York\u27s Roots and wings (Book Review)

A review of York, S. (2016). Roots and wings. St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press. 334 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978160554455

Digital resilience in higher education

Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution’s ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada’s Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing

Multi-Modal Delivery Approaches in Teaching Postgraduate Legal Research Courses

This paper commences with a consideration of the rationales for teaching legal research to postgraduate students. It discusses the importance of legal research to the dynamic and ever-changing discipline of law and the added significance of this area to postgraduate study. The paper then discusses the learning needs of postgraduate students and the changing educational environment that they face, and how new directions in education and developments in student numbers and background, funding and technology affect this environment. It examines the contextual needs of postgraduate students and how these affect their expectations of postgraduate study. The paper concludes with an analysis of the results of a survey of students undertaking the subject Advanced Legal Research as to various modes of delivery and considers some recommendations arising from the responses

Current Research: Analysis of Ceramic Vessel Residues from the Washington Square Mound Site (41NA49) for Evidence of Peyote use by the Caddo in the 13th-15th centuries A.D.

In 2012, Perttula requested permission from to the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma\u27s Repatriation Committee to analyze small samples (ca. 1-2 grams of ceramic paste, or sherds ca. 1-2 square centimeters in size) from the paste of five vessels from Features 31 and 95 at the Washington Square Mound site (41NA49) (Perttula et al. 2010) in East Texas to identify residue traces of the Caddo\u27s use of peyote in the 13th-15th centuries A.D. The Caddo Nation of Oklahoma gave their permission to conduct these ceramic vessel residue studies

Dynamic Discovery of Composable Type Adapters for Practical Web Services Workflow

As the Web Services and Grid community adopt Semantic Web technology, we observe a shift towards higher-level workflow composition and service discovery practices. While this provides excellent functionality to non-expert users, more sophisticated middleware is required to hide the details of service integration. By investigating a common Bioinformatics use case, we observe the need for Type Adaptor components to be inserted into Workflows to harmonise syntactically incompatible interfaces. In this paper, we propose a generic Type Adaptor description approach that can be used in conjunction with existing service registries to facilitate automatic syntactic mediation. We demonstrate our implementation before evaluating both the translation approach we employ, and the relative cost of using a registry for Type Adaptor discovery

Using Semantic Web Technology to Automate Data Integration in Grid and Web Service Architectures

While the Grid and Web Services have helped us support heterogeneous resource access through the use of service oriented architectures, they have not addressed the issue of heterogeneous data representation. Since service providers often describe their service interfaces using different data models than those assumed by the client, it is common for additional processing to be required to compensate for the mismatch in data formats. By utilising technology from the Semantic Web, we are able to augment existing Web Service systems with middleware to automatically perform data harmonisation when a syntactic mismatch occurs. To achieve this, we have developed a mapping language which can be used to annotate XML data structures with OWL concepts and properties, a Mapping Language Engine to implement this language, and a Dynamic Web Service Invocation component to execute Web Services