Stakeholder Relationships within Educational Ecosystems – a Literature Review

The ongoing societal and technological changes make it necessary for universities to modify their teaching and learning programs. Regarding the cooperation with stakeholders that have influence on how it could be designed can serve as a basis. With this article we examine the recent contributions in the field of cooperation of higher education (HE) institutions by conducting a structured literature review. A close regard in particular are the interdependences between stakeholders in order to build a basis for future curricula developments. For our conceptualization, we use the quadruple helix model to analyse the educational ecosystems. Therefore in particular the term “educational ecosystem” is taken into account. The results show that evenso that the term is used there is a lack of suitable definitions in this context. So based on the analysis of the recent literature, a definition of educational ecosystem was introduced and the quintuple helix model, which was constructed for the conceptualization of the topic, was extended by further important aspects – knowledge transfer and adaptivity

Reward Shaping in the Ant Colony System: Lessons for the Design of Collective Intelligence Systems

The problem-oriented design of collective intelligence systems (CIS) is in itself an open problem. Previous research draws upon findings from bio-logical swarm intelligence to derive guiding design principles but also high-lights the importance of evaluating the system\u27s state with respect to the given problem. We investigate this evaluation task on the individual and the global level within the framework inspired by reinforcement learning. We map differ-ent modes of evaluation to different schemes of rewarding agents, thereby illus-trating that designer of CIS face the task of reward shaping. We simulate sever-al reward schemes as variations of the well-known ant colony system (ACS). We show that rewards in the ACS, although they consist only of a single value, the metaphorical pheromone concentration, have complex semantics, and coor-dinate the distribution of information and allocation of work within the system. This makes the ACS a valuable source of inspiration for CIS with human agents

Virtual teamwork in the context of technological and cultural transformation

Megatrends affect all individuals and organizations in our society. Mobility and flexibility are examples of megatrends that influence our everyday lives and also intensely alter the ways we work. The deployment of virtual teams meets the new chances emerging with these trends. Employees aspire to work virtually due to benefits, such as flexibility regarding the locations and hours for working. Organizations deploy virtual teams to remain competitive regarding new technological opportunities, employee retention and cost efficiency in an increasingly digital environment. Organizations can guide their change towards virtuality by building on the knowledge of practice as well as scientific insights regarding the deployment of virtual teams. In order to provide a holistic view on the structures and processes affected by such a change and thus provide guidance, a framework for analyzing and planning organizational change is adapted to virtual teamwork and presented in this paper. The framework shows that the deployment of virtual teams affects the whole organization. This comprehensive view on the implementation of virtual teamwork allows an integration of virtual teams and focusses on their performance. The adapted framework furthermore provides links for further in-depth research in this field

Virtual teamwork in the context of technological and cultural transformation

Megatrends affect all individuals and organizations in our society. Mobility and flexibility are examples of megatrends that influence our everyday lives and also intensely alter the ways we work. The deployment of virtual teams meets the new chances emerging with these trends. Employees aspire to work virtually due to benefits, such as flexibility regarding the locations and hours for working. Organizations deploy virtual teams to remain competitive regarding new technological opportunities, employee retention and cost efficiency in an increasingly digital environment. Organizations can guide their change towards virtuality by building on the knowledge of practice as well as scientific insights regarding the deployment of virtual teams. In order to provide a holistic view on the structures and processes affected by such a change and thus provide guidance, a framework for analyzing and planning organizational change is adapted to virtual teamwork and presented in this paper. The framework shows that the deployment of virtual teams affects the whole organization. This comprehensive view on the implementation of virtual teamwork allows an integration of virtual teams and focusses on their performance. The adapted framework furthermore provides links for further in-depth research in this field

Towards a Model for Collective Intelligence, Emergence and Individual Motivation in the Web 2.0

In this paper we sketch out a two-way-path from the general definition of collective intelligence to the specific usage of collective intelligence in ‘corporate web 2.0’ and back again. On the one hand we argue for a better formal underpinning of the connection of micro-level activities and macro-level emergents in the context of collective intelligence. On the other hand we reason that explicit consideration of examples from the web 2.0 in the discussion of collective intelligence will lead to better models of collective intelligence if done systematically. We propose a first step towards a model that could help to understand emergence and individual motivation in collective intelligence systems