Designing for change: mash-up personal learning environments

Institutions for formal education and most work places are equipped today with at least some kind of tools that bring together people and content artefacts in learning activities to support them in constructing and processing information and knowledge. For almost half a century, science and practice have been discussing models on how to bring personalisation through digital means to these environments. Learning environments and their construction as well as maintenance makes up the most crucial part of the learning process and the desired learning outcomes and theories should take this into account. Instruction itself as the predominant paradigm has to step down. The learning environment is an (if not 'the�) important outcome of a learning process, not just a stage to perform a 'learning play'. For these good reasons, we therefore consider instructional design theories to be flawed. In this article we first clarify key concepts and assumptions for personalised learning environments. Afterwards, we summarise our critique on the contemporary models for personalised adaptive learning. Subsequently, we propose our alternative, i.e. the concept of a mash-up personal learning environment that provides adaptation mechanisms for learning environment construction and maintenance. The web application mash-up solution allows learners to reuse existing (web-based) tools plus services. Our alternative, LISL is a design language model for creating, managing, maintaining, and learning about learning environment design; it is complemented by a proof of concept, the MUPPLE platform. We demonstrate this approach with a prototypical implementation and a – we think – comprehensible example. Finally, we round up the article with a discussion on possible extensions of this new model and open problems

DESIGN AND DELIVERY OF ELECTRONIC SERVICES: IMPLICATIONS FOR CUSTOMER VALUE IN ELECTRONIC FOOD RETAILING

Electronic food retailers can satisfy their customers more effectively if they understand how this particular market works. As in other service segments, the emergence of electronic business-to-customer services in the retail food industry poses questions for managers about the design of new food retailing services and the redesign of existing services for delivery through electronic channels. Important topics include characteristics of electronic service offerings, the typical operational configurations used to deliver electronic services, and the ways in which they relate to the effectiveness of electronic service delivery. We address this issue by developing a product-process matrix for understanding and analyzing electronic retailing services in general. We tailor the matrix to food retailing in particular. The product-process matrix allows electronic food retailers to determine in advance what features they need in a web site to serve their chosen market effectively.Consumer/Household Economics, Marketing, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

SERVICE-PROCESS CONFIGURATIONS IN ELECTRONIC RETAILING: A TAXONOMIC ANALYSIS OF ELECTRONIC FOOD RETAILERS

Service-processes of electronic retailers are founded on electronic technologies that provide flexibility to sense and respond online to the dynamic and complex needs of customers. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy of service-processes in electronic retailing and demonstrate their linkage to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The taxonomy is grounded in a conceptual classification scheme that differentiates service-process stages on a continuum of flexibility. Using data on electronic service-processes collected from 255 electronic food retailers, we identified eight configurations for the taxonomy. We also collected and analyzed publicly reported customer satisfaction survey data that were available for 52 electronic food retailers in the study sample. The results of this analysis indicate positive and significant correlation of the ordering of the taxonomy configurations with (i) customer satisfaction with product information, product selection, web site aesthetics, web site navigation, customer support, and ease of return, and (ii) customer loyalty. Taken together, the results of our empirical analyses demonstrate that the taxonomy captures information and variety within and across the electronic service-process configurations in ways that can be related to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.Marketing, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Mapping web personal learning environments

A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end users–interactions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE

Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry

In the context of an emerging economy, the paper analyzes indigenous growth and internationalization. Using novel and original data, the paper studies the Indian film cluster in Mumbai, Bollywood. It argues that as the world’s biggest commercial film cluster and a conspicuous growth phenomenon in an emerging economy context, Bollywood can be seen as a paradigmatic case for adding to our understanding of the development of film clusters outside the USA, as well as suggesting more general insights into the growth and internationalization of industries in emerging economies. The empirical analysis of the paper points to the importance of home market, government regulation, and industry structure for Bollywood’s recent export growth. The paper discusses how the existence of a well-defined and geographically centered social network among producers, directors and other key roles in filmmaking in Mumbai supports the development of a ‘Bollywood model’ of filmmaking with a industry structure remarkably different from Hollywood’s.Film industry, India, Bollywood, networks, home market, industry structure, exports, institutional change, emerging economies

