Historical awareness support and its evaluation in collaborative software engineering

The types of awareness relevant to collaborative soft- ware engineering are identified and an additional type, "historical awareness" is proposed. This new type of awareness is the knowledge of how software artefacts re- sulting from collaboration have evolved in the course of their development. The types of awareness that different software engineer- ing environment architectures can support are discussed. A way to add awareness support to our existing OSCAR sys- tem, a component of the GENESIS software engineering platform, is proposed. Finally ways of instrumenting and evaluating the awareness support offered by the modified system are outlined

Group Leadership in Online Collaborative Learning

The innovations in computer and communications technologies combined with on-going needs to deliver educational programs to students regardless of their physical locations, have lead to the innovation of distance education programs and technologies. To keep up with recent developments in both areas of technologies and techniques related to distance education programs, educators, administrators, and researchers are in constant needs of learning about issues, solutions, and challenges of these technologies. The Encyclopedia of Distance Learning offers the most comprehensive coverage of the issues, concepts, trends, and technologies of distance learning. With more than 2,000 terms and definitions and over 6,000 additional references, this authoritative 4-volume encyclopedia is considered the foremost reference source for the latest understanding, discoveries, and research in the field of distance learning

CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Promoting learner autonomy through multiliteracy skills development in cross-institutional exchanges

This contribution presents findings from two empirical case studies, which followed a task-based telecollaborative learning format. Participants included student teacher trainees, tutors, and language learners from colleges/universities in Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The projects aimed at promoting learner autonomy through awareness raising of modes and meaning-making online and multiliteracy skills development based on hands-on analysis of web resources and social networking tools. It was hoped that this awareness would foster the teachers' own autonomy in virtual learning environments and enable them to design tasks which—in turn—would promote learner autonomy as understood by Palfreyman (2006): the informed use of a range of interacting resources in context. We argue that this awareness is reflected in enhanced multimodal communicative competence, i.e., “the ability to understand the combined potential of various modes for making meaning” (Royce, 2002, p. 92), and multiliteracy, with the latter allowing teachers and learners to realize the potential of blended and online only settings for language acquisition purposes. Ideally then, while becoming gradually more versed in multimodality and multiliteracy, learners can also take over more control and self-direct their own learning when working online (Benson, 2001) which are also characteristics of autonomy