The Global People toolbook: managing the life cycle of intercultural partnerships

This Toolbook has been designed for those who are planning and running international projects and who feel a need for guidance. It has its origins in a major educational project, the eChina-UK Programme, that created new collaborations between UK and Chinese Higher Education Institutions around the development of e-learning materials. The rich intercultural learning that emerged from that programme prompted the development of a new and evidence-based set of resources for other individuals and institutions undertaking international collaborative projects. Although the main focus of the work is on intercultural effectiveness in international contexts, we believe that many of the resources have a more general value and are useful for those planning collaboration in any situation of diversity – national, regional, sectoral or institutional

FORGE enabling FIRE facilities for the eLearning community

International audienceMany engineering students at third-level institutions across the world will not have the advantage of using real-world experimentation equipment, as the infrastructure and resources required for this activity are too expensive. This paper explains how the FORGE (Forging Online Education through FIRE) FP7 project transforms Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) testbed facilities into educational resources for the eLearning community. This is achieved by providing a framework for remote experimentation that supports easy access and control to testbed infrastructure for students and educators. Moreover, we identify a list of recommendations to support development of eLearning courses that access these facilities and highlight some of the challenges encountered by FORGE

Co-production for innovation: the urban living lab experience

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are public spaces where local authorities engage citizens to develop innovative urban services. Their strength and popularity stem from a methodology based on open innovation, experimentation, and citizen engagement. Although the ULL methodology is supposed to largely adopt a co-production approach, connections between the two have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The paper seeks to fill this gap by examining through a qualitative analysis three experiences of ULLs made in Amsterdam, Boston and Turin. Specifically, the paper aims to assess whether ULLs can be really conceptualised as a form of co-production and, if so, which elements characterised them as innovative in comparison to \u2018mainstreaming\u2019 co-production; Then it analyses benefits and drawbacks related to their implementation

Popper's epistemology versus Popper's politics: A libertarian viewpoint

What is my thesis? It is not that radical experimentation by the state, rather than liberal democracy, is more in accord with the spirit and logic of Popper’s ‘revolutionary’ epistemology. It is the opposite criticism, that full anarchic libertarianism (individual liberty and the free market without any state interference) better fits Popper’s epistemology and scientific method

FrameWorks 3D: composition in the third dimension

Music composition on computer is a challenging task, involving a range of data types to be managed within a single software tool. A composition typically comprises a complex arrangement of material, with many internal relationships between data in different locations - repetition, inversion, retrograde, reversal and more sophisticated transformations. The creation of such complex artefacts is labour intensive, and current systems typically place a significant cognitive burden on the composer in terms of maintaining a work as a coherent whole. FrameWorks 3D is an attempt to improve support for composition tasks within a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) style environment via a novel three-dimensional (3D) user-interface. In addition to the standard paradigm of tracks, regions and tape recording analogy, FrameWorks displays hierarchical and transformational information in a single, fully navigable workspace. The implementation combines Java with Max/MSP to create a cross-platform, user-extensible package and will be used to assess the viability of such a tool and to develop the ideas furthe