The impacts of learning styles, learning patterns and demographic factors on learners’ performance in a blended learning environment

Many studies have widely accepted the assumption that learning processes can be promoted when teaching styles and learning styles are well matched. In this study, the synergy between learning styles, learning patterns, and gender as a selected demographic feature and learners’ performance were quantitatively investigated in a blended learning setting. This environment adopts a traditional teaching approach of ‘one-sizefits-all’ without considering individual user’s preferences and attitudes. Hence, evidence can be provided about the value of taking such factors into account in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems (AEHSs). Felder and Soloman’s Index of Learning Styles (ILS) was used to identify the learning styles of 59 undergraduate students at the University of Babylon. Five hypotheses were investigated in the experiment. Our findings show that there is no statistical significance in some of the assessed factors. However, processing dimension, the total number of hits on course website and gender indicated a statistical significance on learners’ performance. This finding needs more investigation in order to identify the effective factors on students’ achievement to be considered in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems (AEHSs).

Análise da indústria de televisão a cabo no Brasil : estrutura competitiva e evolução

A indústria de TVa cabo está num caminho convergente com o setor de telecomunicações por força dos avanços tecnológicos relacionados à informática. As redes das operadoras de cabo têm a possibilidade de se transformarem num elemento central na evolução da sociedade da informação. Essa dissertação investiga a estrutura competitiva atual da indústria de TV a cabo brasileira. Para isso, lança mão dos conceitos de Michael E. Porter (1980). Além disso, são descritos possíveis desdobramentos na evolução da estrutura do setor, na visão de especialistas da indústria.

From free software to free culture: the emergence of open business

This paper provides an examination of the emergence of open business models — entrepreneurial strategies that take advantage of the ease of digital reproduction to distribute free content, while earning money from the sale of related products and services. Locating the origins of open business in the open source software phenomenon, the authors suggest that the business strategies innovated there have broader economic relevance. Through a case study of the tecnobrega music scene in Belém, the paper illustrates how open business models can be applied to the production of cultural materials more generally

Access to knoledge in Brazil: new research on intellectual property, innovation and development

The present volume is the fruit of a research initiative on Access to Knowledge begun in 2004 by Yochai Benkler, Eddan Katz, and myself. Access to Knowledge is both a social movement and an approach to international and domestic policy. In the present era of globalization, intellectual property and information and communications technology are major determinants of wealth and power. The principle of access to knowledge argues that we best serve both human rights and economic development through policies that make knowledge, knowledge-creating tools, and nowledgeembedded goods as widely available as possible for decentralized innovation and use. Open technological standards, a balanced approach to intellectual property rights, and expansion of an open telecommunications infrastructure enable ordinary people around the world to benefit from the technological advances of the information age and allow them to generate a vibrant, participatory and democratic culture. Law plays a crucial role in securing access to knowledge, determining whether knowledge and knowledge goods are shared widely for the benefit of all, or controlled and monopolized for the benefit of a few.

Teletrabalho na administração pública federal: uma análise do potencial de implantação na diretoria de marcas do INPI

This dissertation analyses the implementation of the telework project of the Marks Directorate at the Industrial Property National Institute, an agency of the Brazilian federal administration. The analysis focuses on the public servants and their expectations, since the work developed at the Marks Directorate is mainly based on the intellectual capital of its staff. This research first addresses the subject by describing the current technical and sociological context. In which information society and globalization's impact on labour's evolution, and information and communication technology's impact on e-government development are both considered as having important roles. A review of the state of the art on telework research is presented as the basis of the analyses, including a definition of telework and its most relevant aspects. National and international cases of telework, both in the public and private sector, are used as examples in the analyses. The matter of performance control and evaluation is also briefly addressed. In order to assess the viability of the implementation of telework, a review of the activities developed at the Marks Directorate is performed. Emphasis is given to the modernization of examining procedures, without disregarding administrative facts, such as the new career plan and its performance evaluation procedures, that might affect the telework project. The case study is conducted by means of a survey with open and closed questions served in a questionnaire. The analyses of the results leads to the conclusion that telework can be successfully implemented in the Marks Directorate, being also an opportunity to study the adaptation of a working practice originating at the private sector and applied in public administration, taking into account their differences.

