A Metamodel for Collaboration Formalization

Part 11: Reference and Conceptual Models

O museu virtual Google Art Project : um estudo de caso em contexto de ensino-aprendizagem da educação visual

A educação na arte e pela arte confere a todos os seus intervenientes a estimulação da sua criatividade e da sua consciência cultural, proporcionando meios para se exprimirem e participarem ativamente no mundo que nos rodeia. A integração das tecnologias de informação e comunicação no processo de ensino-aprendizagem veio alargar o papel que a arte pode desempenhar neste processo, promovendo novas formas de aprender, de ensinar e de pensar. Assim, a utilização de ambientes virtuais em contexto educativo tem revelado um enorme potencial, sobretudo ao nível da comunicação e da interação entre alunos e obras de arte. Neste sentido, considerou-se importante desenvolver um estudo de caso em contexto de sala de aula da Educação Visual, promovendo uma aprendizagem baseada na articulação entre a observação, interpretação e análise da obra de arte e o museu virtual. Assim o principal objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar as potencialidades do Google Art Project, enquanto objeto de aprendizagem, na promoção da aprendizagem na área da literacia em artes. Para além disso, procurámos ainda avaliar se a utilização de ferramentas multimédia como o referido Google Art Project e o Quadro Interativo, constituem fatores de motivação na aprendizagem da disciplina de Educação Visual. Do ponto de vista metodológico desenvolvemos uma estratégia baseada na investigação-ação. Procurámos, por um lado, descobrir e compreender o significado de uma realidade vivida por um grupo de alunos e, por outro lado, refletir sobre a prática educativa com o intuito de a melhorar e transformar. Este estudo envolveu cinco turmas do sexto ano do ensino público. Para a recolha de dados utilizámos técnicas baseadas na conversação e na observação, no questionário e nas notas de campo. Os resultados deste estudo revelam que as ferramentas tecnológicas utilizadas podem efetivamente contribuir para a promoção da aprendizagem dos alunos na área da Educação Visual, mais concretamente ao nível do domínio da literacia artística, da representação e da interpretação visual.

Pillars and Elements to Develop an Open Business Model for Innovation Networks

Part 9: Innovation Networks

An Agile Innovation Framework Supported through Business Incubators

Part 9: Innovation Networks

Financial Statement Analysis for Enterprise Network Design

Part 8: Business Strategies Alignment

A Framework for Energy-Efficiency in Smart Home Environments

Part 7: Cyber-Physical Systems

Tourism Destination Management: A Collaborative Approach

Part 6: Engineering and Implementation of Collaborative Networks

Virtual Enterprise Process Management: An Application to Industrial Maintenance

Part 2: Behaviour and Coordination

Interoperable Resource Brokering with Policy-based Provisioning and Job Allocation

The increasing needs for computational power in areas such as weather simulation, genomics or Internet applications have led to sharing of geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources from commercial data centers and scientific institutions. Research in the areas of utility, grid and cloud computing, together with improvements in network and hardware virtualization has resulted in methods to locate and use resources to rapidly provision virtual environments in a flexible manner, while lowering costs for consumers and providers. However, there is still a lack of methodologies to enable efficient and seamless sharing of resources among institutions. In this work, we concentrate in the problem of executing parallel scientific applications across distributed resources belonging to separate organizations. Our approach can be divided in three main points. First, we define and implement an interoperable grid protocol to distribute job workloads among partners with different middleware and execution resources. Second, we research and implement different policies for virtual resource provisioning and job-to-resource allocation, taking advantage of their cooperation to improve execution cost and performance. Third, we explore the consequences of on-demand provisioning and allocation in the problem of site-selection for the execution of parallel workloads, and propose new strategies to reduce job slowdown and overall cost.

El aprendizaje en una comunidad en internet de profesores de español como segunda lengua: estudio etnográfico virtual de la comunidad Todoele

In the digital era the availability of resources for online learning has multiplied along with personal learning environments. Proof of this is the proliferation of phenomena in the internet like Open Educational Resources or the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and the vast diversity of Online Communities of Practice (OCoP). The former is the object of study in the present Thesis. As Juan Freire (2012: 71) wrote: “The education is already happening, specially outside of educational institutions and formal process of education.” The OCoP garnered attention in the research community during the last few years. And, according to published research, online communities are turning into an emerging phenomena not only for “digital natives” (White, 2011) but also for lifelong learning (Wenger et al, 2002; Dubé et al, 2006; Lai et al, 2006) and specially as a tool for teacher training (Garrido, 2003; Murua, 2015). Teachers develop, through these tools, networks of self support, share didactic material, and look for solutions to common problems while undertaking initiatives towards even more collaboration. The present thesis is a study of Comunidad Todoele (CT) one of the most reputable networks for Spanish as a Foreign Language Teachers (ELE, from it’s Spanish acronym). Currently the community has near 11,000 members and it’s main purpose is researching, describing, and theorising the formative processes that happen inside the network from the perspective of those experiencing it. Debate is centred on the questions: What relevant knowledge do the teachers get from the community? In which way are these processes of learning developed? In other words, How, and what, do teachers learn in these environment?..

