Empowerment of women through an innovative e-mentoring community platform: implications and lessons learned

This article presents an overview of an e-mentoring community platform that intends to promote women’s empowerment. Women face the so-called glass ceiling effect, the barrier that keeps them from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements. We aim to eliminate the stereotypical profile of women as excluded from economic, political, and professional life and promote women’s empowerment, equality, and social coherence. To this aim, we aspire to develop Womenpower, an innovative e-mentoring community platform that intends to link women mentors and mentees in the areas of academia, business, and healthcare. Given the nature of this endeavor, there is a need to approach the development of the e-mentoring platform as a horizontal process and democratize the design, allowing for different perspectives of stakeholders to be heard and determine the design decisions. This article delineates the approach adopted for democratizing the design process and maximizing intended users’ involvement in the development process. Finally, we conclude with implications for researchers and practitioners in Community Informatics and recommendations for promoting the participation of women in the fields of academia, business, and healthcare

Empowerment of women through an innovative e-mentoring community platform: implications and lessons learned

This article presents an overview of an e-mentoring community platform that intends to promote women’s empowerment. Women face the so-called glass ceiling effect, the barrier that keeps them from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements. We aim to eliminate the stereotypical profile of women as excluded from economic, political, and professional life and promote women’s empowerment, equality, and social coherence. To this aim, we aspire to develop Womenpower, an innovative e-mentoring community platform that intends to link women mentors and mentees in the areas of academia, business, and healthcare. Given the nature of this endeavor, there is a need to approach the development of the e-mentoring platform as a horizontal process and democratize the design, allowing for different perspectives of stakeholders to be heard and determine the design decisions. This article delineates the approach adopted for democratizing the design process and maximizing intended users’ involvement in the development process. Finally, we conclude with implications for researchers and practitioners in Community Informatics and recommendations for promoting the participation of women in the fields of academia, business, and healthcare

A model for enhancing creativity, collaboration and pre-professional identities in technology-supported cross-organizational communities of practice

This research proposes that technology-supported cross-organizational (university-industry) Communities of Practice (CoPs), which are integrated into the Design Studies curriculum in Higher Education, can foster robust university-industry collaborations. These can help bridge the reported gap between the actual versus the expected soft skills and personae of young graduates transitioning to the creative industries today. CoPs are groups of people who share a common interest in an area of ‘endeavor’ and connect to co-create competence in that area through their practice. This paper makes two overarching research contributions. First, it informs about the design, enactment, and evaluation of a student CoP in an undergraduate Design course which was expanded to include members from the industry as clients, alumni mentors, and expert evaluators. Drawing from rich empirical data, the paper explains the designed and emergent learning phenomena of CoP participation and its effects on the students’ creative and socio-epistemic outcomes, as well as their pre-professional identities. Second, it presents a governance model with three sets of actionable guidelines, namely the Set (technology), the Social (collaborative), and the Epistemic (learning) components. The entire body of work validates the critical interlocking of these components to form a robust social learning model that appropriates the complex practices of cross-organizational CoPs in Higher Education Design studies

The Assessment Scale for Creative Collaboration (ASCC) Validation and Reliability Study

Creativity, a primary academic objective, is crucial in higher education, as economic, informational, societal and environmental advancements rely on people’s ability to innovate. Creativity is widely investigated in its individualistic form, yet there is a notable dearth in work that studies its collective dimension, from a learning perspective. This study focuses on validating the psychometric properties of an existing instrument (ASCC), by measuring creative collaboration in blended learning settings. Two hundred and thirty-six under and post-graduate students self-evaluated their creative collaboration experiences, using the ASCC instrument. The findings of exploratory factor analysis denote a three-factor (21-item) structure, measuring ‘Synergistic Social Collaboration’, ‘Distributed Creativity’, and ‘Time Regulation and Achievement’, with good internal consistency. An instrument with valid psychometric properties for the assessment of creative collaboration is much-needed in the growing research and practitioners’ community. This is critical in the fields of Design, HCI, and Engineering, which rely extensively on the creative collaboration (online and offline) of teams to develop innovative products that are suitable for real-world purposes

Spomenik Kvinta Valerija iz Hardomilja kod Ljubuškoga

U radu je opisan rimski nadgrobni spomenik iz Hardomilja kod Ljubuškoga. Veteran Kvinto Valerije iz Ikonija bio je pripadnik Vii. legije, koja je na području Ljubuškoga ostavila 11 spomenika. Imena s natpisa: Q. Valerius Q. f., Q. Portorius i Q. Valerius Anteros, vjerojatno su maloazijski domoroci koji nose romanizirana imena. I ostali pripadnici vii. legije, koji se imali imanja na području Ljubuškoga, bili su unovačeni u M. Aziji: Milijada, Pesinunt, Konana i Sevastopolj. Sedma legija vjerojatno je došla 6. – 9. po. Kr. u provinciju Dalmaciju, a 56. – 57. otišla je u Meziju. Spomenik Kvinta Valerija spada u monumentalne vojničke stele, slične onima u Tiluriju, Saloni i Aseriji, koje su u gornjem dijelu imale zabat i friz s vojničkim oru‘jem, u sredini natpis u edikuli, a u donjem dijelu prikaz vrata

