Search

With the rapid development of social platforms and human activities, people are now interested to solve their problems with the help of the social crowd-powered system. So, crowdsourcing has become a promising way of solving problems in a distributed manner within a specific time. Crowd workers pick up a task (simple or complex) and solve it with competing interest or collaboratively and receive an incentive (as monetary or non-monetary). In paid crowdsourcing platforms, crowd workers solve complex tasks and get remunerations through prior bidding or prior announcement of fee decided by the requester (task provider). For decomposable tasks, a single winner may not provide a significant solution to the requester due to the insufficient knowledge. So, we induce collaboration in competitive crowdsourcing markets to better handle decomposable-type tasks. In this paper, we propose an envelope game-based mechanism that ensures if the tasks are decomposable then the workers will be encouraged to collaborate with their subtasks and share their remunerations. This mechanism also increases the chance of receiving more number of cost-effective solutions. Thus both the requester and crowd workers get benefits from the system. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is evaluated through empirical analysis on simulated environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A smart bracelet that reacts to a person's heartbeat. A smart bench that invites passers-by to sit close. These and others are smart things, part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and people's lives. However, people are mainly IoT consumers and rarely given the possibility of becoming IoT creators. This paper presents a case study concerning the design of smart things for outdoor environments, with end users as the main creators. Ideas of smart things were collaboratively conceptualised by child end-users with a card-based board game. Their ideas were taken up in the form of inspiration cards within a bachelor's first-year course, by students coming from different high schools. Students started from children's ideas as inspiration triggers and collaboratively evolved some of them into interactive smart-thing prototypes. The paper concludes by reflecting on its results and drawing lessons for future editions of cross-generational workshops related to IoT design with end users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location-based activities can challenge citizens to explore their neighbourhood in new playful ways. This paper presents a classification of such playful activities based on the literature and experience gained (1) in co-creation sessions and (2) gameplay for neighbourhood exploration with citizens in the Hague. The location-based game designed for this purpose encouraged neighbourhood exploration and social interaction that went beyond the everyday normal. Results showed that citizens are specifically interested in activities that allow them to discover new information about, and places in, their neighbourhood when these are related to their own life. The results of this paper provide new knowledge on game design to inform designers on which type of interactions and activities foster neighbourhood exploration and social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Project-based learning is among the most common learning approaches aimed at conveying professional standards and best practices to students in programming courses. However, team projects commonly impose problems related to responsibility sharing, such as low effort or inequality in contributions. This paper presents a collaborative programming assessment system featuring a code quality assessment function with specific metrics to measure individual contributions. Student engagement data is used to detect nonconformities in collaboration using a learning analytical approach. Latent profile analysis was used to detect four theoretical team profiles differentiated by team effort (2 levels) and within-team collaboration (2 levels). We demonstrated the efficacy of assessing code to evaluate team dynamics and student behaviour, wherein efforts to resolve coding style failures can be used as a proxy by which to estimate the taskwork awareness of team members. Submission data from 146 students in 41 web-programming projects revealed four behavioural patterns that could potentially hinder the effective functioning of programming teams: free-riding, social loafing, the bystander effect, and lone wolves. We also demonstrated the applicability of automated programming assessment systems to the monitoring of learning progress, thereby facilitating timely interventions to correct difficulties at the team level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise Social Media (ESM) is thought to provide new capabilities for employees to establish and manage relationships with co-workers. However, little is known about how employees use these new capabilities, thus leading to performance variation. Drawing on a rich dataset from an ESM platform built in a Chinese high-tech company, this paper uses Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to examine how employees build their social networks on ESM platforms with the visibility affordance of ESM. The results reveal that (1) employees' networking behaviours on ESM platforms are limited by formal organisational boundaries such as department and hierarchical positions, and they tend to reproduce their working structures rather than to build new ties across horizontal and vertical boundaries enabled by ESM; (2) employees' networking behaviours are more likely to be influenced by their positions in formal hierarchy than by their informal hierarchies derived from their interactions on ESM; and (3) employees use ESM to reinforce their natural networking tendencies, including preferential attachment, closure and homophily. These findings extend our understandings of employees' social networking behaviours on ESM platforms and provide insights for managers to make better decisions on the design and implementation of ESM thus to achieve the expected benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current design approaches mainly focus on co-design activities for creating (novel) digital artefacts. Less attention is paid on implications of new technologies on people and their experiences. This paper proposes a conceptual framework aimed at describing and supporting systematic and sustained critical co-reflection on artefact use. It employs and