Implementing mobile learning curricula in a grade level: Empirical study of learning effectiveness at scale

Developing and then scaling up an educational innovation so that it achieves on the dimensions of depth, sustainability, spread and change of ownership is a complex endeavor. In this paper, we present a study of one such innovation which has been developed through a design-based research process in a Singapore school. The innovation features a primary science curriculum integrating the 5E inquiry phases with the use of mobile technology. It has evolved through the various development phases to where the innovation is becoming an integral part of routine classroom practices. With the objective of examining the impact of the curriculum innovation on science teaching and learning, this paper reports some of the results of our scaling efforts, in particular, those relating to changes in classroom practices and the effectiveness brought by the curriculum innovation. Using qualitative data analysis methods, the study discusses the transformation of the classroom practices on teachers' pedagogical approaches, classroom culture, lesson plan design, linkages to informal learning, assessment methods, and parent involvement. Quantitative analysis of the performance of students in science assessments when compared between pre-scaling and scaling phases shows the efficacy of the innovation when scaled up to a whole grade level. Implications are drawn to inform future studies or work on factors for effective scaling up of technology-supported curricular innovations.     

Understanding the gap between software process practices and actual practice in very small companies

This paper reports on a grounded theory to study into software developers’ use of software development processes in actual practice in the specific context of very small companies. This study was conducted in three very small software product companies located in Ecuador. The data collection was based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with software project managers, focus group with software developers and was supplemented by the literature and document studies. We interviewed two types of participants (managers and developers), so as to ensure that we elicited a holistic perspective of how they approached the software development process in actual practice. The goal was to study what practices are actually used and their opinion and attitude toward the potential adopting of an international standard (ISO/IEC 29110) specifically designed for very small companies. With the collected data, we performed an analysis utilizing grounded theory coding techniques, as this methodology promotes the focus on uncovering the real concerns of the participants. This study highlighted three areas of concern: customer, software product and development tasks coordination and tracking. The findings in this study give an insight toward the work products as they relate to software development process practices in very small companies and the important factors that must be considered to assist project success.     

WaterCalls: an ambient call queue for cooperation between emergency service centres

This paper presents some design-oriented reflections about a design idea—WaterCalls. This design concept is informed by findings from an ethnographic study of emergency service work. Two main components constitute WaterCalls—an ambient display consisting of bowls with water and a call queue in a graphical interface. The purpose is to support cooperation between several operators who work at different emergency service centres. One benefit of ambient displays in the emergency service centre is that information that is currently not available in the setting may be displayed in an unobtrusive way. In this paper, we suggest that it is important to consider how the ambient displays come into real use and how they fit into the work people actually do, namely, their work practices. For the development of interfaces like this, it is crucial to take into consideration how they are used in combination with more traditional graphical interfaces and other artefacts.     

Bridging the gap between the Kodak and the Flickr generations: A novel interaction technique for collocated photo sharing

Passing around stacks of paper photographs while sitting around a table is one of the key social practices defining what is commonly referred to as the ‘Kodak Generation’. Due to the way digital photographs are stored and handled, this practice does not translate well to the ‘Flickr Generation’, where collocated photo sharing often involves the (wireless) transmission of a photo from one mobile device to another. In order to facilitate ‘cross-generation’ sharing without enforcing either practice, it is desirable to bridge this gap in a way that incorporates familiar aspects of both.In this paper, we discuss a novel interaction technique that addresses some of the constraints introduced by current communication technology, and that enables photo sharing in a way, which resembles the passing of stacks of paper photographs. This technique is based on dynamically generated spatial regions around mobile devices and has been evaluated through two user studies. The results we obtained indicate that our technique is easy to learn and as fast, or faster than, current technology such as transmitting photos between devices using Bluetooth. In addition, we found evidence of different sharing techniques influencing social practice around photo sharing. The use of our technique resulted in a more inclusive and group-oriented behavior in contrast to Bluetooth photo sharing, which resulted in a more fractured setting composed of sub-groups.     