A cross-organizational ecology for virtual communities of practice in higher education

This work investigates Communities of Practice (CoPs) that support social learning in higher education. While most CoP research has taken place in single-stream contexts (e.g. in a university), this study reports on the ecology of a cross-organizational community (university and industry stakeholders) in the context of the formal curriculum. The work examines the role of technology configurations in supporting CoPs in Design and related studies. It also reports on the type and level of technology adoption, focusing on the learner perspective. This study’s CoP is made up of 21 third-year university students and ten external stakeholders (mentors, clients and industrial experts). The study concludes with a set of guidelines for the design and evaluation of similar CoP technology configurations. Key guidelines suggest a) supporting enhanced awareness of identity, space and time, b) enabling roles and permissions on-demand according to the requirements of the activities carried out in shared spaces and c) facilitating fluid interoperability between the domain-specific and mainstream/generic productivity tools used by the community. The outcomes of this work can assist instructors, researchers and practitioners in the design of similar technology configurations for CoPs in the formal curricula of their respective Design or relevant fields

Design students meet industry players: Feedback and creativity in communities of practice

This work investigates the social collaboration and creative outcomes of teams of learners in Higher Education (HE) Design studies, in the context of cross-organizational (university/industry) Communities of Practice (CoP). These refer to groups of people who share a common interest in a field and connect to co-create knowledge. The study focuses on the feedback delivered by the industrial members of the CoP through collaboration technologies, to complement academic feedback. Findings have shown a twofold effect on learners. On the one hand, critical feedback on the deliverables increased both the time-pressure and the complexity of the work, affecting the teams’ perception of their performances. On the other hand, feedback appeared to inspire better creative outcomes while improving the teams’ metacognitive activity and learning regulation. Furthermore, it enabled learners to pragmatically realize their status within the broader geography of professional practice and reconfigure their achievement goals accordingly. These findings confirm the contribution of cross-organizational CoPs in HE and are discussed with reference to the CoP theory and modes of belonging,as fundamental for learning and identity evolution

Ideas mapping, surface computing and user experience

This paper reports work regarding the design, development and evaluation of a surface computing application to support collaborative decision making.. The domain- independent application, so called Ideas Mapping, builds on the principle of Affinity Diagramming to allow participants to analyze a problem and brainstorm around possible solutions while they actively construct a consensus artifact - - a taxonomy of their ideas. During idea generation, Ideas Mapping replicates physical post-it notes on a multi-touch tabletop. Additional functionality supports student collaboration and interaction around the organization of ideas into thematic categories associated with the problem at hand. We report on the functionality and user experience while interacting with the application which was designed and developed using a user-centered approach. We also report initial findings regarding the affordances of surface computing for collaborative decision making

Increasing interest in social studies: Social perspective taking and self-efficacy in stimulating simulations

This study examined the potential of simulations to bolster interest in middle school social studies classrooms. Using a pre-post design, we examined 305 middle school students (49% female) who participated in the web-based GlobalEd simulation. Unlike the motivation declines middle school students usually experience, participants in this simulation became more interested in social studies. We investigated four hypotheses as to why these increases may have occurred. We found no support for the possibility that, (a) students’ interest in a particular issue area or (b) their increased valuing of the subject matter, were related to their increased interest. However, results suggested that, (c) the challenging nature of the activity may have bolstered their interest in social studies and (d) students’ increased propensity to engage in social perspective taking. The discussion explores future research directions and whether implications for classroom teachers are warranted given the correlational nature of the research

Challenging the alignment of learning design tools with HE lecturers’ learning design practice

Extensive research has been carried out for the development of learning design tools; nevertheless, their adoption by HE lecturers remains low. Sharing, guidance, and various forms of representation are the main pillars of learning design tools. However, these features do not seem to be sufficient reasons to convince lecturers to adopt these tools in daily learning design practices in HE. This is attached to the gap between learning design tools and actual learning design practice of university lecturers. Sociomateriality provides an analytical lens for unpacking complex practices for identifying the design space of digital tools for learning design without predetermined boundaries. This paper is a first step in exploring how we can follow sociomaterialty in un-packing complex learning design practices in HE to inform the development of software for learning design. It conducts a survey with one hundred ten university lecturers on their learning design practices. It analyses data through sociomaterial theory and derives a sociomaterial evaluation framework. This is used as an instrument for the analysis of seven available learning design tools. A misalignment between tools and HE lecturers’ learning design practice is revealed. Points of misalignment extend the space for what it means to design digital tools that support-learning design practices in HE, and they could be used to highlight areas for improvement to inform and strengthen further the way we design support tools for learning design