expands ideas from design research and user-oriented design approaches to describe sources and nature of critical co-reflection and to discuss appropriate analytical lenses. Experience spaces are introduced as a complementary concept to design spaces. An experience space is a conceptual space emerging from the collaborative creation, manipulation, merging and discarding of experience-related descriptions of technology appropriation. From a critical reflective perspective, designers not only care about rich design spaces with diverse design proposals but also about rich experience spaces displaying diverse appropriation processes and a broad spectrum of users' perspectives on effects of artefact use. The paper suggests that artefact ecologies constitute the elements of experience spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advances in internet technologies and the emergence of crowdsourcing, organisations are now increasingly looking outside their boundaries for solving problems. Yet, the success of crowdsourcing depends on high-quality participation of crowdsourcing individuals and teams. In recent studies, examining the effect of simultaneous collaboration and competition mechanisms on individual and team performance in crowdsourcing has received considerable attention. But, none of these studies examined how different levels of collaboration affect team performance in crowdsourcing contests. In this paper, using a rich data set from a crowdsourcing platform, Kaggle.com, we study how team discussion-forum performance and solution-sharing performance affect its performance in online crowdsourcing contests. Our results suggest that team's discussion-forum performance and solution-sharing performance have significant effect on its competition performance. Our findings offer valuable theoretical and managerial implications for researchers and crowdsourcing sponsors who want to improve teams' performance in crowdsourcing contests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to exploit students' sentiments using different machine learning techniques is considered an important strategy for planning and manoeuvring in a collaborative educational environment. The advancement of machine learning technology is energised by the healthy growth of big data technologies. This helps the applications based on Sentiment Mining (SM) using big data to become a common platform for data mining activities. However, very little has been studied on the sentiment application using a huge amount of available educational data. Therefore, this paper has made an attempt to mine the academic data using different efficient machine learning algorithms. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (i) studying the sentiment polarity (positive, negative and neutral) from students' data using machine learning techniques, and (ii) modelling and predicting students' emotions (Amused, Anxiety, Bored, Confused, Enthused, Excited, Frustrated, etc.) using the big data frameworks. The developed SM techniques using big data frameworks can be scaled and made adaptable for source variation, velocity and veracity to maximise value mining for the benefit of students, faculties and other stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a detailed, first-ever, in-depth, data-driven, review of debates pertaining to international migration (IM) as depicted by cross-disciplinary records collected in Scopus. Accordingly, the paper also makes a case for the value added of bibliometric analysis and new ways of its application. Specifically, to gain a thorough understanding of issues, names, and topics that have contributed to the IM debate since 1963, bibliometric analysis was conducted on 12.663 procured records. The findings suggest that regardless of the depth and breadth of the analysis, it is doomed to remain partial. That is, when confronted with academic work not available in Scopus, this study concludes that more work needs to be done to ensure, on the one hand, interoperability of research data repositories, and on the other hand, synergies among the until now divided research-communities research and publishing in the field of IM. Only in this way, it is argued, will it be possible to ensure transparency of research artefacts, identify issues and problems silenced and/or under-researched in the field, and finally enable more efficient dialogue between academia and decision-makers, including international organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new computer-supported collaborative learning-based groupware is proposed for supporting problem-based collaborative learning in computer programming education setting. The geo-distributed learners can collaboratively with their tutor resolve the common programming problem within a shared workspace. The proposed system embeds some synchronous and asynchronous collaborative tools that allow learners and tutor to interact with each other to develop a shared source code of the program. This research work has two main objectives. First, it attempts to present the proposed groupware functionalities. Second, it discusses the experimental study adopted to assess the acceptability of the Groupware. Such study is an empirical method based on the model of unified theory of the acceptance and use of technology to determine learners' Behavioural Intention (BI) to accept to use such Groupware in Algerian higher education setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of serious games to improve collaborative skill transfer and retention has received considerable attention from scholars, web marketing practitioners and business consultants. Team rankings and learning progress in game learning analytics, however, have yet to be empirically examined. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to study the performance of competing teams in a web marketing serious game (Simbound), we highlight a combination of causal conditions (engagement, reach and profitability) affecting team rankings. This paper proposes a conceptual architecture of the forces that influence learning progress within a collaborative learning environment. This learning environment is studied for web marketing boot camps powered by Simbound at three European universities: Grenoble Alpes University (France), University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and Dunarea de Jos University of Galati (Romania). Gaining knowledge of cases through game learning analytics is valuable for two reasons: It emphasises the instructor’s role in mobilising players’ engagement, and it tests variability across cases, offering precursors of team performance rankings. This approach to collective skill retention highlights the moderating factors of team performance rankings, whilst purposely calibrating a gameable learning environment. This paper enriches our knowledge of how active experimentation in learning analytics metrics can develop skills for real business competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disasters present us with dynamic and emergent multi-stakeholder scenarios. Complex decision-making is supported by Emergency Management Organisation (EMO) 'command and control' disaster response systems that if pushed to failure, present problems in the development and monitoring of situational awareness. Nowhere is this more evident than when the general public use social media platforms to report crisis incidents when the official emergency management hotline (e.g. Triple Zero (000) in Australia) is overwhelmed or not available. This causes a number of issues for EMO as it is difficult to verify and determine the accuracy and veracity of social media posts and how to best incorporate the information within them into situational awareness for the assessment of and response to, an emergency incident. This paper analyses interview data from five Australian EMO that outlines and discusses these issues in detail. As a result of this analysis, we suggest that developing a supplementary 'repertoires of collaboration' approach to incorporating social media posts into the development of situational awareness during a disaster event, would help improve disaster response outcomes. We then recommend a way forward through the application of the Negotiated Arrangements for the Common Operating Picture (COP) in Extreme Events framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the potential of ICT to support reflective learning for professionals. We aggregated data collected in 20 field studies with 12 different applications, involving a total of 321 participants. The applications addressed individual reflection as well as collaborative reflection. Such a systematic analysis with different applications used across industry sectors and companies is unique in the current literature on computer-supported reflective learning in the workplace. Primarily, we assessed the reaction to reflection applications and their effectiveness regarding learning, behaviour change, and organisational impact. In addition, we investigated differences with respect to work experience. Results show that users had a positive reaction to the apps and perceived their use to be beneficial for their work by using them. In collaborative reflection an inexperienced employee can benefit from the experiences and perspectives of more experienced (co-)workers. In contrast, individual reflection was more profitable for more experienced workers. Notwithstanding the overall positive results, the actual implementation of reflection applications requires careful adaptation to the specific organisational and situational context, as well as introductory and accompanying measures to assure efficient and beneficial usage of the tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of patient behaviours (vital sign, physical action and emotion) is crucial to improve one's quality of life. The only solution for handling and managing millions of people's behaviours and health would be big data and IoT technology because most of the countries are lack of medical professionals. In this paper, a big data and IoT-based patient behaviour monitoring system have proposed. Qualitative studies are carried out on the selected behaviours analytics, cardiovascular disease identification and fall detection. At last, authors have summarised the general challenges like trust, privacy, security and interoperability as well as special challenges in various sectors: government, legislators, research institutions, information technology companies and patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the use of smartphones vs. laptops influences students' engagement, behaviour and experience watching academic videos in a collaborative classroom. Experiments were run in authentic teaching sessions with a total of 483 first-year higher education students. The methodology applied is a quasi-experimental design with post-test-only, being the independent variable, the device used to visualise the academic videos. Results indicate that the use of laptops has provided better results in terms of student's engagement with the videos, their collaborative behaviour and satisfaction with the device. Hence, the findings of this research suggest that the type of mobile device used in activities that consider the use of videos in a collaborative class need to be carefully chosen to maximise the student's comfortability – and in consequence, their engagement with the video-based learning activity and their positive behaviour and experience within the collaborative context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the application of technological innovation in higher education has become more and more widely spread, and technological innovation has been improving the level of education. In the research of higher education with innovation technology, one of the main focuses is on the dynamic data which can lay a foundation for the analysis of educational activities by learning analytics. The dynamic data created by technological innovation will become the key basis for analytical research and development in higher education. The methods and analysis results of learning analytics will directly affect decision-making and strategy about higher education. In this paper, we use bibliometric and visualisation methods to review the literature, in order to highlight the development of learning analytics in higher education. Using bibliometric analysis, our study depicts the development process of the main methods used in learning analytics, and summarises the current situation in this field, which increases the level of understanding provided by those studies. Finally, we summarise the research hotspots and study trends, which will be useful for future study in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on the design and development of QUESt, a platform that is aimed at enabling lay users to deploy web-based multi-page dynamic questionnaires. The platform requires little effort and no programming skills, as it uses a simple configuration file that can be expressed in an almost unstructured and