Knowledge management technology and the reproduction of knowledge work practices

Organizations seeking ways to manage their knowledge assets are increasingly turning to information technology for solutions. As knowledge management systems are being developed and implemented, it behooves both practitioners and researchers to learn from the successes and failures of more established types of information systems including MIS and DSS. According to the Standish Group, the implementation success rate for these systems runs at around 30%. Many argue that these low success rates are, in part, attributable to technologists’ lack of understanding of the situated work practices of the systems’ user communities. This has lead to increasing calls for research on work practice in the field of Information Systems.Unfortunately, it is not always clear what is meant by work practice. Furthermore, the consideration of work practice outside of its circuit of reproduction can be misleading. By circuits of reproduction we mean the reciprocal relationships through which practice creates and recreates the objectified social structures and conditions in which it occurs.In this paper, we adopt Bourdieu's Theory of Practice to illuminate work practices and their circuits of reproduction. Relying on data that were collected during an eight-month ethnography of knowledge work practices in a US-based, Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, we focus on the situated “gatekeeping” practices of a group of competitive intelligence analysts and explore how their situated practices were at odds with the generalized “gatekeeping” practices embedded in a knowledge management technology whose implementation they themselves were advocating. We argue that their inability to see this incongruence until very late in the pilot implementation is associated with an understanding of their work practices in isolation, i.e. outside of their circuits of reproduction.     

Explaining changes in learning and work practice following the adoption of online learning: a human agency perspective

Online learning applications are typically introduced with expectations that they will be used to improve learning and work practices, yet they often fall short of expectations following implementation. Numerous empirical studies have reported unintended use (and nonuse) of new IT applications, providing initial support for practice-based research for viewing emergent changes in work practices. Human agency is a core concept in theories of practice, which seek to explain how recurring patterns of action develop in social contexts such as work settings. However, current applications of theories of practice do not provide satisfactory explanations for the reasons underlying changes in work practice. In this study, we investigate changes in learning and work practices associated with the implementation of an online learning system in a Taiwanese hospital. We apply a temporal theory of human agency that disaggregates agency into elements reflecting actors' orientations to the past, present, and future. We use this theory to address the following research question: why do learning and work practices change following the implementation of online learning? The case study reveals that actors face pressures to respond to the attractions of new ways of learning while preserving traditional work practices. In addition, technological features and social structures constrain the exercise of human agency. As a result, use of the online learning system declined in the period following implementation. Our analysis adds explanatory power to the practice perspective by incorporating human agency, technological constraints, and structural conditions that affect practice.     

Work Practices Surrounding PACS: The Politics of Space in Hospitals

This paper uses a case study of collaborative work practices within the radiology department of a hospital, for examining the usefulness of spatial approaches to collaboration. It takes a socio-political perspective on understanding the shaping effects of spatial arrangements on work practices, and seeks to identify some of the key CSCW issues that can be addressed in spatial terms. We analyse the spatial settings or layers (physical, digital and auditory) within which work takes place, and the qualities of connections between them, examining in how far they support (professional) boundaries or help maintain a sense of context. Guiding themes are the relationships between space and the visibility of work, and how to accommodate social world needs through spatial arrangements.     

The software design studio: an exploration

Some software designers have recently turned for inspiration to the process of building design to improve development practices and increase software's usefulness and effectiveness. Architects' education revolves around the studio course, which promotes: project based work on complex and open ended problems; very rapid iteration of design solutions; frequent formal and informal critique; consideration of heterogeneous issues; the use of precedent and thinking about the whole; the creative use of constraints; and the central importance of design media. M. Kapor (1991) suggested that software practitioners needed to “rethink the fundamentals of how software is made” and proposed the architect's role in building design as a fruitful analogy for software professionals seeking to reform software practice. This analogy helps us focus on usefulness, usability, user needs and practices, and other technical and nontechnical aspects of good software design. It highlights concerns about people's lives and work practices and how people “inhabit” systems. Several authors have explored similarities and differences between software design and building design, including some who have pursued the software implications of architect Christopher Alexander's design patterns     

A framework for reviewing domain specific conceptual models

Conceptual models are used in understanding and communicating the domain of interest during analysis phase of system development. As they are used in early phases, errors and omissions may propagate to later phases and may be very costly to correct. This paper proposes a framework for evaluating conceptual models when represented in a domain specific language based on UML constructs. The framework describes the main aspects to be considered when conceptual models are represented in a domain specific language, presents a classification of semantic issues and some evaluation indicators. The indicators can, in principle, identify situations in the models where inconsistencies or incompleteness might occur. Whether these are real concerns might depend on domain semantics, hence these are semantic, not syntactic checks. The use of the proposed review framework is illustrated in the context of two conceptual models in a domain specific notation, KAMA. With reviews based on the framework, it is possible to spot semantic issues which are not noticed by case tools and help the analyst to identify more information about the domain.     

