44,001 research outputs found
Underdogs and superheroes: Designing for new players in public space
We are exploring methods for participatory and public involvement of new 'players' in the design space. Underdogs & Superheroes involves a game-based methodology â a series of creative activities or games â in order to engage people experientially, creatively, and personally throughout the design process. We have found that games help engage usersâ imaginations by representing reality without limiting expectations to what's possible here and now; engaging experiential and personal perspectives (the 'whole' person); and opening the creative process to hands-on user participation through low/no-tech materials and a widely-understood approach. The methods are currently being applied in the project Underdogs & Superheroes, which aims to evolve technological interventions for personal and community presence in local public spaces
OperA/ALIVE/OperettA
Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Re-Focusing - Building a Future for Entrepreneurial Education & Learning
The field of entrepreneurship has struggled with fundamental
questions concerning the subjectâs nature and purpose. To whom and to
what means are educational and training agendas ultimately directed?
Such questions have become of central importance to policy makers,
practitioners and academics alike. There are suggestions that university
business schools should engage more critically with the lived experiences
of practising entrepreneurs through alternative pedagogical approaches
and methods, seeking to account for and highlighting the social, political
and moral aspects of entrepreneurial practice. In the UK, where funding in
higher education has become increasingly dependent on student fees,
there are renewed pressures to educate students for entrepreneurial
practice as opposed to educating them about the nature and effects of
entrepreneurship. Government and EU policies are calling on business
schools to develop and enhance entrepreneurial growth and skill sets, to
make their education and training programmes more proactive in
providing innovative educational practices which help and facilitate life
experiences and experiential learning. This paper makes the case for
critical frameworks to be applied so that complex social processes
become a source of learning for educators and entrepreneurs and so that
innovative pedagogical approaches can be developed in terms both of
context (curriculum design) and process (delivery methods)
Quality teaching in rural Sub-Saharan Africa: Different perspectives, values and capabilities
Over the last decade vast sums have been invested in Sub-Saharan Africa to enhance teacher quality. Yet improvements in quality â when interpreted as enhanced pupil attainment â are disappointing. This paper shows how Amartya Senâs capability approach can help answer the call for a renewed focus on, and reconceptualisation of, quality teaching by considering the pursuit of valued goals in teachersâ work. It is increasingly understood that what teachers do, matters. Drawing on a recently completed PhD, this paper examines the professional capabilities of two women teachers from a rural Nigerian school. These teachers provide a focus for exploring the relationship between official representations of teachersâ work and the professional lives teachers create and experience. Official perspectives were extrapolated from policy documents around teachersâ work, teachersâ perspectives were drawn from an ethnography of rural teachersâ lives carried out between 2007 and 2011. A list of professional capabilities was developed from each perspective to represent what was valued in teachersâ work, and the study developed an analytical framework for evaluating teachersâ professional capability from each perspective. This paper draws out some highlights of this analysis and proposes a new cyclical model of professional capability for quality teaching
Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing
Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps
Human-Centric Process-Aware Information Systems (HC-PAIS)
Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) support organizations in managing
and automating their processes. A full automation of processes is in particular
industries, such as service-oriented markets, not practicable. The integration
of humans in PAIS is necessary to manage and perform processes that require
human capabilities, judgments and decisions. A challenge of interdisciplinary
PAIS research is to provide concepts and solutions that support human
integration in PAIS and human orientation of PAIS in a way that provably
increase the PAIS users' satisfaction and motivation with working with the
Human-Centric Process Aware Information System (HC-PAIS) and consequently
influence users' performance of tasks. This work is an initial step of research
that aims at providing a definition of Human-Centric Process Aware Information
Systems (HC-PAIS) and future research challenges of HC-PAIS. Results of focus
group research are presented.Comment: 8 page
Knowledge-Intensive Processes: Characteristics, Requirements and Analysis of Contemporary Approaches
Engineering of knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) is far from being mastered, since they are genuinely knowledge- and data-centric, and require substantial flexibility, at both design- and run-time. In this work, starting from a scientific literature analysis in the area of KiPs and from three real-world domains and application scenarios, we provide a precise characterization of KiPs. Furthermore, we devise some general requirements related to KiPs management and execution. Such requirements contribute to the definition of an evaluation framework to assess current system support for KiPs. To this end, we present a critical analysis on a number of existing process-oriented approaches by discussing their efficacy against the requirements
Model-driven Enterprise Systems Configuration
Enterprise Systems potentially lead to significant efficiency gains but require a well-conducted configuration process. A promising idea to manage and simplify the configuration process is based on the premise of using reference models for this task. Our paper continues along this idea and delivers a two-fold contribution: first, we present a generic process for the task of model-driven Enterprise Systems configuration including the steps of (a) Specification of configurable reference models, (b) Configuration of configurable reference models, (c) Transformation of configured reference models to regular build time models, (d) Deployment of the generated build time models, (e) Controlling of implementation models to provide input to the configuration, and (f) Consolidation of implementation models to provide input to reference model specification. We discuss inputs and outputs as well as the involvement of different roles and validation mechanisms. Second, we present an instantiation case of this generic process for Enterprise Systems configuration based on Configurable EPCs
Entrepreneurship as nexus of change: the syncretistic production of the future
This paper deals with the issue of how the future is created and the mechanisms through which it is produced and conceived. Key to this process appears to be social interaction and how it is used to bring about change. Examining the entrepreneurial context by qualitative longitudinal research techniques, the study considers the situations of three entrepreneurs. It demonstrates that the web of relationships in which individuals are engaged provide the opportunity to enact the environment in new ways, thus producing organizations for the future. It further provides empirical evidence for a Heideggerian reading of strategy-as-practice, extending this conceptualization to account for the temporal dimension
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