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The Cisco Networking Academy (CNA) is a private-public partnership between Cisco and thousands of educational institutions in over 160 countries. Cisco provides a comprehensive e-learning package for integration into courses at educational institutions, which designate local instructors to deliver a mixture of hands-on and online instruction in basic computer networking. One key e-learning tool in this package, provided free to all students and instructors in the CNA, is Packet Tracer (PT) 5.0. PT 5.0 has extensive network simulation, visualization and collaboration features. Three features of PT 5.0 are particularly relevant for a CNA instructor community of practice (CoP): an authoring capability called the activity wizard, a multi-user capability that allows interconnection of different users' virtual networks, and an open application programming interface (API) which allows development of e-learning applications based on PT 5.0. To support instructor activities around these features, a pilot collaboration web site, the PT Portal, for 500 instructors and developers, has been operating since February 2008. It will be evaluated by November 2008 using a CoP framework. During this pilot, instructors have been active as users, authors, and co-developers. After evaluation, the portal will be redesigned with a goal of scaling to support the entire CNA community of over fifteen thousand instructors. Enabling, supporting and optimizing interactions in the portal are considered important for the instructional effectiveness of the PT 5.0 tool. We seek to encourage the development of the community by emphasizing interaction design with Web 2.0 technologies. The preliminary evaluation and redesign results will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cisco Networking Academy (CNA) is a private-public partnership between Cisco and thousands of educational institutions in over 160 countries. Cisco provides a comprehensive e-learning package for integration into courses at educational institutions, which designate local instructors to deliver a mixture of hands-on and online instruction in basic computer networking. One key e-learning tool in this package, provided free to all students and instructors in the CNA, is Packet Tracer (PT) 5.0. PT 5.0 has extensive network simulation, visualization and collaboration features. Three features of PT 5.0 are particularly relevant for a CNA instructor community of practice (CoP): an authoring capability called the activity wizard, a multi-user capability that allows interconnection of different users' virtual networks, and an open application programming interface (API) which allows development of e-learning applications based on PT 5.0. To support instructor activities around these features, a pilot collaboration web site, the PT Portal, for 500 instructors and developers, has been operating since February 2008. It will be evaluated by November 2008 using a CoP framework. During this pilot, instructors have been active as users, authors, and co-developers. After evaluation, the portal will be redesigned with a goal of scaling to support the entire CNA community of over fifteen thousand instructors. Enabling, supporting and optimizing interactions in the portal are considered important for the instructional effectiveness of the PT 5.0 tool. We seek to encourage the development of the community by emphasizing interaction design with Web 2.0 technologies. The preliminary evaluation and redesign results will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design and realization of health monitoring applications has attracted the interest of large communities both from industry and academia. Currently many cardiac diseases are unpredictable; remote and continuous health monitoring for reliable detection of these problems becomes very useful for older people and patients. Clearly, the correct functioning of a health monitoring application is very critical for the safety of patients, hence their practical application calls for stringent dependability requirements which need to be assessed against potential failure modes. The paper describes a dependability analysis of a long-term wearable vital signs monitoring system which can real-time measure physiological signs such as SpO2 (saturation of arterial oxygen) equipped with Bluetooth connection. We propose a system architecture for pervasive healthcare that will open up new opportunities for continuous and reliable monitoring of assisted and independent-living residents by means of a set of services already included in Uranus middleware and of new added services to achieve a higher dependability level. Finally we propose a Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) to study the possible failure modes for this kind of system and to perform the dependability analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]