Testing in the Wild: The Social and Organisational Dimensions of Real World Practice

Testing is a key part of any systems engineering project. There is an extensive literature on testing, but very little that focuses on how testing is carried out in real-world circumstances. This is partly because current practices are often seen as unsophisticated and ineffective. We believe that by investigating and characterising the real-world work of testing we can help question why such ‘bad practices’ occur and how improvements might be made. We also argue that the testing literature is too focused on technological issues when many of the problems, and indeed strengths, have as much do with work and organisation. In this paper we use empirical examples from four systems engineering projects to demonstrate how and in what ways testing is a cooperative activity. In particular we demonstrate the ways in which testing is situated within organisational work and satisfices organisational and marketplace demands.     

Methods to improve prediction performance of ANN models

Artificial neural network (ANN) is a powerful tool and applied successfully in numerous fields. But there are still two limitations on its use. One is over-training, which occurs when the capacity of the ANN for training is too great because it is allowed too many training iterations. The other is that ANNs are not effective for extrapolation, which is sometimes very important because the existing data used to train an ANN do not necessarily cover the entire range. The two limitations degrade seriously the prediction performance of ANN models. In this paper, two practices are introduced to alleviate or overcome the negative effect of the limitations. Demonstrations based on these practices indicate that they are general and useful practices and can improve greatly the prediction performance of the resulting ANN models to make them really suitable for engineering applications.     

Delivering unprecedented access to learning through podcasting as OER,but who's listening? A profile of the external iTunes U user

Little is known about the learners who download iTunes U resources but do not belong to the Higher Education institutions that provide them. This paper presents the first full profile of the external iTunes U learner and their practices and opinions of the materials they download. The data was gathered through a large survey (over 2000 responses) carried out over two years using the iTunes U site from The Open University. It shows that external iTunes U learners are very different from the internal users and practices described in the literature so far: there are more men than women, mostly middle-aged, and they use the resources mostly for personal reasons. Despite the fact that respondents used the iTunes U site from a distance university, the paper argues that the respondents are comparable to external learners who use resources from other iTunes U sites. This profile of the iTunes U user provides a clearer picture of the target listener and can help inform and improve the materials design and delivery strategies for iTunes U as an independent learning tool and Open Educational Resources (OER) in general. The article also proposes areas for further research and argues for more studies into external learners' use of podcasting resources.     

Ranking canonical views for tourist attractions

Online photo collections have become truly gigantic. Photo sharing sites such as Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) host billions of photographs, a large portion of which are contributed by tourists. In this paper, we leverage online photo collections to automatically rank canonical views for tourist attractions. Ideal canonical views for a tourist attraction should both be representative of the site and exhibit a diverse set of views (Kennedy and Naaman, International Conference on World Wide Web 297–306, 2008). In order to meet both goals, we rank canonical views in two stages. During the first stage, we use visual features to encode the content of photographs and infer the popularity of each photograph. During the second stage, we rank photographs using a suppression scheme to keep popular views top-ranked while demoting duplicate views. After a ranking is generated, canonical views at various granularities can be retrieved in real-time, which advances over previous work and is a promising feature for real applications. In order to scale canonical view ranking to gigantic online photo collections, we propose to leverage geo-tags (latitudes/longitudes of the location of the scene in the photographs) to speed up the basic algorithm. We preprocess the photo collection to extract subsets of photographs that are geographically clustered (or geo-clusters), and constrain the expensive visual processing within each geo-cluster. We test the algorithm on two large Flickr data sets of Rome and the Yosemite national park, and show promising results on canonical view ranking. For quantitative analysis, we adopt two medium data sets and conduct a subjective comparison with previous work. It shows that while both algorithms are able to produce canonical views of high quality, our algorithm has the advantage of responding in real-time to canonical view retrieval at various granularities.     

Scientific Data Collections and Distributed Collective Practice

As the basic sciences become increasingly information-intensive, the management and use of research data presents new challenges in the collective activities that constitute scholarly and scientific communication. This also presents new opportunities for understanding the role of informatics in scientific work practices, and for designing new kinds tools and resources needed to support them. These issues of data management, scientific communication and collective activity are brought together at once in scientific data collections (SDCs). What can the development and use of shared SDCs tell us about collective activity, dynamic infrastructures, and distributed scientific work? Using examples drawn from a nascent neuroscience data collection, we examine some unique features of SDCs to illustrate that they do more than act as infrastructures for scientific research. Instead, we argue that they are themselves instantiations of Distributed Collective Practice (DCP), and as such illustrate concepts of transition, emergence, and interdependency that may not be so apparent in other kinds of DCPs. We propose that research into SDCs can yield new insights into institutional arrangements, policymaking, and authority structures in other very large-scale socio-technical networks.     