text-based manner. We have validated the approach and platform in the healthcare domain, where the questionnaires were intended to solicit and collect both structured and unstructured feedback from large communities of practitioners in response to the sharing and dissemination of relevant case studies; more specifically in this paper we use a qualitative research approach, encompassing evaluation questionnaires and a particular kind of focus group, and the incremental prototype-based development that led to the current release of QUESt. The paper also reports on the experimentation of the platform in a real context, involving almost 100 orthopaedics, including the post-use evaluation of the participants. In light of this evaluation, we discuss the specific requirements of openness and flexibility that end-users ask for in order to be autonomous in developing their own tools for knowledge-sharing; in particular, we discuss the role of lightweight tools, like QUESt to support the dissemination and discussion of clinical case reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an application framework supporting collaborative handheld decision-making (CHDM). The main characteristics of the framework are: (1) extensive usage of visual elements and gestures; and (2) independence from specific decision-making methods, processes and tasks. The research departed from the analysis and systematisation of several CHDM scenarios, highlighting repeatable behaviour across multiple decision-making contexts. From these scenarios, we distilled a coherent set of common functional requirements organised in three main categories: process, macro- and micro-functionality. The proposed framework has been validated at length through the development of several CHDM tools. Six different tools are described in the paper. The main contribution of this work is a common foundation for developing CHDM tools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The almost unlimited access to educational information plethora came with a drawback: finding meaningful material is not a straightforward task anymore. Recommender algorithms can be used to make smart decisions in complex information systems and help the users decide upon useful materials; therefore, they become a promising area in academia and industry. The current paper presents a survey on educational recommender systems (RS): a set of analysis criteria are exposed and the technological specifications and challenges of each analysed system are provided, in the context of the main trends in the development of RS. Also, an ontology-based educational recommendation mechanism is proposed and its application to lifelong learning is highlighted, proving that RS can successfully support new learning paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study aimed to evaluate how differently co-located users perform and interact while solving problems by using existing and newly developed interaction mechanisms of a multi-touch tabletop system on a large-size tabletop display. Furthermore, this study aimed to investigate users’ perceived situation awareness due to the system. This study conducted one experiment and introduced three newly developed interaction mechanisms:two-way rubber band, drag-and-response,andcentre collection area.Two-way rubber band enables users not only to send but also to request digital objects. Drag-and-response allows users to accept or to reject digital objects sent by others; therefore, it eliminates conflicting situations and interference. Centre collection area stores, organises, and manages shared digital resources on a surface of a tabletop display, so that users have an overall picture of available resources. This paper discusses results of an experiment, research findings, and implications along with conclusions and several suggestions for future development and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different levels of cognitive conflict widely exist in the process of collaborative editing, affecting the result of editing. This can be seen especially in Wikipedia, the free-content encyclopedia edited by users collaboratively. Here, we used the method of exploratory case study to explore the influence of wiki-based cognitive conflict on the result of collaborative editing. Page quality was considered as the result of co-editing. By measuring cognitive conflict and calculating page quality of ‘Hong Kong MRT’ featured article, we found that different levels of conflict had different influence on page quality and the influence was changing with time variation. Our findings are concluded into four propositions, which highlight the role of cognitive conflict in affecting page quality. This paper provides the foundation for further revising and develops the theory by using the methods of verification research and statistical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As new technologies emerge that can bring older adults together with children, little has been discussed by researchers concerning the design methods used to create these new technologies. Giving both children and older adults a voice in a shared design process comes with many challenges. This paper details an exploratory study focusing on connecting generations through cooperative design (co-design) methods that can enable idea construction and elaboration to flourish. Design techniques were adapted that ranged from low-tech prototyping and sticky-note feedback to distributed collaboration. The critical finding in this research was that children and older adults need not only time together to start the collaboration but also time apart to further the collaboration at a distance. This case study research reports on how our methods evolved and how others can apply these methods for their own work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing systems engineering (SE) methodology and principles to the development of smart products has the potential of establishing a novel field of research. This paper summarises previous work in this area in order to define and characterise a revolutionary SE and social-networking framework for collaborative education, design and modelling of the next generation of smarter products. A conceptual framework and practical applications of SE approaches and social networking to support smarter product development is proposed. Future challenges that collaborative SE and interactive social networking techniques are likely to face in this domain are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]