Building Security Aware E-Commerce Web Applications

In the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in Electronic commerce (e-commerce) activity via web applications. With this increase, there is a need for building a good quality application. One of the major factors to achieve quality is the application’s security. This paper discusses about how alarming the threats posed to the e-commerce applications are, how can one counteract against the threats, what are the mistakes made by the current e-commerce applications which enabled them to get affected by the security attacks, how they recovered from the incidents, takes the opinions from the consumers with the help of a survey, proposes a methodology to be followed while developing an e-commerce web application to make the application aware about the threats and take countermeasures accordingly

Risks and remedies in e-learning system

One of the most effective applications of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is the emergence of E-Learning. Considering the importance and need of E-Learning, recent years have seen a drastic change of learning methodologies in Higher Education. Undoubtedly, the three main entities of E-Learning system can be considered as Student, Teacher & Controlling Authority and there will be different level, but a good E-Learning system needs total integrity among all entities in every level. Apart from integrity enforcement, security enforcement in the whole system is the other crucial way to organize the it. As internet is the backbone of the entire system which is inherently insecure, during transaction of message in E-Learning system, hackers attack by utilising different loopholes of technology. So different security measures are required to be imposed on the system. In this paper, emphasis is given on different risks called e-risks and their remedies called e-remedies to build trust in the minds of all participants of E-Learning system

Designing the tools of the trade: How corporate social responsibility consultants and their tool-based practices created market shifts

Combining insights from the sociology of markets and studies of consultants, this article examines the tool-based practices by which market actors enable the agencing of the supply and demand of the market in ways that shape market’s trajectory. Building on 30 interviews and a rich set of secondary data, we provide an analysis of the development of a market for consultancy products and services for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the province of Quebec (Canada). We analytically induced six tool-based practices by which consultants contributed to the agencing of the market, and our results show how these practices collectively created market shifts. Our analysis offers new insights into the processes by which consultants’ tool-based practices produce market shifts, embed environmental and social concerns within market mechanisms, and ‘vascularize’ markets

Digital Poetry: Comparative Textual Performances in Trans-medial Spaces

This study extends work on notions of space and performance developed by media and poetry theorists. I particularly analyze how contemporary technologies re-define the writing space of digital poetry making by investigating the configuration and the function of this space in the writing of the digital poem. Thus, I employ David Jay Bolter's concept of "topographic" digital writing and propose the term "trans-medial" space to describe the computer space in which the digital poem exists, emerges, and is experienced. With origins in Italian Futurism, the literary avant-garde of the first half of twentieth century, digital poetry extends the creative repertoire of this experimental poetry tradition using computers in the composition, generation, or presentation of texts. Because these poems convey a perception of space as changeable and multiple (made of computer screen and code spaces), this "trans-medial" space is both self-transformative (forms itself as it self-transforms) and transforming (transforms what it contains). Media scholars such as Espen Aarseth and Stephanie Strickland often explain how computer programming makes such digital works become sites of encounter between agencies such as author, text, or readers. Conversely, I show that this "trans-medial" space is also a mediating agent in the performance of the text along with its readers in the sense that it engages in and with the performance of text. I examine three forms of digital poetry: Gianni Toti's video-poetry, Caterina Davinio's net-poetry, and Loss Pequeno Glazier's JavaScript-based poetry. These Italian and United States poet-scholars are leading figures in digital poetry. As scholars, they articulate the theoretical frameworks of this genre in landmark anthologies. As poets, their digital works are similar in that they are indebted to Italian Futurism; and yet they represent distinct visions of and about poetry in new media spaces. I use their works to think through video-graphic spaces, networked spaces, and scripting spaces as expressions of trans-medial space. In this respect, my comparative analysis opens up new venues for the reading of digital poetry by re-fashioning the concept and the function of the writing space of our digitized world

'Call' Centres to 'Contact' Centres: Shifting Paradigms of Customer Service Systems and Research

This paper explores and compares the existing paradigm of 'call centres' as simplistic service functions underpinned by Taylorism with, the emer-gence of 'contact centres' as complex customer service systems. Such emergence has been briefly highlighted in the literature however, with little attention to the additional complexity and challenges on service design and delivery as a result of this shift. Through examination of literature and in-depth conversations with practitioners, the research has found that there is a further scope of exploration of contact centres beyond service delivery channels. Organisations have to re-consider service design and its implications on service management through fresh perspectives