The paper reports a study of a videoconference-based environment in decentralized university education and factors contributing to the success of teaching and learning in the environment. The focus of the paper is on the role of a person having the formal responsibilities of a technician. An ethnographic study conducted over the course of a year revealed that the contribution of this person far exceeded the scope of formal responsibilities. The person, who was acting in the setting as a facilitator, was found to possess expertise, which was critically important for supporting interaction between remote participants at several levels, such as attention management, time management, acquisition of setting-specific skills, and coordination within a larger institutional context. The findings suggest that "supra-situational" activities can be important factors for the successful functioning and development of emerging learning environments.
Over the past decades a number of new perspectives on public administration have emerged, for instance New Public Service, New Public Governance, and Digital Era Governance. Several of these perspectives seem to have the concept of co-production in common, implying that the public sector engages citizens to take part in the design and execution of services. A rather new way to achieve co-production in the public sector has been to utilize crowdsourcing or social media monitoring. However, the way these “methods” have been implemented in public sector is often associated with difficulties, and to overcome some of them we propose an Internet of Things (IoT) approach that hopefully will create improved conditions for data-driven business development. At present, the approach is tested in a local government in northern Sweden in which we have set up a Low Power Wide Area Network designed for wireless battery-operated sensors. Although the test is still in an initial stage, results so far are promising and using sensor data in business development may be one way to improve public sector services. However, our test also shows that there are some issues that are of importance when designing and using IoT in public spaces. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of affordance can be useful to understand how we design and implement sensors in public spaces.
The past decades a number of new perspectives on public administration have emerged, for instance New Public Service, New Public Governance and Digital Era Governance. Several of these perspectives seem to have the concept of co-production in common, implying that the public sector engages citizens to take part in the design and execution of services. A rather new way to achieve co-production in the public sector has been to utilize crowdsourcing or social media monitoring. However, the way these 'methods' has been implemented in public sector is often associated with difficulties, and to overcome some of them we propose an Internet of Things (IoT) approach that hopefully will create improved conditions for data-driven business development, and innovative citizen sourcing. At present, the approach is tested in a local government in northern Sweden in which we have set up a Low Power Wide Area Network (LoRa) designed for wireless battery-operated sensors. Although the test is still in an initial stage, results so far are promising and combining IoT and social media may be one way of creating co-production of public sector services.
The objective of this paper is to present empirical findings suggesting that it may be easier to develop a citizen service than to create more effective administrative procedures. Our starting point is a case study in which we followed a large strategically important development project in a Swedish municipality. The project aims to improve both citizen service and the municipality's internal effectiveness. Its main objective is to develop a Citizen Service Unit (CSU) that works as a one-stop-shop collecting service requests from citizens in one channel. According to the citizens the CSU clearly is a success. In the citizen survey we conducted the service of the CSU is rated very high. The answering rate has increased to 85%, every request is recorded in a document and workflow system and the citizen receives fast feedback from a handling officer at the responsible office. From an organizational perspective the CSU is not at all a success. On the managerial level there is a consensus on why and how they should change within their offices. On lower levels, however, clear roles, new work routines and routines for the communication between the CSU and handling officers to a large extent have been missing. Therefore, we suggest the following lessons to be learned: (1) Pay equal attention to the front-office and the back-office perspective. Reengineered business processes and new work routines will not show up by themselves, and (2) When developing one-stop-shops as the CSU make sure to also develop models for the relationship between the one-stop-shop and the rest of the organization.
National, regional and local governments are currently positioning themselves to be part of the Internet revolution, and as technology improves, greater attention is being given to its use in developing the business of governments. However, this aspect does not seem to have been an object of interest for university education. Developments have been done on the operational level where net based learning platforms and environments have been introduced, but strategically universities still seem to be organised from a supply oriented perspective. Hence, few methods and tools are developed for student driven development of lifelong learning. This paper presents three models for improving universities ability to develop demand oriented lifelong learning for its students. The first model considers the idea of a one-stop shop at universities. Today potential students communicate with different units/actors; student service, study counsellors, teachers, directors of undergraduate studies, etc. Currently common information systems, which collects and records requests from students are lacking. This type of information system could be similar to a customer-relation management system and help the organisation to make strategic decisions based on real needs. The second approach considers efficient models for development and maintenance of courses delivered over multiple channels. The objective is to generate the necessary foundation for making decisions based on student needs that is of practical and financial value to the organisation. The third model aims at finding private-public partnerships that deliver different forms of educational solutions. These aspects are all of importance when developing a sustainable strategic development of universities.
