Working collaboratively on the digital global frontier

An international online collaborative learning experience was designed and implemented in preservice teacher education classes at the University of Calgary, Canada and the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The project was designed to give preservice teachers an opportunity to live the experience of being online collaborators investigating real world teaching issues of diversity and inclusivity. Qualitative research was conducted to examine the complexity of the online collaborative experiences of participants. Redmond and Lock’s (2006) flexible online collaborative learning framework was used to explain the design and the implementation of the project. Henri’s (1992) content analysis model for computer-mediated communication was used for the online asynchronous postings and a constant comparative method of data analysis was used in the construction of themes. From the findings, the authors propose recommendations for designing and facilitating collaborative learning on the digital global frontier

Oil in Venezuela: Triggering Violence or Ensuring Stability? A Context-sensitive Analysis of the Ambivalent Impact of Resource Abundance

This paper studies the causal factors that make the oil-state Venezuela, which is generally characterized by a low level of violence, an outlier among the oil countries as a whole. It applies a newly elaborated “context approach” that systematically considers domestic and international contextual factors. To test the results of the systematic analysis, two periods with a moderate increase in internal violence in Venezuela are subsequently analyzed, in the second part of the paper, from a comparative-historical perspective. The findings demonstrate that oil, in interaction with fluctuating non-resource-specific contextual conditions, has had ambiguous effects: On the one hand, oil has explicitly served as a conflict-reducing and partly democracy-promoting factor, principally through large-scale socioeconomic redistribution, widespread clientelistic structures, and corruption. On the other hand, oil has triggered violence—primarily through socioeconomic causal mechanisms (central keywords: decline of oil abundance and resource management) and secondarily through the long-term degradation of political institutions. While clientelism and corruption initially had a stabilizing effect, in the long run they exacerbated the delegitimization of the traditional political elite. Another crucial finding is that the impact and relative importance of oil with respect to the increase in violence seems to vary significantly depending on the specific subtype of violence.Venezuela, natural resources, oil, political economy, violence, contextual sensitivity

MORMED: towards a multilingual social networking platform facilitating medicine 2.0

The broad adoption of Web 2.0 tools has signalled a new era of "Medicine 2.0" in the field of medical informatics. The support for collaboration within online communities and the sharing of information in social networks offers the opportunity for new communication channels among patients, medical experts, and researchers. This paper introduces MORMED, a novel multilingual social networking and content management platform that exemplifies the Medicine 2.0 paradigm, and aims to achieve knowledge commonality by promoting sociality, while also transcending language barriers through automated translation. The MORMED platform will be piloted in a community interested in the treatment of rare diseases (Lupus or Antiphospholipid Syndrome)

Scaffolding Reflection: Prompting Social Constructive Metacognitive Activity in Non-Formal Learning

The study explores the effects of three different types of non-adaptive, metacognitive scaffolding on social, constructive metacognitive activity and reflection in groups of non-formal learners. Six triads of non-formal learners were assigned randomly to one of the three scaffolding conditions: structuring, problematising or epistemological. The triads were then asked to collaboratively resolve an ill-structured problem and record their deliberations. Evidence from think-aloud protocols was analysed using conversational and discourse analysis. Findings indicate that epistemological scaffolds produced more social, constructive metacognitive activity than either of the two other scaffolding conditions in all metacognitive activities except for task orientation, as well as higher quality interactions during evaluation and reflection phases. However, participants appeared to be less aware of their activities as forming a strategic, self-regulatory response to the problem. This may indicate that for learning transfer, it may be necessary to employ an adaptive, facilitated reflection on learners' activities

Strategies and Tools to Raise Energy Awareness Collectively

Providing smart meters and technology for feedback on energy consumption have been considered strategic in current energy policies as part of the battle against climate change. However, feedback alone does not always lead to energy savings. Beyond information on their own consumption and generic advices, people usually still need more specific guidance on how to change their behaviour in an effective and sustainable way. This research considers electricity consumption feedback as a learning element for collective knowledge building, and relies mainly on dialogue and collaboration to engage people with energy conservation as a social issue. To this end, a set of artefacts for triggering and mediating discussions on energy consumption within social groups was developed and evaluated with community leaders in the UK. In a series of 3 workshops, participants discussed how this approach and tools could help them in their mission of disseminating the energy conservation message to the community. Our results show that developing knowledge within a social group is an effective approach in raising awareness, and suggest that tangible artefacts can have an important role in engaging people. Also, initiatives aiming at engaging a wide range of the public must consider different degrees of familiarity with technology, as well as the different perceptions people may have relating energy consumption and environmental protection