Media piracy in emerging economies

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in the developing world, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia. Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, the study tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that enforcement efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better addressed as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

Multilayer optimization in radio resource allocation for the packet transmission in wireless networks

In the last decade mobile wireless communications have witnessed an explosive growth in the user’s penetration rate and their widespread deployment around the globe. It is expected that this tendency will continue to increase with the convergence of fixed Internet wired networks with mobile ones and with the evolution to the full IP architecture paradigm. Therefore mobile wireless communications will be of paramount importance on the development of the information society of the near future. In particular a research topic of particular relevance in telecommunications nowadays is related to the design and implementation of mobile communication systems of 4th generation. 4G networks will be characterized by the support of multiple radio access technologies in a core network fully compliant with the Internet Protocol (all IP paradigm). Such networks will sustain the stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements and the expected high data rates from the type of multimedia applications to be available in the near future. The approach followed in the design and implementation of the mobile wireless networks of current generation (2G and 3G) has been the stratification of the architecture into a communication protocol model composed by a set of layers, in which each one encompasses some set of functionalities. In such protocol layered model, communications is only allowed between adjacent layers and through specific interface service points. This modular concept eases the implementation of new functionalities as the behaviour of each layer in the protocol stack is not affected by the others. However, the fact that lower layers in the protocol stack model do not utilize information available from upper layers, and vice versa, downgrades the performance achieved. This is particularly relevant if multiple antenna systems, in a MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) configuration, are implemented. MIMO schemes introduce another degree of freedom for radio resource allocation: the space domain. Contrary to the time and frequency domains, radio resources mapped into the spatial domain cannot be assumed as completely orthogonal, due to the amount of interference resulting from users transmitting in the same frequency sub-channel and/or time slots but in different spatial beams. Therefore, the availability of information regarding the state of radio resources, from lower to upper layers, is of fundamental importance in the prosecution of the levels of QoS expected from those multimedia applications. In order to match applications requirements and the constraints of the mobile radio channel, in the last few years researches have proposed a new paradigm for the layered architecture for communications: the cross-layer design framework. In a general way, the cross-layer design paradigm refers to a protocol design in which the dependence between protocol layers is actively exploited, by breaking out the stringent rules which restrict the communication only between adjacent layers in the original reference model, and allowing direct interaction among different layers of the stack. An efficient management of the set of available radio resources demand for the implementation of efficient and low complexity packet schedulers which prioritize user’s transmissions according to inputs provided from lower as well as upper layers in the protocol stack, fully compliant with the cross-layer design paradigm. Specifically, efficiently designed packet schedulers for 4G networks should result in the maximization of the capacity available, through the consideration of the limitations imposed by the mobile radio channel and comply with the set of QoS requirements from the application layer. IEEE 802.16e standard, also named as Mobile WiMAX, seems to comply with the specifications of 4G mobile networks. The scalable architecture, low cost implementation and high data throughput, enable efficient data multiplexing and low data latency, which are attributes essential to enable broadband data services. Also, the connection oriented approach of Its medium access layer is fully compliant with the quality of service demands from such applications. Therefore, Mobile WiMAX seems to be a promising 4G mobile wireless networks candidate. In this thesis it is proposed the investigation, design and implementation of packet scheduling algorithms for the efficient management of the set of available radio resources, in time, frequency and spatial domains of the Mobile WiMAX networks. The proposed algorithms combine input metrics from physical layer and QoS requirements from upper layers, according to the crosslayer design paradigm. Proposed schedulers are evaluated by means of system level simulations, conducted in a system level simulation platform implementing the physical and medium access control layers of the IEEE802.16e standard.

Ampliando o acesso livre a informação: a digitalização do acervo do Núcleo Temático da Seca

FREIRE, Isa Maria, et al. Ampliando o acesso livre a informaçao: a digitalizaçao do acervo do Nucleo Tematico da Seca. Pesquisa Brasileira em Ciência da Informação e Biblioteconomia, v.3, n.2, p. 137-142, 2008.Disponivel em: . Acesso em: 04 nov. 2010.

O paradigma tecnológico e a revolução informacional: fundamentos da sociedade da informação

REGIS, Josiana Florencio Vieira; CAMPOS, Ana Celia Cavalcanti Fernandes. O paradigma tecnologico e a revoluçao informacional: fundamentos da sociedade da informaçao. In: CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL EM SISTEMAS DE INFORMAÇAO E GESTAO DA TECNOLOGIA, 6., 2009. Sao Paulo. Anais eletronicos... Sao Paulo: FEA/USP, 2009. Trabalho oral.

