Sociotechnical System Design for Learning

CompILE is a sociotechnical “comprehensive interactive learning environment” system for personal knowledge management and visualization that represents the growing collective knowledge an individual gathers throughout his or her lifespan. A network of intelligent agents connects the user and his or her inhabited knowledge space to external information sources and a multitude of fellow users. Following a brief perspective on educational technology, concepts of human-computer interaction, and a description of CompILE, this chapter will introduce CompILE as a sociotechnical system supported by an enriched design process. From an educational perspective, CompILE can bridge the digital divide by creating community, embracing culture, and promoting a learning society.

Technology and Continuing Professional Education

Social Information Technology (SIT) can allow individuals, dispersed both in time and place, to connect via the Internet. Consequently, the use of online networks is very appealing to Continuing Professional Education (CPE) providers. However, our findings seem to have revealed an underlying reality overshadowed by this hype. Our experience, as both providers and researchers of online CPE to a range of healthcare workers, suggests that the reality of online networks is often far different from the planned learning objectives. In fact, we believe that learning in CPE must be assumed to be much more then the attainment of intangible concepts. Acquisition of static facts are useless if the learners do not have the understanding to apply them in apposite contexts and organisational settings. The use of new Web 2.0 approaches, such as social bookmarking and social networking, may well be an exciting potential development, but if busy professionals are to use SITs as an integral part of their daily personal and professional lives, further research into factors that facilitate and inhibit such usage is required.

Technology and Culture

This chapter discusses the deployment of e-learning technologies in the context of how they are helping towards preserving and disseminating knowledge on Indian cultural heritage. An analysis has also been offered as regards how the technologies like e-learning initiatives have their impact on sociocultural settings within Indian context. This chapter attempts to understand and frame Indian culture and experiences through ICT and e-learning practices, and how the differentiated learning needs of multicultural society can be addressed.

Measuring IS Success in SMEs in Samoa

Information technology (IT) can either increase or decrease the ‘digital divide.’ Developing nations, such as Samoa, can leverage their economies with investment in IT, but investment is often determined by past information systems (IS) success. Exploratory research was conducted into the assessment and measurement of IS success by small and medium sized enterprises in Samoa, and the effect on IT investment. It was found that information quality, system quality, use, user satisfaction and financial impacts were the main dimensions according to which success was assessed, while intention to use, and cultural impacts were not usually assessed. Culture acted more as a moderator of the assessment. Measurements focused more on system related measures. Assessment on all dimensions impacted on future investment in IT.

The Social Side of Security

The introduction of new technologies to accumulate large amounts of data has resulted in the need for new methods to secure organizational information. Current information security strategies tend to focus on a technology-based approach to securing information. However, this technology-based approach can leave an organization vulnerable to information security threats. Organizations must realize that information security is not necessarily a technology issue, but rather a social issue. Humans operate, maintain, and use information systems. Their actions, whether intentional or accidental, are the real threat to organizations. Information security strategies must be developed to address the social issue.

Musique Concrètization

For the past several years, a crisis over copyright and control of music distribution has been developing. The outcome of this crisis has tremendous implications not only for the fate of commercial and creative entities involved in music, but for the social reproduction of knowledge and culture more generally. Critical theories of technology are useful in addressing these implications. This chapter introduces the concept of “concretization” (Feenberg, 1999), and demonstrates how it can be mapped onto the field of current music technologies and the lives and work of the people using them. This reading of popular music technologies resonates strongly with themes arising out of current scholarship covering the crisis of copyright and music distribution. Reading music technology in this way can yield a lucid account of the diverse trajectories and goals inherent in heterogeneous networks of participants involved with music technologies. It can also give us not only a detailed description of the relations of various groups, individuals, and technologies involved in networks of music, but also a prescriptive program for the future maintenance and strengthening of a vibrant, perhaps less intensively commercialized, and radically democratized sphere of creative exchange.

Planning for the Worst, Bringing Out the Best? Lessons from Y2K

Organization theorist Lee Clarke (2005) argues when policy makers plan for disasters, they too often think in terms of past experiences and “probabilities.” Rather, policy makers, when planning to protect the infrastructure, should open their minds to worst-case scenarios; catastrophes that are possible but highly unlikely. Underpinned by a precautionary principle, such an approach to the infrastructure would be more likely to produce “out of the box” thinking and in so doing, reduce the impact of disasters that occur more frequently than people think. The purpose of this chapter is to consider the utility of Clarke’s worst-case planning by examining Y2K preparations at two US government agencies, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The data concerning Y2K come mostly from official US government sources, interviews, and media analysis. The chapter concludes that the thoroughness of worst-case planning can bring much needed light to the subtlety of critical complex and interdependent systems. But such an approach can also be narrow in its own way, revealing some of the limitations of such a precautionary approach. It potentially rejects reasonable efforts to moderate risk management responses and ignores the opportunity costs of such exhaustive planning.

The Reversal of Technology

Cities are technological artifacts. Since their massive proliferation during the industrial revolution and their transformation of sites for both physical and virtual connectivity during globalization, cities afford the possibility for propinquity through different interest groups and spaces including the distant-mobile relationships of a society where technology and movement predominates. This chapter will offer an overview of how technology is central to modern development, how technology has been conceptualized, and how virtual development (in terms of both access to the virtual world and the development of the infrastructure to provide this access) is yet another frontier best captured in the notion of technopolis and/or technocity as contextual factors that sustain social technologies. The pervasiveness of technology, the factors that affect the technological experience besides the rhetoric of infallibility and the taken-forgranted delivery of utility and efficiency will also be explored. By looking at the criticisms voiced against urban and virtual development about the loosening of social ties, I argue for a fluid interaction that considers the possibilities for additional and different, if not new social relations, that both physical and virtual interactions afford to urbanites: technosociability. This technosociability should be considered in light of a critical reading of the contextual factors and conditions that support it.

Cultural Variables and Instructional Engineering

This chapter discusses how cultural variables can be taken into account when designing computer-based learning environments (CLEs). Its purpose is to identify concrete recommendations to guide instructional engineering of computer-based learning for diverse cultures through a review of the literature on the subject. First, this chapter describes the background in which such recommendations have emerged, and identifies some of the issues underlying instructional design for diverse cultures. Then it introduces models and guidelines on how cultural variables can be taken into account when designing CLEs. Specific recommendations are organized using a method of instructional engineering for CLEs called MISA (Paquette, 2003) as a frame of reference. This is followed by a discussion on future trends and future research directions.

The Social Glue in Open Source

Open source has, of late been discussed as a most significant institutional disruption to the way software and, indeed, digital content, in general, evolves and dissipates through society. Credits and their due redemption play a vital yet often underrated role in the development and dissemination of open source. While credits in open source development are often of a rather elusive and informal nature (goodwill, reputation, indirect effects), formal credits have their inevitable role, too. On the one hand, less formal kinds of credits than money and the like often provide for a relatively efficient and viable way of accounting for credits in the development of large and complex software and technology projects. On the other hand, at the intersection of developer communities with end users, there is a distinct need for formal money-based interactions, because informal contracts and credit redemption do work well in communities, but less so in anonymous market contexts.