Knowledge-based public service transactions: An intelligent model-driven approach in co-learning contexts

Public administrations pursue the efficiency and quality of administrative services they offer as well as the reduction of time and operational costs in executing service transactions. However, some issues arise when trying to achieve these goals: (a) the lack of procedure formalization to describe public services, (b) a mechanism to guarantee services’ obligatory compliance with frequently changing legal regulations, and (c) the efficient deployment of service transactions in e-government platforms. The aim of this work is to identify the phases of the development cycle of eGovernment transactions and provide the support to automatize them efficiently by using a model driven engineering (MDE) and knowledge-based approach. The main source of the knowledge extraction process comes from a collaborative learning environment where public servants share acquired domain knowledge. A web survey has been conducted to evaluate the approach acceptance degree by software developers and domain experts. The main conclusion is that 61% of the surveyed experts strongly agree that our approach improves actual eGovernment transactions practices and the phases needed to develop them.     

Auspicious computing?

Anthropologists working in the technology industry are nothing new. Lucy Suchman and Julian Orr blazed that trail at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 1970s; they helped shed light on a range of organizational and work practices, documenting the ways in which people responded to the influx of new technologies such as early photocopying machines and computer-aided design (CAD) programs. Indeed, the late Marc Weiser credits Suchman, Orr, and their PARC colleagues with helping him think through the "ubiquitous computing" notion and compelling him to animate it with real people and their daily lives. Currently, anthropologists and other social scientists still work at Xerox, Kodak, Microsoft, Whirlpool, Philips, and Intel. Not only do we continue to use anthropological methods and theories to make sense of everyday activities and cultural practices for a diverse industry audience, but we also find ways to challenge the implicit assumptions that underwrite our very notions of what technology could or should do. This paper examines one such set of assumptions that everyone seems to share about computing.     

Workers and Their Willingness to Learn: Will ICT‐Implementation Strategies and HRM Practices Contribute to Innovation?

The article deals with the relationship between the willingness of workers to acquire ICT‐competences), the ICT‐implementation strategy (to ‘automate’ or ‘to informate’) pursuit by organizations and the HRM practices used by them. Based on a simple conceptual model, we tested three hypotheses: the more extended the use HRM practices in organizations, the more often workers will work in a work setting based on an informated ICT implementation strategy; an informated ICT implementation strategy will lead to a higher willingness of employees to acquire ICT‐related competences; the effect of an informated ICT‐strategy on the willingness to acquire ICT‐related competences will be higher than that of the HRM‐practices. To test these hypotheses, we used a survey of 733 Dutch employees working with ICT devices. Our analysis gives some partial support to the first two hypotheses, but the third is rejected by the data: ICT‐implementation strategies and some HRM‐practices have an independent effect on the willingness to acquire ICT‐compentences.     

Reconstruct street network from imprecise excavation data using fuzzy Hough transforms

This paper proposes an approach for handling multivariate data in an archaeological Geographical Information System (GIS), providing a new tool to archaeologists and historians. Our method extracts potential objects of known shapes in a geographical database (GDB) devoted to archaeological excavations. In this work, archaeological information is organized according to three components: location, date and a shape parameter, in a context where data are imprecise and lacunar. To manage these aspects, a three-step methodology was developed using fuzzy sets modeling and adapting the fuzzy Hough transform. This methodology is applied in order to define the appropriate tool for a GDB of Roman street remains in Reims, France. The defined queries return an estimation of the possible presence of streets during a fuzzy time interval given by experts on the Roman period in Reims.     

Energy efficient teaching-learning-based optimization for the discrete routing problem in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of sensor nodes, having limited energy resources and low processing capability. Accordingly, major challenges are involved in WSNs Routing. Thus, in many use cases, routing is considered as an NP-hard optimization problem. Many routing protocols are based on metaheuristics, such as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Despite the fact that metaheuristics have provided elegant solutions, they still suffer from complexity concerns and difficulty of parameter tuning. In this paper, we propose a new routing approach based on Teaching Learning Based Optimization (TLBO) which is a recent and robust method, consisting on two essential phases: Teacher and Learner. As TLBO was proposed for continuous optimization problems, this work presents the first use of TLBO for the discrete problem of WSN routing. The approach is well founded theoretically as well as detailed algorithmically. Experimental results show that our approach allows obtaining lower energy consumption which leads to a better WSN lifetime. Our method is also compared to some typical routing methods; PSO approach, advanced ACO approach, Improved Harmony based approach (IHSBEER) and Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, to illustrate TLBO’s routing efficiency.