This paper focus on the preconditions for life long learning in network learning environments.There is currently a large discrepancy between the design of technology enhanced learningsettings and actual use of technology, which can constrain the ability to deliver sustainable andefficient lifelong learning. Despite the flexibility within information and communication technologymost designed virtual environments are highly static in their function of supportingcommunication, coordination and collaboration. Further, many national ICT-initiatives in schoolsand universities have had little impact of educational practices.The paper investigates in methods for understanding aspects of interactions and practicesamong different actors in virtual learning settings. Concretely, the objective has been tounderstand what strategies/practices people use to manage collaboration in technologyenhanced learning settings. As a consequence it is of importance to study the affordances ofvarious information technologies and how different actors handle it. Affordances is hereregarded as pre-condition for virtual learning settings which give the designer an understandingof the space of opportunities technical artefacts has in a curtain environments. Technologyaffordance has its origin from Gibson (1986) but has been elaborated within a cognitivistapproach (Norman 1988) and activity theory approach (Berentsen and Trettvik 2002) The paperuses an ethnographical approach observing teachers and students interacting in networkedlearning environments. Specifically, the relationship between artefacts, users and environmenthas been observed by focusing on breakdowns in interaction and coordination. The resultsshow that current work practices/experiences and ways of interacting with technology influencethe space of opportunities in the learning setting.
Design of learning spaces has to correspond to users’ needs and goals, how current and future practices evolve in them and users’ appropriation of new technologies. Financial constraints, increased diversity among students, more and more students taking part-time and flexible learning options, etc. have created new challenges for the design of learning spaces in higher education. In this new context innovative technologies are also emerging and the ways people communicate, coordinate and collaborate are continuously transforming and changing, which affect learning space design.
Our empirical data consist of focus group interviews with students and directors of studies. Students preferred learning spaces that integrate formal learning activities with more informal and leisure activities. Directors favoured spaces that integrate their roles as teachers, researchers and administrators. Based on the results of the focus group interviews we designed three different learning spaces supporting classroom teaching as well as more informal learning, which allow students to perform both individual and group activities. The learning spaces described are not yet evaluated. We believe that the appropriation of a learning space is a complex process. Hence, when evaluating the use of learning spaces it is essential to understand users’ practices, their needs and goals and their use of learning resources.
This paper presents a case study on workplace learning were Swedish and Norwegian public authorities participated in an academic course in business process modelling. The aim has been to develop an un- derstanding of how partners in a transnational project can build bridges between the academic teaching and the students’ local learning at work. A sociocultural framework was applied in the study focusing on the use of tools, the building of knowledge and learning in the zone of proximal development, the crossing of boarders, and interaction and networking between activities. The source of data consisted of inter- views, surveys, observations, data from learning management system, and student’s reports. Analyse of the data was based on four dialogical learning mechanisms – identification, coordination, reflection and transformation. Our findings show that students’ local cases acted as key drivers for their developmental process, as the course transformed from distribution of information to case based knowledge building process at local work places. A mutual learning process occurred when teacher and students taught each other in a zone of proximal development. Further, the use of business model techniques made the inter- pretation of academic discipline easier, since it created a common language that served as a foundation for shared understanding when they discussed their local cases.
The paper deals with the use of mobile technology in decentralized university education. In order to support individual and collective activities we have conducted a study, which elaborates the shift between private and public dimensions of information. To approach the problem we have used the notion of grounding and Vygotskys’ cultural approach and conducted a study where student groups are set out to construct individual and collective concept maps in PDA’s and desktop computers. The study show that personal technologies has potential features to enhance learning, as they are (1) present both in individual and collective phases of a learning activity, and (2) a support for sharing individually created representations with in a group and moreover (3) play different roles in the process of grounding.
Orre, C J. Hedestig, U. & Kaptelinin, V. (2001), Mobile technology and the social context of distance learning. In proceedings of "ED-MEDIA 2001 -World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications", 25-30 June 2001, Tampere, Finland.
The paper deals with the use of personal technologies in decentralized university education. Decentralized education, delivered to off campus students located in the same geographical area, is a hybrid genre combining features of both on campus and distance education. The paper reports two studies. The first study focussed on communication patterns among students in a regular decentralized education setting. It was shown that (a) there are obstacles preventing the students from developing communities of practice, and (b) some of the obstacles are likely to be eliminated to alleviated with personal technologies helping the students to get an access to various resources and to communicate to each other. The second study included providing a student group with a set of PDAs and analyzing the impact of the technology on students' learning and communication patterns. The prospects for using personal technologies in decentralized education are discussed.
In this paper, we propose the necessity to expand the concept of semiformal systems in collaborative environments. We have through extensive empirical work identified a number of salient dimensions that points towards need of broaden the space of possible actions for the users. The complexity of collaborative processes and the trend of increased use of mobile technologies have been concretized in a collaborative learning system, the MOVE system. The implication of interconnecting stationary and mobile devices in MOVE has provided a technological support for critical transitions between participants in collaborative activities.
The main objective of the Bitstream project was to create a transnational platform for capacity building and exchange of experiences in the area of innovative business development. This includes capacity building for staff in the public sector in Norway and Sweden. The project deliverables has been to accomplish