13 research outputs found

    Enhancing Key Digital Literacy Skills: Information Privacy, Information Security, and Copyright/Intellectual Property

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    Key Messages Background Knowledge and skills in the areas of information security, information privacy, and copyright/intellectual property rights and protection are of key importance for organizational and individual success in an evolving society and labour market in which information is a core resource. Organizations require skilled and knowledgeable professionals who understand risks and responsibilities related to the management of information privacy, information security, and copyright/intellectual property. Professionals with this expertise can assist organizations to ensure that they and their employees meet requirements for the privacy and security of information in their care and control, and in order to ensure that neither the organization nor its employees contravene copyright provisions in their use of information. Failure to meet any of these responsibilities can expose the organization to reputational harm, legal action and/or financial loss. Context Inadequate or inappropriate information management practices of individual employees are at the root of organizational vulnerabilities with respect to information privacy, information security, and information ownership issues. Users demonstrate inadequate skills and knowledge coupled with inappropriate practices in these areas, and similar gaps at the organizational level are also widely documented. National and international regulatory frameworks governing information privacy, information security, and copyright/intellectual property are complex and in constant flux, placing additional burden on organizations to keep abreast of relevant regulatory and legal responsibilities. Governance and risk management related to information privacy, security, and ownership are critical to many job categories, including the emerging areas of information and knowledge management. There is an increasing need for skilled and knowledgeable individuals to fill organizational roles related to information management, with particular growth in these areas within the past 10 years. Our analysis of current job postings in Ontario supports the demand for skills and knowledge in these areas. Key Competencies We have developed a set of key competencies across a range of areas that responds to these needs by providing a blueprint for the training of information managers prepared for leadership and strategic positions. These competencies are identified in the full report. Competency areas include: conceptual foundations risk assessment tools and techniques for threat responses communications contract negotiation and compliance evaluation and assessment human resources management organizational knowledge management planning; policy awareness and compliance policy development project managemen

    Technology Made Legible: A Cultural Study of Software as a Form of Writing in the Theories and Practices of Software Engineering

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    My dissertation proposes an analytical framework for the cultural understanding of the group of technologies commonly referred to as 'new' or 'digital'. I aim at dispelling what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the 'deep opacity' that still surrounds new technologies, and that constitutes one of the main obstacles in their conceptualization today. I argue that such a critical intervention is essential if we are to take new technologies seriously, and if we are to engage with them on both the cultural and the political level. I understand new technologies as technologies based on software. I therefore suggest that a complex understanding of technologies, and of their role in contemporary culture and society, requires, as a preliminary step, an investigation of how software works. This involves going beyond studying the intertwined processes of its production, reception and consumption - processes that typically constitute the focus of media and cultural studies. Instead, I propose a way of accessing the ever present but allegedly invisible codes and languages that constitute software. I thus reformulate the problem of understanding software-based technologies as a problem of making software legible. I build my analysis on the concept of software advanced by Software Engineering, a technical discipline born in the late 1960s that defines software development as an advanced writing technique and software as a text. This conception of software enables me to analyse it through a number of reading strategies. I draw on the philosophical framework of deconstruction as formulated by Jacques Derrida in order to identify the conceptual structures underlying software and hence 'demystify' the opacity of new technologies. Ultimately, I argue that a deconstructive reading of software enables us to recognize the constitutive, if unacknowledged, role of technology in the formation of both the human and academic knowledge. This reading leads to a self-reflexive interrogation of the media and cultural studies' approach to technology and enhances our capacity to engage with new technologies without separating our cultural understanding from our political practices

    DEVELOPMENT OF A QUALITY MANAGEMENT ASSESSMENT TOOL TO EVALUATE SOFTWARE USING SOFTWARE QUALITY MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES

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    Organizations are constantly in search of competitive advantages in today’s complex global marketplace through improvement of quality, better affordability, and quicker delivery of products and services. This is significantly true for software as a product and service. With other things being equal, the quality of software will impact consumers, organizations, and nations. The quality and efficiency of the process utilized to create and deploy software can result in cost and schedule overruns, cancelled projects, loss of revenue, loss of market share, and loss of consumer confidence. Hence, it behooves us to constantly explore quality management strategies to deliver high quality software quickly at an affordable price. This research identifies software quality management best practices derived from scholarly literature using bibliometric techniques in conjunction with literature review, synthesizes these best practices into an assessment tool for industrial practitioners, refines the assessment tool based on academic expert review, further refines the assessment tool based on a pilot test with industry experts, and undertakes industry expert validation. Key elements of this software quality assessment tool include issues dealing with people, organizational environment, process, and technology best practices. Additionally, weights were assigned to issues of people, organizational environment, process, and technology best practices based on their relative importance, to calculate an overall weighted score for organizations to evaluate where they stand with respect to their peers in pursuing the business of producing quality software. This research study indicates that people best practices carry 40% of overall weight, organizational best v practices carry 30% of overall weight, process best practices carry 15% of overall weight, and technology best practices carry 15% of overall weight. The assessment tool that is developed will be valuable to organizations that seek to take advantage of rapid innovations in pursuing higher software quality. These organizations can use the assessment tool for implementing best practices based on the latest cutting edge management strategies that can lead to improved software quality and other competitive advantages in the global marketplace. This research contributed to the current academic literature in software quality by presenting a quality assessment tool based on software quality management best practices, contributed to the body of knowledge on software quality management, and expanded the knowledgebase on quality management practices. This research also contributed to current professional practice by incorporating software quality management best practices into a quality management assessment tool to evaluate software

    In the Face of Ethics

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    Western Oregon University 2019-2020 Course Catalog

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    https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/coursecatalogs/1022/thumbnail.jp

    Collaborative news networks : distributed editing, collective action, and the construction of online news on Slashdot.org

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    Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2002.Includes bibliographical references.The growth and spread of the Internet have generated new possibilities for public participation with news content, forcing news scholars and makers alike to confront a number of questions about what the nature, role and function of news, journalists, and audiences are in a networked society. If news gathering, reporting, and circulation had existed for generations as a largely centralized process, left to the minds and hands of reporters organized through news rooms across the nation, the environment of the Internet and interactive properties of new media counter such a model, affording users with as much capacity to produce their own news content as they have had to merely consume it. This thesis, then, seeks to contribute to scholarship on online journalism through an ethnographic study of the five-year-old, technology-centered news site Slashdot.org as an emerging model of online news production and distribution I call a collaborative new network. Embodying a pronounced case of the decentralization of editorial control in online news environments, Slashdot's collaborative news network operates through an inscription of users as the primary producers of news content; an expansion of an understanding of the site of news to include not just journalistic reports and articles, but the discussion by users around them; debate around issues of editorial authority; a valuation of subjectivity and transparency as properties of news; and the generation of user-driven forms of collective action whose effects extend beyond the environment of Slashdot's network. This study will focus, then, on an examination of the social practices and processes surrounding the production, consumption and distribution of news on Slashdot, and the meanings that are generated through such activities. Through such an analysis, I hope to explore how practices enacted on Slashdot (re)construct users' relationship to news, editors, and one another - and similarly investigate how it (re)constructs editors relationship to news, readers, and one another.by Anita J. Chan.S.M

    Rerolling Boardgames: Essays on Themes, Systems, Experiences and Ideologies (Studies in Gaming)

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    Despite the advent and explosion of videogames, boardgames--from fast-paced party games to intensely strategic titles--have in recent years become more numerous and more diverse in terms of genre, ethos and content. The growth of gaming events and conventions such as Essen Spiel, Gen Con and the UK Games EXPO, as well as crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter, has diversified the evolution of game development, which is increasingly driven by fans, and boardgames provide an important glue to geek culture. In academia, boardgames are used in a practical sense to teach elements of design and game mechanics. Game studies is also recognizing the importance of expanding its focus beyond the digital. As yet, however, no collected work has explored the many different approaches emerging around the critical challenges that boardgaming represents. In this collection, game theorists analyze boardgame play and player behavior, and explore the complex interactions between the sociality, conflict, competition and cooperation that boardgames foster. Game designers discuss the opportunities boardgame system designs offer for narrative and social play. Cultural theorists discuss boardgames' complex history as both beautiful physical artifacts and special places within cultural experiences of play

    Bowdoin Orient v.125, no.1-25 (1994-1995)

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    https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1990s/1006/thumbnail.jp
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