Práticas de letramento digital de professores em formação: demandas, saberes e impactos

Over the last decades, the digital inclusion public policies have significantly invested in the purchase of hardwares and softwares in order to offer technology to the Brazilian public teaching institutions, specifically computers and broadband Internet. However, the teachers education to handle these artefacts is put away, even though there is some demand from the information society. With that, this dissertation chooses as an object of study the digital literacy practices performed by 38 (thirty-eight) teachers in initial and continuous education by means of the extension course Literacies and technologies: portuguese language teaching and cyberculture demands. In this direction, we aim at investigating the digital literacy practices of developing teachers in three specific moments: before, while and after this extension action with the intent to (i) delineate the digital literacy practices performed by the collaborators before the formative action; (ii) to narrate the literacy events made possible by the extension course; (iii) to investigate the contributions of the education course to the collaborators teaching practice. We sought theoretical contributions in the literacy studies (BAYNHAM, 1995; KLEIMAN, 1995; HAMILTON; BARTON; IVANIC, 2000), specifically when it comes to digital literacy (COPE, KALANTZIS, 2000; BUZATO, 2001, 2007, 2009; SNYDER, 2002, 2008; LANKSHEAR & KNOBEL, 2002, 2008) and teacher education (PERRENOUD, 2000; SILVA, 2001). Methodologically, this virtual ethnography study (KOZINETS, 1997; HINE, 2000) is inserted into the field of Applied Linguistics and adopts a quali-quantitative research approach (NUNAN, 1992; DÖRNYEI, 2006). The data analysis permitted to evidentiate that (i) before the course, the digital literacy practices focused on the personal and academic dimensions of their realities at the expense of the professional dimension; (ii) during the extension action, the teachers collaboratively took part in the hybrid study sessions, which had a pedagogical focus on the use of ICTs, accomplishing the use of digital literacy practices - unknown before that; (iii) after the course, the attitude of the collaborator teachers concerning the use of ICTs on their regular professional basis had changed, once those teachers started to effectively make use of them, promoting social visibility to what was produced in the school. We also observed that teachers in initial education acted as more experienced peers in collaborative learning process, offering support scaffolding (VYGOTSKY, 1978; BRUNER, 1985) to teachers in continuous education. This occurred because of the undergraduates actualize digital literacy practices were more sophisticated, besides the fact being integrate generation Y (PRENSKY, 2001)

Aplicação de indicadores webométricos nos programas de Pós-Graduação das engenharias recomendados pela CAPES

This study aims to identify, through the application of webometric indicators, which Post-Graduate Courses in Engineering recommended by the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Personnel Education (CAPES) in Brazil stand out in the web space, in relation to the communication process and dissemination of scientific information in the academic environment. For this, we analyzed the structures content of the sites, the use, through the conduct of investigations and searches, the quality of information available, as well as the structure of existent hypertexts in the sites of this universe of search. The tools and methodologies adopted for this study are: search engines (Google, Yahoo), Mapper software (Xenu Link Sleuth) and analysis software and visualization of networks (and Ucinet6 NetDraw). Webometric indicators are also used, such as size of the web sites, visibility, web impact factor, brightness and density of the network. These instruments provide a brief analysis and evaluation for this webometric study. Therefore, from the incursion of the literature used, it appears that there are many advantages of using this type of metric study in the so called Information Society. The obtained results could identify which postgraduate courses in engineering has a better availability of their information on the Web, as well to define which of these courses stands out in relation to the use of their information, which has been outstanding in respect to its impact factor and which offers a greater number of links that serve as a source of information for its users, contributing, in its turn, with the navigability of the same network. In summary, it is asserted that the webometric study presents promising results, which are able to achieve the proposed objectives, as well as identify the factors that contribute significantly to the good visualization of these sites in the network, thus helping the spread of information and scientific communication through the use of the Web.

