Utilising Research ‘Praxis’ to Enhance Teaching Practice in the Domain of Apprenticeship Education: a Report on a Research Capacity Building Pilot Project Run in the School of Construction Skills, Technological University Dublin, Ireland in 2008.

The Technological University Dublin is one of the largest multi-level higher education providers in Ireland, catering for over 22,000 students annually. Under the 1999 Qualifications (Education and Training) Act, DIT became an awarding body in its own right. Programme provision covers apprenticeships, short continuous professional development courses, taught undergraduate and postgraduate, research MPhil and PhDs. While the Institute’s traditional mission1 was focused on teaching and learning in the field of advanced technical vocational education and training (TVET), over the last decade the importance of developing a research informed culture has become prominent in the strategic policy development of the Institute. Within this new emerging research agenda substantial achievements have been made in specific fields such as; science, engineering, ICT, tourism & food. However the research potential of a large portion of staff who work in the apprenticeship and craft area has been underdeveloped. This paper reviews some contextual information relating to the emerging research agenda as expressed in documents produced by the Institutes of Technology in Ireland and the DIT. It sign-posts significant Irish national strategies and notes some European Union initiatives that have relevance to research policy in this sector of higher education. The research then applies a ‘single case study’ (Yin 1996) to describe a new initiative which seeks to unlock the research potential of staff in the apprenticeship and craft area in DIT. Reporting the findings from a pilot Research Capacity Building project, which was run in DIT in 2008. This was a collaborative project between the Head of Department of Construction Skills and the Project Manager of the Skills Research Initiative, offered to Assistant Lecturers in the Wood Skills area. The paper details the emergence of this project and utilises ‘4th generation evaluation’ methodology (Guba & Lincoln 1986) to access the effectiveness and future potential of this type of initiative. Further by adopting a participatory ‘insider’ research approach the ‘lived experience’ and ‘voice’ of staff who participated in the project is captured through in-depth ethnographic interviews. The research demonstrates a willingness of staff working in the apprenticeship and craft area to engage in, and develop skills, competencies and knowledge relating to research ‘praxis’. However there seems to be a ‘cultural gap’ and mismatch between the high level national and sectoral research policy narratives, and the direct research capacity and capability needs of apprenticeship and craft staff. The research recommends that in order for this staff cohort to gain a footprint in the research domain, there is a need for localized and flexible research capacity building initiatives. This type of proactive research capacity building intervention can facilitate the unlocking, production and dissemination of the rich expert knowledge, experience and skills inherent in the apprenticeship and craft areas

A Normal Form for Spider Diagrams of Order

We develop a reasoning system for an Euler diagram based visual logic, called spider diagrams of order. We de- fine a normal form for spider diagrams of order and provide an algorithm, based on the reasoning system, for producing diagrams in our normal form. Normal forms for visual log- ics have been shown to assist in proving completeness of associated reasoning systems. We wish to use the reasoning system to allow future direct comparison of spider diagrams of order and linear temporal logic

A Semi-Automatic Approach for Eliciting Cloud Security and Privacy Requirements

Cloud computing provides a wide range of services to organisations in a flexible and cost efficient manner. Nevertheless, inherent cloud security issues make organisations hesitant towards the migration of their services to cloud. In parallel, the cloud service-oriented nature requires a specific and more demanding description of the business functional requirements intended for migration. Organisations need to transform their functional requirements based on a specific language, taking into account the respective non-functional requirements of the migrating services. Thus, the need for an approach that will holistically capture organisations\u27 security and privacy requirements and transform them to cloud service requirements is immense. To this end, this paper presents an approach that takes as input abstract security and privacy requirements and produces through a semi-automatic process various alternative implementation options for cloud services. To achieve that a series of model transformations are utilised in order to create a mapping between the organisational and the operational level of the system\u27s analysis

Theories of signs define a novel approach to the analysis of clinical biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress

Biomarkers are widely used not only as prognostic or diagnostic indicators, or as surrogate markers of disease in clinical trials, but also to formulate theories of pathogenesis. We identify two problems in the use of biomarkers in mechanistic studies. The first problem arises in the case of multifactorial diseases, where different combinations of multiple causes result in patient heterogeneity. The second problem arises when a pathogenic mediator is difficult to measure. This is the case of the oxidative stress (OS) theory of disease where the causal components are reactive oxygen species (ROS) that have very short half-lives. In this case, it is usual measure the traces left by the reaction of ROS with biological molecules, rather than the ROS themselves. Borrowing from the philosophical theories of signs, we look at the different facets of biomarkers and discuss their different value and meaning in multifactorial diseases and system medicine, to inform their use in patient stratification in personalized medicine

Visualizing ALC Using Concept Diagrams

This paper addresses the problem of how to visualize axiomsfrom ALC using concept diagrams. We establish that 66.4% of OWL axioms defined for ontologies in the Manchester corpus are formulated over ALC, demonstrating the significance of considering how to visualize this relatively simple description logic. Our solution to the problem involves providing a general translation from ALC axioms into concept diagrams, which is sufficient to establish that all of ALC can be expressed. However, the translation itself is not designed to give optimally readable diagrams, which is particularly challenging to achieve in the general case. As such, we also improve the translations for a selected category of ALC axioms, to illustrate that more effective diagrams can be produced