Collaborative Improvement – Interplay but not a Game

Collaboration literally means working together. Collaborative improvement is an extension of continuous improvement and can be defined as a purposeful inter‐company interactive process that focuses on continuous incremental innovation aimed at enhancing the collaboration’s overall performance. Developing collaborative improvement is a protracted and difficult process. Previous research has identified a number of factors affecting that process and suggested that it is not so much the individual factors, but rather their interplay that determines the successful development of collaborative improvement. This article reports research aimed at developing a deeper understanding of that interplay. Ten relationships between ten factors are presented and discussed. It appears that vision, approach, trust and commercial reality are the strongest factors. These factors are, however, influenced by, or affect the other factors, notably national culture, partner characteristics and competences, the use of power, individual behaviour and commitment. The way this interplay develops varies from case to case and has great influence on the development of collaborative improvement.     

Comparing Emergency Response Infrastructure to Other Critical Infrastructures in the California Bay‐Delta of the United States: A Research Note on Inter‐Infrastructural Differences in Reliability Management

This research note summarizes observed similarities, differences, and mixed similarities and differences between emergency responders in California's emergency response infrastructure and control room operators in some other critical infrastructures there. The dissimilarities are all the more striking given the many similarities. The chief difference, we speculate, lies in the conditions on and skills of control room operators to ensure the continuous and safe provision of the critical service in question, even during (especially during) turbulent times – what we have called ‘high reliability management’. This management differs considerably from the active crisis management of many emergency responders, although both groups seek to manage ‘reliably’.     

中小型企业软件过程改善方法研究

软件过程改善是各个企业建立适合自身软件生产线和促进软件工业化生产的必由之路。软件过程理论和技术的研究与应用始终存在一定的差距,在国内外成功应用并受益于这些软件经验与技术的企业多数是国防企业和大型的商业企业,中小型企业具有不同于大型企业的企业特征,这些特征有些有利于软件工程技术的应用与实施,而有些又限制了软件工程技术的应用与实施。软件过程改善的关键是量体裁衣,以理论和模型为指导,充分结合企业特征,进行适合企业特色的软件过程改善。该文在分析中小型软件企业的企业文化、企业规模、软件生产的创新能力、动态变化能力、技术革新能力等特征的基础上,提出在对中小型软件企业进行过程改善时应突出几个方面,一是过程改善应充分利用开发组的丰富创造能力为解决过程改善问题提出方案,在确立过程改善目标时应尽可能多地涉及各种层次的项目组人员,同时采取划分过程改善任务单元的方法,不破坏软件开发过程的连续性;二是过程改善得到的结果应不限制团体的创造性,对过程改善结果的应用应针对具体项目相关的问题,而非建立一般性的软件过程规范。三是过程改善是应着重企业关心的目标,不一定完全依从CMM。在进行过程改善时,应实施“项目分析”关键子域,“项目分析”是以过程度量为核心的,分析?     

Socially shared regulation of learning in CSCL: understanding and prompting individual- and group-level shared regulatory activities

The field of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is progressing instrumentally and theoretically. Nevertheless, few studies examine the effectiveness and efficiency of CSCL with respect to cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social issues, despite the fact that the role of regulatory processes is critical for the quality of students’ engagement in collaborative learning settings. We review the four earlier lines in developing support in CSCL and show how there has been a lack of work to support individuals in groups to engage in, sustain, and productively regulate their own and the group’s collaborative processes. Our aim is to discuss how our conceptual work in socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) contributes to effective and efficient CSCL, what tools are presently available, and what the implications of research on these tools are for future tool development.     

Ontology Evolution: Not the Same as Schema Evolution

As ontology development becomes a more ubiquitous and collaborative process, ontology versioning and evolution becomes an important area of ontology research. The many similarities between database-schema evolution and ontology evolution will allow us to build on the extensive research in schema evolution. However, there are also important differences between database schemas and ontologies. The differences stem from different usage paradigms, the presence of explicit semantics and different knowledge models. A lot of problems that existed only in theory in database research come to the forefront as practical problems in ontology evolution. These differences have important implications for the development of ontology-evolution frameworks: The traditional distinction between versioning and evolution is not applicable to ontologies. There are several dimensions along which compatibility between versions must be considered. The set of change operations for ontologies is different. We must develop automatic techniques for finding similarities and differences between versions.     

Learning technologies: Affective and social issues in computer-supported collaborative learning

This paper is concerned with affective issues in learning technologies in a collaborative context. Traditionally in learning there has been a division between cognition and affect: where cognition is concerned with skills and processes such as thinking and problem-solving and affect with emotional areas such as motivation, attitudes, feelings. Affective issues have been viewed as somewhat problematic in studying learning, so although it is well known that learner attitude, motivation, and emotional state are very important, they have often been excluded from the frame of research, or studied separately from cognitive learning. This position is gradually changing and this paper considers what previous research has been conducted in these areas. It discusses the role of affective factors in three main areas of collaboration: in settings where learners are co-located, in on-line communities and to support and develop socio-emotional skills. It considers relevant developments in these areas, what the outcomes have been and suggests important directions for future research.     