Virtual knowledge brokering : describing the roles and strategies used by knowledge brokers in a pediatric physiotherapy virtual community of practice

Introduction: Knowledge transfer in pediatric rehabilitation is challenging and requires active, multifaceted strategies. The use of knowledge brokers (KBs) is one such strategy noted to promote clinician behavior change. The success of using KBs to transfer knowledge relies on their ability to adapt to ever-changing clinical contexts. In addition, with the rapid growth of online platforms as knowledge transfer forums, KBs must become effective in virtual environments. Although the role of KBs has been studied in various clinical contexts, their emerging role in specific online environments designed to support evidence-based behavior change has not yet been described. Our objective is to describe the roles of, and strategies used by, four KBs involved in a virtual community of practice to guide and inform future online KB interventions. Methods: A descriptive design guided this study and a thematic content analysis process was used to analyze online KB postings. The Promoting Action on Research in Health Sciences knowledge transfer framework and online andragogical learning theories assisted in the coding. A thematic map was created illustrating the links between KBs' strategies and emerging roles in the virtual environment. Results: We analyzed 95 posts and identified three roles: 1) context architect: promoting a respectful learning environment, 2) knowledge sharing promoter: building capacity, and 3) linkage creator: connecting research-to-practice. Strategies used by KBs reflected invitational, constructivism, and connectivism approaches, with roles and strategies changing over time. Discussion: This study increases our understanding of the actions of KBs in virtual contexts to foster uptake of research evidence in pediatric physiotherapy. Our results provide valuable information about the knowledge and skills required by individuals to fulfill this role in virtual environments.

Resiliencia y desempeño organizacional

El cambio hoy se reconoce como el principal reto que enfrentan las empresas. Desde diversas ciencias como la biología, la psicología y la dirección se vienen estudiando las diferentes variables que tienen relación con los procesos de ajuste y adaptación que los individuos y las organizaciones desarrollan cuando disrupciones de diverso tipo se materializan en el entorno. En las últimas décadas se ha contemplado el estudio de la resiliencia como una característica que pueden desarrollar las organizaciones. Por ello, es un tema de estudio interesante, tanto desde los individuos como desde las organizaciones. Se revisan en este artículo los conceptos de resiliencia, resiliencia individual y organizacional, así como las relaciones que surgen entre dichos conceptos para explicar el desempeño organizacional.

Data privacy in interoperability environments – a case study in the Portuguese healthcare sector

Data sharing between organizations through interoperability initiatives involving multiple information systems is fundamental to promote the collaboration and integration of services. However, in terms of data, the considerable increase in its exposure to additional risks, require a special attention to issues related to privacy of these data. For the Portuguese healthcare sector, where the sharing of health data is, nowadays, a reality at national level, data privacy is a central issue, which needs solutions according to the agreed level of interoperability between organizations. This context led the authors to study the factors with influence on data privacy in a context of interoperability, through a qualitative and interpretative research, based on the method of case study. This article presents the final results of the research that successfully identifies 10 subdomains of factors with influence on data privacy, which should be the basis for the development of a joint protection program, targeted at issues associated with data privacy.

Work environments implementation for genomic reporting and analytics

A global italian pharmaceutical company has to provide two work environments that favor different needs. The environments will allow to develop solutions in a controlled, secure and at the same time in an independent manner on a state-of-the-art enterprise cloud platform. The need of developing two different environments is dictated by the needs of the working units. Indeed, the first environment is designed to facilitate the creation of application related to genomics, therefore, designed more for data-scientists. This environment is capable of consuming, producing, retrieving and incorporating data, furthermore, will support the most used programming languages for genomic applications (e.g., Python, R). The proposal was to obtain a pool of ready-togo Virtual Machines with different architectures to provide best performance based on the job that needs to be carried out. The second environment has more of a traditional trait, to obtain, via ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) process, a global datamodel, resembling a classical relational structure. It will provide major BI operations (e.g., analytics, performance measure, reports, etc.) that can be leveraged both for application analysis or for internal usage. Since, both architectures will maintain large amounts of data regarding not only pharmaceutical informations but also internal company informations, it would be possible to digest the data by reporting/ analytics tools and also apply data-mining, machine learning technologies to exploit intrinsic informations. The thesis work will introduce, proposals, implementations, descriptions of used technologies/platforms and future works of the above discussed environments.

Development and testing of a virtual energy meter using the Labview Environment

The quantity of electric energy utilized by a home, a business, or an electrically powered device is measured by an electricity meter, also known as an electric meter, electrical meter, or energy meter. Electric meters located at customers' locations are used by electric providers for billing. They are usually calibrated in billing units, with the kilowatt hour being the most popular (kWh). Typically, they are read once each billing cycle. When energy savings are sought during specific times, some meters may monitor demand, or the highest amount of electricity used during a specific time. Additionally, some meters feature relays for load shedding in response to responses during periods of peak load. The amount of electrical energy consumed by users is measured by a Watt-hour meter, also known as an energy meter. To charge the electricity usage by loads like lights, fans, and other appliances, utilities put these gadgets everywhere, including in households, businesses, and organizations. Watts are a fundamental power unit. A kilowatt is equal to one thousand watts. One kilowatt is regarded as one unit of energy used if used for one hour. These meters calculate the product of the instantaneous voltage and current readings and provide instantaneous power. This power is distributed over a period and is used during that time. Depending on the supply used by home or commercial installations, these may be single or three phase meters. These can be linked directly between line and load for minor service measurements, such as home consumers. However, step-down current transformers must be installed for greater loads to handle their higher current demands.