Enhancing learning beyond the classroom: blogging and other social networking tools

Blogging has become one of the key ingredients of the so-called socials networks. This phenomenon has indeed invaded the world of education. Connections between people, comments on each other posts, and assessment of innovation are usually interesting characteristics of blogs related to students and scholars. Blogs have become a kind of new form of authority, bringing about (divergent) discussions which lead to creation of knowledge. The use of blogs as an innovative, educational tool is not at all new. However, their use in universities is not very widespread yet. Blogging for personal affairs is rather commonplace, but blogging for professional affairs – teaching, research and service, is scarce, despite the availability of ready-to-use, free tools. Unfortunately, Information Society has not reached yet enough some universities: not only are (student) blogs scarcely used as an educational tool, but it is quite rare to find a blog written by University professors. The Institute of Computational Chemistry of the University of Girona and the Department of Chemistry of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has joined forces to create “InnoCiència”, a new Group on Digital Science Communitation. This group, formed by ca. ten researchers, has promoted the use of blogs, twitters. wikis and other tools of Web 2.0 in activities in Catalonia concerning the dissemination of Science, like Science Week, Open Day or Researchers’ Night. Likewise, its members promote use of social networking tools in chemistry- and communication-related courses. This communication explains the outcome of social-network experiences with teaching undergraduate students and organizing research communication events. We provide live, hands-on examples and interactive ground to show how blogs and twitters can be used to enhance the yield of teaching and research. Impact of blogging and other social networking tools on the outcome of the learning process is very depending on the target audience and the environmental conditions. A few examples are provided and some proposals to use these techniques efficiently to help students are hinted

A Negotiation Style Recommender Based on Computational Ecology in Open Negotiation Environments

The system described herein represents the first example of a recommender system in digital ecosystems where agents negotiate services on behalf of small companies. The small companies compete not only with price or quality, but with a wider service-by-service composition by subcontracting with other companies. The final result of these offerings depends on negotiations at the scale of millions of small companies. This scale requires new platforms for supporting digital business ecosystems, as well as related services like open-id, trust management, monitors and recommenders. This is done in the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE), which is an open-source platform that allows agents, on behalf of small companies, to negotiate and use the ecosystem services, and enables the development of new agent technologies. The methods and tools of cyber engineering are necessary to build up Open Negotiation Environments that are stable, a basic condition for predictable business and reliable business environments. Aiming to build stable digital business ecosystems by means of improved collective intelligence, we introduce a model of negotiation style dynamics from the point of view of computational ecology. This model inspires an ecosystem monitor as well as a novel negotiation style recommender. The ecosystem monitor provides hints to the negotiation style recommender to achieve greater stability of an open negotiation environment in a digital business ecosystem. The greater stability provides the small companies with higher predictability, and therefore better business results. The negotiation style recommender is implemented with a simulated annealing algorithm at a constant temperature, and its impact is shown by applying it to a real case of an open negotiation environment populated by Italian companies