Multiphase method for analysing online discussions

Several studies have analysed and assessed online performance and discourse using quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative measures have typically included the analysis of participation rates and learning outcomes in terms of grades. Qualitative measures of postings, discussions and context features aim to give insights into the nature of learning activities taking place in the online learning environment. No matter what the particular method, one of the critical aspects in these analyses is the coherence between theory and methodology as well as the explicit focus on the unit(s) of analysis. Technology‐enhanced learning (TEL) settings typically involve processes (e.g. cognitive or social) at different levels, and these processes are often intertwined with each other in a way that is not reducible to any one level only. In this article, a short review on the challenges of research‐based evaluation of TEL, and computer‐supported collaborative learning in particular, is made. With these challenges in the background, the integration of different levels of analysis is demonstrated with the aid of the method developed for analysing the level and reciprocity of discussions in a Web‐based learning setting.     

The Antecedents of Individual Innovative Behaviour in Temporary Group Innovation

This study examines the antecedents of individual innovative behaviour in short‐term innovation camp conditions. Innovation is increasingly a joint activity conducted in various kinds of temporary settings that collect widely diverse people together for a brief time to work on a particular problem. As innovativeness of interplaying individuals is key for the success of collaborative innovation, it is important to study what factors enhance individual innovative behaviour in temporary settings. Data from 103 innovation camp participants were the basis of PLS‐SEM analysis. Results show that individual creative self‐efficacy, perceived task orientation and experimentation have significant effects on individual innovative behaviour. In contrast, participative safety, support for innovation, and vision are not associated with individual innovativeness. These findings suggest that the antecedents of individual innovativeness in temporary settings differ from those identified in conventional groups, pointing to a new field for future research.     

Sliding mode control for robust and smooth reference tracking in robot visual servoing

An approach based on sliding mode is proposed in this work for reference tracking in robot visual servoing. In particular, 2 sliding mode controls are obtained depending on whether joint accelerations or joint jerks are considered as the discontinuous control action. Both sliding mode controls are extensively compared in a 3D‐simulated environment with their equivalent well‐known continuous controls, which can be found in the literature, to highlight their similarities and differences. The main advantages of the proposed method are smoothness, robustness, and low computational cost. The applicability and robustness of the proposed approach are substantiated by experimental results using a conventional 6R industrial manipulator (KUKA KR 6 R900 sixx [AGILUS]) for positioning and tracking tasks.     

Efficient and scalable continuous skyline monitoring in two-tier streaming settings

Two-tier streaming settings are a typical dynamic environment where continuous skylines represent an important semantic indicator for multiple attributes. To monitor skylines over the dynamic data in such settings, one needs to continuously update the skyline query results in order to reflect the new data values. This paper tackles the problem of continuous skyline monitoring on a central query server over dynamic data from multiple data sites. Simply sending the updates of tuple values to the server is cost-prohibitive. Therefore, we propose an approach that allows the central server to collaborate with the data sites to monitor the possible skyline changes. By doing so, the processing load is distributed over all the data sites instead of only on the central server. Furthermore, this collaborative approach minimizes the bandwidth consumption between the server and the data sites, which is often critical in a widely distributed environment such as a wide-area sensor network. We give theoretical upper bounds for the computation costs and communication costs of the proposed collaborative approach. We also conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data sets. The experimental results demonstrate that our collaborative approach is efficient, scalable and well-balanced in terms of communication costs and computation costs.     

Teaching mathematics: What teachers say,believe, and do

Abstract:

Developing an understanding of the influences that shape teacher practice is a complex endeavour. This review explores some of this complexity in relation to teachers’ theories, knowledge, and beliefs about the teaching of mathematics. Specifically, this review focuses on the relationships that exist between teachers’ espoused theories and their theories‐in‐use, the two components of teachers’ theories of action identified by Argyris and Schön (1974). Teachers’ espoused theories are composed of the knowledge and beliefs that teachers articulate when they describe their practices, whereas their theories‐in‐use are the assumptions about themselves, others, and the connections among action, consequence, and situation that govern their classroom practices. It is suggested that methods used to facilitate teacher development and reform initiatives in schools might be improved with the development of a clearer understanding of the relationships between what teachers say, what they believe, what they intend, and what they do. This review helps to further this understanding for the teaching of mathematics.     

A Comparison of Bayesian and Belief Function Reasoning

The goal of this paper is to compare the similarities and differences between Bayesian and belief function reasoning. Our main conclusion is that although there are obvious differences in semantics, representations, and the rules for combining and marginalizing representations, there are many similarities. We claim that the two calculi have roughly the same expressive power. Each calculus has its own semantics that allow us to construct models suited for these semantics. Once we have a model in either calculus, one can transform it to the other by means of a suitable transformation.     

