Mapping the open education landscape: citation network analysis of historical open and distance education research

The term open education has recently been used to refer to topics such as Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Historically its roots lie in civil approaches to education and open universities, but this research is rarely referenced or acknowledged in current interpretations. In this article the antecedents of the modern open educational movement are examined, as the basis for connecting the various strands of research. Using a citation analysis method the key references are extracted and their relationships mapped. This work reveals eight distinct sub-topics within the broad open education area, with relatively little overlap. The implications for this are discussed and methods of improving inter-topic research are proposed

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Exploration of Big Data in Procurement - Benefits and Challenges

Emergence of Big Data had positive implications in various industries and businesses. Big Data analytics provides the ability to harness massive amount of data for decision making purposes. One of the important use case of Big Data analytics is in supply chain management. Increased visibility, enhanced bargaining position in negotiations, better risk management and informed decision making are examples of benefits gained from Big Data analytics in supply chain. Although there are advances in analytics application throughout supply chain management, sourcing applications are lagging behind other functions of supply chain. The purpose of this study is to analyse use cases of exploiting Big Data for purchasing and supply purposes, in order to help companies having more visibility over the supply market. Data collection in this study was carried out through the use of semi-structured interviews which then were coded and categorized for comparison. The results pointed out that big data aids in identifying new suppliers. Additionally, having transparency over n-tier suppliers for managing risks were important for companies. Most of the companies are using descriptive analytics. However, they expected to have predictive analytics to become aware of market situation and gain better position in negotiations. Furthermore, this research showed that to prevent supply disruptions, the Big Data analytics should send timely warnings to managers. The main expectations from Big Data analytics are gaining transparency, automation of data collection and analysis, prediction, availability of new data sources, more efficient KPIs and better representation of data. The main hurdle in Big Data initiative is unintegrated and non-homogenous internal data

MyEvents: a personal visual analytics approach for mining key events and knowledge discovery in support of personal reminiscence

Reminiscence is an important aspect in our life. It preserves precious memories, allows us to form our own identities and encourages us to accept the past. Our work takes advantage of modern sensor technologies to support reminiscence, enabling self-monitoring of personal activities and individual movement in space and time on a daily basis. This paper presents MyEvents, a web-based personal visual analytics platform designed for non-computing experts, that allows for the collection of long-term location and movement data and the generation of event mementos. Our research is focused on two prominent goals in event reminiscence: 1) selection subjectivity and human involvement in the process of self knowledge discovery and memento creation; and 2) the enhancement of event familiarity by presenting target events and their related information for optimal memory recall and reminiscence. A novel multi-significance event ranking model is proposed to determine significant events in the personal history according to user preferences for event category, frequency and regularity. The evaluation results show that MyEvents effectively fulfils the reminiscence goals and tasks.