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Literacy is a complex term that involves an array of intertwined processes, including motivation. Students who lack this internal willingness often fail to engage with books and other literacy-related content, which in turn negatively affects their learning outcomes. Though several arts-based strategies have been shown to improve students’ involvement in reading, these approaches can be difficult and time consuming to implement. Murder on Mansion Hill is a digital tabletop game designed to weave together literacy-improving creative techniques such as storytelling, collage, and co-design in a cohesive manner. By blending these strategies with the motivational benefits of gameplay, Mansion Hill encourages players to take a highly active role in developing and sharing imaginative narratives, helping them to view stories as an enjoyable and rewarding outlet they can share with friends. After a series of improvements made through player feedback, players felt the game helped them overcome fear of judgment, engage with narrative in new multimodal ways, and bond with peers.

The long term aspiration to develop a bionic eye was agreed by the National Health Strategy at the Australian 2020 summit in April 2008. The Australian Research Council awarded part of the agreed funding to our collaborative group.

As collaborative embedded systems operate autonomously in highly dynamic contexts, they must be able to handle uncertainties that can occur during operation. On the one hand, they must be able to handle uncertainties due to the imprecision of sensors and the behavior of data-driven components for perceiving and interpreting the context to enable decisions to be made during operation. On the other hand, uncertainties can emerge from the collaboration in a collaborative group, related to the exchange of information (e.g., context knowledge) between collaborative systems. This chapter presents methods for modeling uncertainty early in development and analyzing uncertainty during both design and operation. These methods allow for the identification of epistemic uncertainties that can occur when various, potentially heterogeneous systems are required to collaborate. The methods also enable graphical and formal modeling of uncertainties and their impact on system behavior (e.g., in the course of dynamic traffic scenarios). Furthermore, this chapter investigates the quality of outputs issued by data-driven models used to equip collaborative embedded systems with uncertainty-resilient machine learning capability.

The secondary forms of hypertension are not so common. In the presence of a clinical suspicion, patients should be rapidly screened with diagnostic tests as suggested by guidelines. It appears to be of particular relevance to the presence or absence of blood pressure-related target organ damage and to estimate the present and the 10 years cardiovascular risk of these patients. This assessment is useful to decide the time to act, the need for specialists to refer to or a collaborative group (endocrinologist, surgeon, interventional radiologist, neurologist, internist), and the appropriate blood pressure threshold, the additional therapies to reduce cardiovascular risk. Despite appropriate therapy or removal of the secondary cause of hypertension, blood pressure may remain high, suggesting that irreversible vascular remodeling has taken place.

This book captures the 22-year interactions of the longest-standing collaborative group in education who came together as teachers guided by a professor within the context of a $60 million dollar school reform project in the fourth largest urban center in the United States. The relationships evolved and matured into an informal knowledge community of peers co-examining their work. The volume’s introduction begins with a brief overview of the Portfolio Group’s formation in 1998 and introduction to the authors.

Passive behavior in collaborative group settings is often associated with negative or no contributions to the group (social loafing). This paper examines low and high participation levels of students in a virtual collaborative group setting within a global, STEM-focused digital makerspace community. The results of using epistemic network analysis show that both high and low participation levels contributed to the overall balance of the group discourse, overcoming social loafing behavior. High participation level students provided social aspects that contributed to the development of a safe social space for sharing, while low level participation provided content focused dialogue for the group.

To promote the performance of cooperative learning, this study proposes an online multi-user real-time co-reading system. Through this platform, it assists the teacher and students to increase the coordinative degree of learning activities such that the flipped learning can be seamlessly performed inside or outside the classroom. The multi-user real-time co-reading system is based on the skill of WebSocket to let learners simultaneously watch streaming videos on YouTube almost without delay. This can provide the teacher to guide the student watching the learning video and then get back the feedback from whole class or cooperative groups. According to the feedback, the teacher is able to understand immediately the students’ learning condition so that the teacher can adjust the learning material to improve students’ learning effect and interest. When students have a learning problem, they can discuss or share the ideas with other members in the chatroom. In addition, the greatest feature of the system is the grouping mechanism different from Skype and JoinNet. The teacher can rearrange cooperative groups based on students’ learning condition by their learning feedback from system to give an ideal grouping such that most of students can take higher advantage during their flipped learning.

The purpose of this paper is to address two main concerns in mathematics education. The first is finding ways of bridging the gap between the worldviews of a university research team and secondary school mathematics teachers. The second is meaningful and implementable ways of introducing technological tools in regular classrooms in order to teach and explore functional relationships. Whereas these two issues have been discussed in the literature, this contribution blends these two issues in the context of Argentina while proposing general insights for the mathematics education community at large. This paper outlines and describes the different stages of the formation and functioning of a collaborative team of researchers and teachers and discusses some didactical complexities encountered.