Enabling Software Process Improvement: An Investigation of the Importance of Organizational Issues

This doctoral study was initiated to explore the relative importance of organizational issues in software process improvement. It is based on a pilot case study, a multiple case study of twelve organizations, and a quantitative survey among 120 software organizations. The findings from the investigations suggest that the key to successful learning is a continuous and simultaneous dialectic interplay between the knowledge that the organization has established over time, and the knowing of the organization's members in their respective contexts. Also, the findings indicate that success depends critically on six organizational factors. Finally, the findings show that there are important differences between small and large software organizations, specifically in the ways in which they react to unstable and changing stimulus situations.     

基于动态k近邻的SlopeOne协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤是个性化推荐系统中的常用技术, 数据稀疏性是影响协同过滤算法预测精度的主要因素。SlopeOne算法利用线性回归模型解决数据稀疏性问题。基于用户相似度的k近邻方法可以优化参与预测的用户评分数据的质量。在SlopeOne算法的基础上, 提出了一种动态k近邻和SlopeOne相结合的算法。首先根据用户之间相似度的具体情况动态地为每个用户选择不同数目的近邻用户, 然后利用近邻用户的评分数据生成项目之间的平均偏差, 最后利用线性回归模型进行预测。在MovieLens数据集上的实验结果表明, 改进算法在预测精度上比原SlopeOne算法有所提高, 能适应数据稀疏度更低的推荐系统, 并且与其他协同过滤算法相比, 推荐精度也具有明显优势。     

Hermeneutics,information and representation

By drawing from semiology, epistemology and philosophical hermeneutics, we discuss the way that computer systems, particularly systems used in collaborative work, represent information, situation and activity. In other words, we focus on approaches to representation in design for computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). We point out similarities between discourse in hermeneutics and in the anthropology and sociology that predominates in CSCW, and propose that a hermeneutic perspective offers a unifying view on the social science and computer science within CSCW. We discuss formalisation, adaptation and objectivity in our theories, methodologies and implementations, and offer collaborative filtering and its extension, the path model, as examples of practical approaches to representation, which show, support and adapt with activity in a hermeneutic style.     

Design patterns and language design

Despite many similarities, there are important differences between design patterns and programming language mechanisms. Nevertheless, we can classify patterns in terms of how far they are from becoming actual language features. Treating patterns as mechanisms that are candidates for being language features, rather than treating them as what they are meant to be, can help demystify them. The authors discuss abstraction, design patterns and idioms     

Exploring practices in collaborative innovation: Unpacking dynamics,relations, and enactment in in‐between spaces

In the field of innovation management, the study of collaborative innovation has focused primarily on the type of networks to support innovation, the modularity of the product's architecture required to engage actors in collaboration, the strategies for patenting and knowledge appropriation, and the public policies likely to stimulate collaborative innovation. But given that many efforts to collaborate collapse and fail to generate the desired innovative value, previous research needs to be complemented with perspectives on what individuals and collectives actually do when creating collaborative innovation as they engage in “in‐between spaces”, spaces between actors created by and simultaneously creating social interaction, to understand the practices that both form and constitute the collaboration. Through such studies, new knowledge can be created building on detailed insights about what ensues as different actors engage in interaction to innovate together and contribute to identifying levers to build collaborative spaces that indeed foster innovation. With this special section, we wish to encourage innovation management scholars to rethink their approach to collaborative innovation research by complementing macro‐level insights with an exploration of the micro‐foundations of collaborative innovation to gain a more nuanced understanding of collaborative dynamics, relations and enactment.     

Exploring similarities and differences in teamwork across diverse healthcare contexts using communication analysis

Teamwork is prevalent in many work contexts. This study explored the similarities and differences in teamwork processes across different healthcare work contexts with the aim of assessing knowledge transfer feasibility. The research approach was to aggregate team communication analyses from four healthcare contexts to uncover teamwork similarities and differences. The four healthcare contexts included two handoffs and two surgery contexts. The communication analysis segmented communication into meaningful sequences. It categorized utterances into content categories and verbal behaviors. There were a few similar content categories across the four contexts. A clear information structure emerged in the two handoff contexts. In addition, there were more dialogues and requests in the surgeries compared to more reports in the handoffs. The content similarities suggest that some knowledge is transferable among the contexts. However, the differences in communication patterns reflect fundamental differences between handoff and surgery contexts in some teamwork processes. This research demonstrated that using communication analysis can uncover similarities and differences in team cognition and teamwork processes across work contexts. This in turn can help determine what knowledge and methods pertaining to team training, procedures, and technology are transferable across the contexts.     

Contextual perspective in analysing collaborative knowledge construction of two small groups in web-based discussion

This paper presents a methodology designed to explore the role of context in collaborative knowledge construction activity in asynchronous web-based discussion. The discussions of two student groups participating in a web-based teacher education course were compared. The comparison aimed to highlight the differences and similarities between the groups’ knowledge construction activity through studying the thematic structure, communicative functions and contextual resources used in their discussions. The results indicated that the different backgrounds of the two student groups influenced the way context was created and interpreted, and how meanings were negotiated. The differences and similarities between the groups’ activity illuminated the situated and mediated nature of learning. The possibilities of the methodology used in this study for evaluating collaborative knowledge construction in context are also discussed.