Evolução, avaliação e validação do software RoboEduc

Considering the transition from industrial society to information society, we realize that the digital training that is addressed is currently insufficient to navigate within a digitized reality. As proposed to minimize this problem, this paper assesses, validates and develops the software RoboEduc to work with educational robotics with the main differential programming of robotic devices in levels, considering the specifics of reality training . One of the emphases of this work isthe presentation of materials and procedures involving the development, analysis and evolution of this software. For validation of usability tests were performed, based on analysis of these tests was developed version 4.0 of RoboEduc

O ambiente virtual na formação inicial de professores de alemão como apoio para o ensino e a aprendizagem da língua e a reflexão sobre ações docentes

Estudiosos dos campos da Educação, da Linguística Aplicada e da Formação de Professores de Línguas insistem hoje na grande importância da inclusão de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TICs) na formação inicial, bem como na necessidade de promover o desenvolvimento do pensamento crítico-reflexivo dos futuros professores. Tomando como pressupostos teóricos estudos acerca das características da sociedade de informação, dos ambientes virtuais e da formação de professores, este trabalho tem como objetivo discutir possibilidades oferecidas pela plataforma Moodle de aprendizagem na formação inicial de professores de alemão. Para tanto, apresentaremos diferentes formas de uso de ambientes virtuais e de ferramentas neles disponíveis, que demonstraram ser de grande valor no processo de formação de licenciandos, tanto em língua alemã, quanto durante suas práticas iniciais. As experiências apontam para um valor inestimável de ambientes virtuais no acompanhamento de licenciandos no processo de aprendizagem da língua e nas primeiras experiências com a docência.

Práticas de letramento digital de professores em formação: demandas, saberes e impactos

Over the last decades, the digital inclusion public policies have significantly invested in the purchase of hardwares and softwares in order to offer technology to the Brazilian public teaching institutions, specifically computers and broadband Internet. However, the teachers education to handle these artefacts is put away, even though there is some demand from the information society. With that, this dissertation chooses as an object of study the digital literacy practices performed by 38 (thirty-eight) teachers in initial and continuous education by means of the extension course Literacies and technologies: portuguese language teaching and cyberculture demands. In this direction, we aim at investigating the digital literacy practices of developing teachers in three specific moments: before, while and after this extension action with the intent to (i) delineate the digital literacy practices performed by the collaborators before the formative action; (ii) to narrate the literacy events made possible by the extension course; (iii) to investigate the contributions of the education course to the collaborators teaching practice. We sought theoretical contributions in the literacy studies (BAYNHAM, 1995; KLEIMAN, 1995; HAMILTON; BARTON; IVANIC, 2000), specifically when it comes to digital literacy (COPE, KALANTZIS, 2000; BUZATO, 2001, 2007, 2009; SNYDER, 2002, 2008; LANKSHEAR & KNOBEL, 2002, 2008) and teacher education (PERRENOUD, 2000; SILVA, 2001). Methodologically, this virtual ethnography study (KOZINETS, 1997; HINE, 2000) is inserted into the field of Applied Linguistics and adopts a quali-quantitative research approach (NUNAN, 1992; DÖRNYEI, 2006). The data analysis permitted to evidentiate that (i) before the course, the digital literacy practices focused on the personal and academic dimensions of their realities at the expense of the professional dimension; (ii) during the extension action, the teachers collaboratively took part in the hybrid study sessions, which had a pedagogical focus on the use of ICTs, accomplishing the use of digital literacy practices - unknown before that; (iii) after the course, the attitude of the collaborator teachers concerning the use of ICTs on their regular professional basis had changed, once those teachers started to effectively make use of them, promoting social visibility to what was produced in the school. We also observed that teachers in initial education acted as more experienced peers in collaborative learning process, offering support scaffolding (VYGOTSKY, 1978; BRUNER, 1985) to teachers in continuous education. This occurred because of the undergraduates actualize digital literacy practices were more sophisticated, besides the fact being integrate generation Y (PRENSKY, 2001)

Sociedade da Informação: avanços e retrocessos no acesso e no uso da informação

The Information Society (IS) may be taken as a geopolitical organization which started after the Third Industrial Revolution, having direct impact on the use of information and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The expression arose as techno-social paradigm change in the post-industrial society, aiming to use information as currency to the society-in-progress at that time. In Brazil it has become stronger with the Programa Sociedade da Informação no Brasil-Livro Verde, lunched by the Ministerio da Ciência e Tecnologia, in September 2000 without any discussion with the civil society to formulate the main document. Our main goal in this article is to discuss the Information Society in contemporary times, and also the organized and conscious use of information, looking for key-concepts to a better understanding of it, from some topics as digital inclusion-exclusion to the use of digital informational resources.