Landscape for children to play and learn: A conceptual framework

Play and movement are at the very center of young children’s lives. Allowing the children to experience the natural and man-made elements in their living environments would generate cognitive, physical and social skills and developments. Children do not discriminate between playing and learning; to them both activities are attained in same time and space. To them natural forces such as rain and wind, natural features such as vegetation, animals and landform, and man-made elements such as building and road are ubiquitous elements in their living environments. Through play with the elements they learn to perceive their benefits or adversities. They learn through three modes of learning which are cognitive, affective and evaluative from the landscapes, either natural or nurtured. Such involvement would generate physiological and psychological well-being to them. This paper explains a conceptual framework on landscape for children to play and learn in direct mean rather than vicarious way. The landscape is described as an ecological dynamic entity that develops the cognitive, physical and social functioning of the children. In conclusion, it is important to design and develop landscapes for children that stimulate their senses, provide feedbacks and afford functional meanings to their cognitive, social and physical skills

Physicality and Cooperative Design

CSCW researchers have increasingly come to realize that material work setting and its population of artefacts play a crucial part in coordination of distributed or co-located work. This paper uses the notion of physicality as a basis to understand cooperative work. Using examples from an ongoing fieldwork on cooperative design practices, it provides a conceptual understanding of physicality and shows that material settings and co-worker’s working practices play an important role in understanding physicality of cooperative design

SME Development Banks: Conceptual Framework and Empirical Analysis

In this paper we develop a conceptual framework to define small and medium-sized enterprise development banks (SMEDB). This conceptual effort is motivated by the lack of a clear definition of SMEDB. Once a consistent definition of SMEDB is provided, we compare a sample of banks that are SMEDB according to such definition with a sample of commercial banks. We conclude that it is possible to separate SMEDB from commercial banks in a statistically significant manner by taking into consideration a set of relevant financial indicators and we confirm the widespread idea that SMEDB play a crucial public/social role

Class and Categories: What Role Does Socioeconomic Status Play in Children\u27s Lexical and Conceptual Development?

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United States (which has been criticized as a culturally biased education policy that, through highstakes testing and broad-based, uniform curricula, discounts the value of non-standard home language varieties largely spoken by working-class children), there has been renewed interest in the relationship between class, language use, and the assessment of academic achievement in the field of education. Despite the inroads that have been made over the past 40 years by linguists in establishing the contrary, recent educational and language policies have served to reignite the difference vs. deficit debate largely attributed to the early work of both Basil Bernstein and William Labov. Unfortunately, much of the language acquisition work upon which policymakers are relying is founded on outdated information and misrepresentations of the varieties under consideration (African American English in particular); and still the scholastic performance of these children is measured according to class-based rubrics. In order to address the lacuna in the field, in this study, working- and middle-class adults and children aged two through six were shown a series of pictures including ‘normal’ referents (e.g., a cat), and unfamiliar combinations (e.g., a clock with wheels), which they were asked to identify. There were both age and class dependent differences in terms of naming behaviors (e.g., the number of words and morphemes and linguistic construction types). The older and middle-class participants used more sophisticated linguistic strategies (such as descriptive phrases) than the younger participants, and the working-class children showed a greater reluctance to engage in naming strategies beyond one- word overextensions. These disparities suggested that the participants not only employed different strategies by age, but that there was also a classlinked difference in their understanding of the task. When these results are interpreted in light of the deficit/difference debate, it is clear that linguists and educators continue to face the same issue: non-standard varieties are linguistically adequate, but there remains a societal insistence on furthering the primacy of middle-class linguistic structures and language behaviors which serves to maintain a cycle of educational failure for working-class children

Transformation Techniques for OCL Constraints

Constraints play a key role in the definition of conceptual schemas. In the UML, constraints are usually specified by means of invariants written in the OCL. However, due to the high expressiveness of the OCL, the designer has different syntactic alternatives to express each constraint. The techniques presented in this paper assist the designer during the definition of the constraints by means of generating equivalent alternatives for the initially defined ones. Moreover, in the context of the MDA, transformations between these different alternatives are required as part of the PIM-to-PIM, PIM-to-PSM or PIM-to-code transformations of the original conceptual schema

Systemic capabilities: the source of IT business value

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop, and explicate the significance of the need for a systemic conceptual framework for understanding IT business value. Design/methodology/approach – Embracing a systems perspective, this paper examines the interrelationship between IT and other organisational factors at the organisational level and its impact on the business value of IT. As a result, a systemic conceptual framework for understanding IT business value is developed. An example of enhancing IT business value through developing systemic capabilities is then used to test and demonstrate the value of this framework. Findings – The findings suggest that IT business value would be significantly enhanced when systemic capabilities are generated from the synergistic interrelations among IT and other organisational factors at the systems level, while the system’s human agents play a critical role in developing systemic capabilities by purposely configuring and reconfiguring organisational factors. Practical implications – The conceptual framework advanced provides the means to recognise the significance of the need for understanding IT business value systemically and dynamically. It encourages an organisation to focus on developing systemic capabilities by ensuring that IT and other organisational factors work together as a synergistic whole, better managing the role its human agents play in shaping the systems interrelations, and developing and redeveloping systemic capabilities by configuring its subsystems purposely with the changing business environment. Originality/value – This paper reveals the nature of systemic capabilities underpinned by a systems perspective. The resultant systemic conceptual framework for understanding IT business value can help us move away from pairwise resource complementarity to focusing on the whole system and its interrelations while responding to the changing business environment. It is hoped that the framework can help organisations delineate important IT investment considerations and the priorities that they must adopt to create superior IT business value