The role of social networks in students’ learning experiences

The aim of this research is to investigate the role of social networks in computer science education. The Internet shows great potential for enhancing collaboration between people and the role of social software has become increasingly relevant in recent years. This research focuses on analyzing the role that social networks play in students’ learning experiences. The construction of students’ social networks, the evolution of these networks, and their effects on the students’ learning experience in a university environment are examined

Co-creation of Value in IT Service Processes Using Semantic MediaWiki

Abstract: Enterprises are substituting their own IT-Systems by services provided by external providers. This provisioning of services may be done in an industrialized way, separating the service provider from the consumer. However, using industrialized services diminishes the capability to differentiate from competitors. To counter this, collaborative service processes based on the co-creation of value between service providers and prosumers are of huge importance. The approach presented shows how the co-creation of value in IT-service processes can profit from social software, using the example of the Semantic MediaWiki

Developing general cultural awareness in a monocultural English as a foreign language context in a Mexican university: a wiki-based critical incident approach

© 2013 Association for Language Learning. This article explores what the ‘intercultural turn’ might mean in the case of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). The discussion is contextualised in what has been termed the ‘expanding circle’ of English and focuses on an English as a foreign language (EFL) class in a Mexican university, a context where the full implications of a shift from EFL to English as a lingua franca (ELF) have yet to be addressed. We consider how the intercultural turn might be understood in this Mexican context and then present the rationale for, and design of, a technology-based (wiki) extra-curricular pilot project which adopted less of an EFL/cultural and more of an ELF/intercultural approach. We evaluate the evidence from this small-scale project in terms of students\u27 developing general cultural awareness and suggest that this type of project, an example of the intercultural turn, might be more widely applicable in similar ‘expanding circle’ EFL contexts

Meaningful Metrics for Evaluating Eventual Consistency

Abstract. Optimistic replication is a fundamental technique for supporting collaborative work practices in mobile environments. However, eventual consistency, in contrast to immediate strong consistency in pessimistic replication, is much harder to evaluate. This paper analyzes different metrics for measuring the effectiveness of eventually consistent systems. Using results from a simulated environment of relevant optimistic replication protocols, we show that each metric hides previously undocumented side effects. These add considerable imprecision to any evaluation that exclusively relies on a single metric. Hence, we advocate a combined methodology comprising three complementary metrics: commit ratio, average agreement delay and average commit delay.

Social navigation

In this chapter we present one of the pioneer approaches in supporting users in navigating the complex information spaces, social navigation support. Social navigation support is inspired by natural tendencies of individuals to follow traces of each other in exploring the world, especially when dealing with uncertainties. In this chapter, we cover details on various approaches in implementing social navigation support in the information space as we also connect the concept to supporting theories. The first part of this chapter reviews related theories and introduces the design space of social navigation support through a series of example applications. The second part of the chapter discusses the common challenges in design and implementation of social navigation support, demonstrates how these challenges have been addressed, and reviews more recent direction of social navigation support. Furthermore, as social navigation support has been an inspirational approach to various other social information access approaches we discuss how social navigation support can be integrated with those approaches. We conclude with a review of evaluation methods for social navigation support and remarks about its current state

Adding User-Editing to a Catalogue of Cartoon Drawings

This paper describes an ongoing project to enable user-editing on an existing online database of about 120,000 British newspaper cartoons at the University of Kent. It describes the cartoon catalogue itself and then describes how the online search website has been extended to allow users to edit catalogue records in a way that should be both safe and economical. Finally, it discusses the next stage of the project, which is to experiment with ways to encourage users to become contributors

Collaborative ocean resource interoperability - multi-use of ocean data on the semantic web

Earth Observations (EO) collect various characteristics of the objective environment using sensors which often have different measuring, spatial and temporal coverage. Making individual observational data interoperable becomes equally important when viewed in the context of its expensive and time-consuming EO operations. Interoperability will improve reusability of existing observations in both the broader context, and with other observations. As a demonstration of the potential offered by semantic web technology, we have used the National Oceanography Centre Southampton’s Ferrybox project (where suites of environmental sensors installed on commercial ships collect near real time data) to set up an ontology based reference model of a Collaborative Ocean, where relevant oceanographic resources, such as sensors and observations, can be semantically annotated by their stakeholders to produce RDF format metadata to facilitate data/resource interoperability in a distributed environment. We have also demonstrated an infrastructure where common semantic management activities are supported, including ontology management, semantic annotation, storage, and reuse (navigating, inference and query). Once the method and infrastructure are adopted by other related oceanographic projects to describe their resources and move their metadata onto the semantic web, it would be possible to see better interoperability within the Collaborative Ocean initiative to facilitate multiuse of ocean data, as well as making more EO data available on the semantic web