posits that opening government data should be followed by the opening up of government business processes in order to peddle the concept of accountability and responsiveness. Much text on data governance has concentrated on articulating the basic definitions surrounding this concept. Another very important topic explored in this book is regarding how the concept of decolonisation can be extended to e-Government by providing practical examples as to how researchers in the developing world can contribute to the advancement of e-Government as a scientific field of enquiry and guide its implementation, thereof. Decolonisation is advocated for in e-Government research so that there is a balance in the inclusion of the Afrocentric knowledge into e-Government advancement other than over-reliance on the Euro-, Asia- and America-centric knowledge value chains (Mbembe 2015). As e-Government is a very expensive undertaking, the issue of funding has excluded African countries and a majority of the developing world from implementing e-Government. Despite funding being a critical cornerstone of e-Government development, there is a dearth of information on this topic. Therefore, this book provides a chapter which discusses traditional and innovative ways of funding e-Government design and implementation which can go a long way in improving e-Government penetration into the developing world. Further, the book explores how intelligent e-Government applications can be designed, especially in resource-constrained countries. A couple of emerging technology innovations such as fog computing and intelligent information technology are explored within the realm of e-Government design