E-learning has become an essential element in education today. This chapter reports the tactile experience with simulated 3D learning environments in an English department at a Hong Kong university. With the belief that multimedia instruction and multimedia learning can help learners’ construction of knowledge, we used Second Life to supplement three English courses in the department. Second Life can be used for sharing knowledge, demonstrating language functions, initiating instant communication and enabling peer assessment in the learning process. Various student activities were carefully designed, such as knowledge hunting, intercultural communication, peer assessment and assimilation of workplace operation. The tasks can either be solitary individual activities or collaborative group activities. In order to determine whether the students are motivated to use Second Life and the 3D multimedia environment is more effective than a traditional classroom, different research instruments were used to obtain student feedback. The data reveals that more than half of the students regard virtual learning activities in Second Life stimulating, interesting, interactive and entertaining.

“Learning is concerned with ideas, their structure and the evidence for them. It is not simply the acquisition of correct responses, a verbal repertoire or a set of behaviours. There is considerable evidence that they [students’ personal scientific conceptions] are not readily abandoned, but are retained together with the accepted scientific view” (McDermott, Phys Today:24–32, 1984). “Basic knowledge gain under conventional instruction is essentially independent of the professor” (Halloun and Hestenes, Am J Phys 53:1043–1055, 1985a). The work of Halloun and Hestenes ((1985a), Am J Phys 53:1043–1055) appeared shortly after the paper of McDermott ((1984), Phys Today:24–32).

In this chapter we discuss methods, which help students change their way of learning and take an active role in science courses.

Irradiation of the whole breast in women who have undergone breast-conserving surgery (BCS) has long been a standard of care in the treatment of early breast cancer. This practice is predominantly based on the local control and survival gains demonstrated by the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group (EBCTCG) meta-analyses [1, 2]. These are based on data from 10,801 women treated in 17 randomised trials of BCS plus or minus whole-breast irradiation (WBI) and demonstrate that the addition of WBI to BCS approximately halves the risk of local recurrence at 10 years (from 35% to 19%) and reduces the risk of breast cancer death at 15 years by around one sixth (from 25% to 21%). In women with pathologically node-negative disease (n = 7287), the risk of local recurrence was reduced from 31% to 16% at 10 years and the risk of breast cancer death from 21% to 17% at 15 years. In women with node-positive breast cancer (n = 1050), radiotherapy reduced the 10-year risk of local recurrence from 64% to 43% and the 15-year risk of breast cancer death from 51% to 43%. Consistent with previous meta-analyses, the prevention of four local recurrences at 10 years prevented one breast cancer death at 15 years.

The Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis (GRAPPA) was established in 2003 as an international collaborative group focused on psoriatic disease. GRAPPA has matured and become the foremost research and education society for psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis in the world, involving dermatologists and rheumatologists from many countries. GRAPPA collaborates with other societies including the ACR, EULAR, SPARTAN, ASAS, and OMERACT in fostering its goals. As an investment in the future, GRAPPA nurtures young researchers and clinicians interested in psoriasis and PsA in order to develop the next generation of leaders in these fields of medicine.

Asynchronous participation in volunteering social systems is mainly based on various communication and collaboration tools. Supporting creativity in such groups during the process of concept generation is one major challenge to reach high quality working results. This paper presents a collaboration tool supporting the creative process of concept generation. The solution focuses the support of a concrete social system with loose structures and that aims open participation, as discussed in a case study. At the end, the paper shows an evaluation of the solution itself with regards to the described social system.

Collaborative learning is a process in which two or more individuals interact in order to learn or attempt to learn something. The success of the process depends heavily on the way in which the individuals are engaged in a community, i.e. where the process takes place. Individuals in the community are grouped into small clusters that i) posses homogeneous properties and ii) emphasize the diversity inside the group, allowing flourishing of diverse points of view. In this work we focus on the formation of groups of individuals. More specifically, we apply genetic algorithms in the formation process in order to deal with the high level of complexity. We developed a prototype to evaluate the approach and the results are discussed.

The BCM method represents SME’s perspective in the BCN approach. The customer’s perspective is shown and their needs for access to key strategic information. The current chapter focuses on the service provider’s perspective, which is the coordinator of the BCG (Benchmarking Collaborative Group), responsible for the quality, completeness and usefulness of provided strategic information. The BSI (Broker of Strategic Information) is the coordinator of the group and an expert in the field of company competitiveness, whose knowledge and experience support the activities of the BCG to improve the competitiveness of its members. The mutual benefit of the cooperation lies in the preparation of useful strategic information by the BSI and its subsequent delivery to the BCG, for a fee. From the BSI’s perspective, it is evident that providing a chargeable service results in benefits. They will be the greater, the larger the number of serviced customers. The above statement leads to the concept of the MBSI method (Method of Brokering Strategic Information), which goes beyond the coordination of a single BCG and constitutes providing chargeable information services in the field of company competitiveness.

This article aims to investigate how students use new technology in collaborative group work and tries to measure what factors impact students’ satisfaction with overall group collaboration. In particular, this study aims to investigate the following research questions: What are the factors (including challenges) that influence the students’ overall satisfaction with collaboration? Does the usage of e-collaboration tools and social media usage influence collaboration satisfaction? The findings of the study are summarized in a model that point towards the main factors influencing student overall group work satisfaction.