Community in Tension (CiT)

The development and availability of Information Communication Technology (ICT) impacts many sectors yet a digital divide is still present amongst citizens in communities. Not only is there a digital divide evident but also many other factors that causes tension in communities. This paper defines a Community in Tension (CiT) as a community where the wellbeing of its citizens is being threatened. This provides an opportunity to use these available ICTs in communities and have it locally appropriated to empower the citizens and stabilise these communities

Demystifying the educational benefits of different gaming genres

As research continues into the use of computer games for educational purposes, educators still appear reluctant to incorporate them into their teaching. One contributing factor to this reluctance is the lack of information regarding the benefits offered by the different games available today. These differences appear to have been largely overlooked by the academic community, resulting in a lack of information being made available to both the academic and education communities alike. Without this information, educators will find it difficult to determine whether a game will suit their teaching needs, and will continue to avoid using them. This paper studies a selection of games from several different genres, assessing each one in its ability to fulfil a set of previously identified requirements for a good educational resource. The results of the investigation showed that there were indeed strong differences between the genres, allowing for some suggestions to be made regarding their use in education, as well as leaving room for some interesting future work

Customising software products in distributed software development a model for allocating customisation requirements across organisational boundaries

Requirements engineering plays a vital role in the software development process. While it is difficult to manage those requirements locally, it is even more difficult to communicate those requirements over organisational boundaries and to convey them to multiple distribution customers. This paper discusses the requirements of multiple distribution customers empirically in the context of customised software products. The main purpose is to understand the challenges of communicating and allocating customisation requirements across distributed organisational boundaries. We conducted an empirical survey with 19 practitioners, which confirmed that communicating customisation requirements in a DSD context is a significant challenge. We therefore propose a model for allocating customisation requirements between a local, customer-based agile team and a distributed development team that uses a traditional development approach. Our conjecture is that the model would reduce the challenge of communicating requirements across organisational boundaries, address customers’ requirements and provide a focus for future empirical studies

Demystifying the Educational Benefits of Different Gaming Genres

As research continues into the use of computer games for educational purposes, educators still appear reluctant to incorporate them into their teaching. One contributing factor to this reluctance is the lack of information regarding the benefits offered by the different games available today. These differences appear to have been largely overlooked by the academic community, resulting in a lack of information being made available to both the academic and education communities alike. Without this information, educators will find it difficult to determine whether a game will suit their teaching needs, and will continue to avoid using them. This paper studies a selection of games from several different genres, assessing each one in its ability to fulfil a set of previously identified requirements for a good educational resource. The results of the investigation showed that there were indeed strong differences between the genres, allowing for some suggestions to be made regarding their use in education, as well as leaving room for some interesting future work

Towards Business Integration as a Service 2.0

Cloud Computing Business Framework (CCBF) is a framework for designing and implementation of Could Computing solutions. This proposal focuses on how CCBF can help to address linkage in Cloud Computing implementations. This leads to the development of Business Integration as a Service 1.0 (BIaS 1.0) allowing different services, roles and functionalities to work together in a linkage-oriented framework where the outcome of one service can be input to another, without the need to translate between domains or languages. BIaS 2.0 aims to allow full automation, enhanced security, advanced risk modelling and improved collaboration between processes in BIaaS 1.0. The benefits from adopting BIaS 1.0 and developing BIaS 2.0 are illustrated using a case study from the University of Southampton and several collaborators including IBM US. BIaS 2.0 can work with mainstream technologies such as scientific workflows, and the proposal and demonstration of BIaaS 2.0 will certainly benefit industry and academia

Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaS) which enables connections between services operating in the Cloud. BIaS integrates different services and business activities to achieve a streamline process. We illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in two case studies at the University of Southampton and Vodafone/Apple. The University of Southampton case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. The Vodafone/Apple case study illustrates statistical analysis and 3D Visualisation of expected revenue and associated risk. These two cases confirm the benefits of BIaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management of University of Southampton and potential and current investors for Vodafone/Apple

Cloud Storage and Bioinformatics in a private cloud deployment: Lessons for Data Intensive research

This paper describes service portability for a private cloud deployment, including a detailed case study about Cloud Storage and bioinformatics services developed as part of the Cloud Computing Adoption Framework (CCAF). Our Cloud Storage design and deployment is based on Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, details of which include functionalities, technical implementation, architecture and user support. Experiments for data services (backup automation, data recovery and data migration) are performed and results confirm backup automation is completed swiftly and is reliable for data-intensive research. The data recovery result confirms that execution time is in proportion to quantity of recovered data, but the failure rate increases in an exponential manner. The data migration result confirms execution time is in proportion to disk volume of migrated data, but again the failure rate increases in an exponential manner. In addition, benefits of CCAF are illustrated using several bioinformatics examples such as tumour modelling, brain imaging, insulin molecules and simulations for medical training. Our Cloud Storage solution described here offers cost reduction, time-saving and user friendliness

A Four Dimensional Model of Formal and Informal Learning

Learning systems focused on collaborative learning are often described in terms of formal and informal learning, however definitions of formal and informal learning vary, which makes it difficult to compare systems that may have been described using different perspectives. In this paper we present a framework for describing formality in e-learning systems, which can account for the most common perspectives: formality focused on Learning Objective, Learning Environment, Learning Activity and/or Learning Tool. Our framework can be used to compare different e-learning systems, and can also describe collaborative systems where different students can take very different roles in the activity, and the degree of formality can vary according to the role