Partnership in Practice Research: a Norwegian Experience

This article outlines some of the issues involved in developing partnerships between service users, practitioners and researchers. It discusses these through some experience in Oslo as part of a national level agreement (HUSK) to improve social services in Norway through research and knowledge development. It begins with a review of the main concepts and debates involved in developing collaborative partnerships for practice-based research, particularly in the social services arena. The HUSK program is then described. The article then traces some specific developments and challenges in negotiating partnership relations as discussed by program participants (users, practitioners and researchers) in a series of workshops designed to elicit the issues directly from their experience.

Governance of Massive Multiauthor Collaboration – Linux, Wikipedia, and Other Networks: Governed by Bilateral Contracts, Partnerships, or Something in Between?

Open collaborative projects are moving to the foreground of knowledge production. Some online user communities develop into longterm projects that generate a highly valuable and at the same time freely accessible output. Traditional copyright law that is organized around the idea of a single creative entity is not well equipped to accommodate the needs of these forms of collaboration. In order to enable a peculiar network-type of interaction participants instead draw on public licensing models that determine the freedoms to use individual contributions. With the help of these access rules the operational logic of the project can be implemented successfully. However, as the case of the Wikipedia GFDL-CC license transition demonstrates, the adaptation of access rules in networks to new circumstances raises collective action problems and suffers from pitfalls caused by the fact that public licensing is grounded in individual copyright. Legal governance of open collaboration projects is a largely unexplored field. The article argues that the license steward of a public license assumes the position of a fiduciary of the knowledge commons generated under the license regime. Ultimately, the governance of decentralized networks translates into a composite of organizational and contractual elements. It is concluded that the production of global knowledge commons relies on rules of transnational private law.

ARTHUR: A Collaborative Augmented Environment for Architectural Design and Urban Planning

Projects in the area of architectural design and urban planning typically engage several architects as well as experts from other professions. While the design and review meetings thus often involve a large number of cooperating participants, the actual design is still done by the individuals in the time in between those meetings using desktop PCs and CAD applications. A real collaborative approach to architectural design and urban planning is often limited to early paper-based sketches.In order to overcome these limitations, we designed and realized the ARTHUR system, an Augmented Reality (AR) enhanced round table to support complex design and planning decisions for architects. WhileAR has been applied to this area earlier, our approach does not try to replace the use of CAD systems but rather integrates them seamlessly into the collaborative AR environment. The approach is enhanced by intuitiveinteraction mechanisms that can be easily con-figured for different application scenarios.

Towards an Open Source Framework for Collaborative Problem-Based Learning Environments

This paper presents our research works in the domain of Collaborative Environments centred on Problem Based Learning (PBL) and taking advantage of existing Electronic Documents. We first present the modelling and engineering problems that we want to address; then we discuss technological issues of such a research particularly the use of OpenUSS and of the Enterprise Java Open Source Architecture (EJOSA) to implement such collaborative PBL environments.

Teachers' professional development in a community

The goal of this article was to study teachers' professional development related to web-based learning in the context of the teacher community. The object was to learn in what kind of networks teachers share the knowledge of web-based learning and what are the factors in the community that support or challenge teachers professional development of web-based learning. The findings of the study revealed that there are teachers who are especially active, called the central actors in this study, in the teacher community who collaborate and share knowledge of web-based learning. These central actors share both technical and pedagogical knowledge of web-based learning in networks that include both internal and external relations in the community and involve people, artefacts and a variety of media. Furthermore, the central actors appear to bridge different fields of teaching expertise in their community. According to the central actors' experiences the important factors that support teachers' professional development of web-based learning in the community are; the possibility to learn from colleagues and from everyday working practices, an emotionally safe atmosphere, the leader's personal support and community-level commitment. Also, the flexibility in work planning, challenging pupils, shared lessons with colleagues, training events in an authentic work environment and colleagues' professionalism are considered meaningful for professional development. As challenges, the knowledge sharing of web-based learning in the community needs mutual interests, transactive memory, time and facilities, peer support, a safe atmosphere and meaningful pedagogical practices. On the basis of the findings of the study it is suggested that by intensive collaboration related to web-based learning it may be possible to break the boundaries of individual teachership and create such sociocultural activities which support collaborative professional development in the teacher community. Teachers' in-service training programs should be more sensitive to the culture of teacher communities and teachers' reciprocal relations. Further, teacher trainers should design teachers' in-service training of web-based learning in co-evolution with supporting networks which include the media and artefacts as well as people.

Teachers' professional development in a community

The goal of this article was to study teachers' professional development related to web-based learning in the context of the teacher community. The object was to learn in what kind of networks teachers share the knowledge of web-based learning and what are the factors in the community that support or challenge teachers professional development of web-based learning. The findings of the study revealed that there are teachers who are especially active, called the central actors in this study, in the teacher community who collaborate and share knowledge of web-based learning. These central actors share both technical and pedagogical knowledge of web-based learning in networks that include both internal and external relations in the community and involve people, artefacts and a variety of media. Furthermore, the central actors appear to bridge different fields of teaching expertise in their community. According to the central actors' experiences the important factors that support teachers' professional development of web-based learning in the community are; the possibility to learn from colleagues and from everyday working practices, an emotionally safe atmosphere, the leader's personal support and community-level commitment. Also, the flexibility in work planning, challenging pupils, shared lessons with colleagues, training events in an authentic work environment and colleagues' professionalism are considered meaningful for professional development. As challenges, the knowledge sharing of web-based learning in the community needs mutual interests, transactive memory, time and facilities, peer support, a safe atmosphere and meaningful pedagogical practices. On the basis of the findings of the study it is suggested that by intensive collaboration related to web-based learning it may be possible to break the boundaries of individual teachership and create such sociocultural activities which support collaborative professional development in the teacher community. Teachers' in-service training programs should be more sensitive to the culture of teacher communities and teachers' reciprocal relations. Further, teacher trainers should design teachers' in-service training of web-based learning in co-evolution with supporting networks which include the media and artefacts as well as people.

Teachers' professional development in a community

The goal of this article was to study teachers' professional development related to web-based learning in the context of the teacher community. The object was to learn in what kind of networks teachers share the knowledge of web-based learning and what are the factors in the community that support or challenge teachers professional development of web-based learning. The findings of the study revealed that there are teachers who are especially active, called the central actors in this study, in the teacher community who collaborate and share knowledge of web-based learning. These central actors share both technical and pedagogical knowledge of web-based learning in networks that include both internal and external relations in the community and involve people, artefacts and a variety of media. Furthermore, the central actors appear to bridge different fields of teaching expertise in their community. According to the central actors' experiences the important factors that support teachers' professional development of web-based learning in the community are; the possibility to learn from colleagues and from everyday working practices, an emotionally safe atmosphere, the leader's personal support and community-level commitment. Also, the flexibility in work planning, challenging pupils, shared lessons with colleagues, training events in an authentic work environment and colleagues' professionalism are considered meaningful for professional development. As challenges, the knowledge sharing of web-based learning in the community needs mutual interests, transactive memory, time and facilities, peer support, a safe atmosphere and meaningful pedagogical practices. On the basis of the findings of the study it is suggested that by intensive collaboration related to web-based learning it may be possible to break the boundaries of individual teachership and create such sociocultural activities which support collaborative professional development in the teacher community. Teachers' in-service training programs should be more sensitive to the culture of teacher communities and teachers' reciprocal relations. Further, teacher trainers should design teachers' in-service training of web-based learning in co-evolution with supporting networks which include the media and artefacts as well as people.

Method of collaborative detection of autonomous transport vehicles based on laser rangefinder data

To master changing performance demands, autonomous transport vehicles are deployed to make inhouse material flow applications more flexible. The socalled cellular transport system consists of a multitude of small scale transport vehicles which shall be able to form a swarm. Therefore the vehicles need to detect each other, exchange information amongst each other and sense their environment. By provision of peripherally acquired information of other transport entities, more convenient decisions can be made in terms of navigation and collision avoidance. This paper is a contribution to collective utilization of sensor data in the swarm of cellular transport vehicles.