Since computers were first introduced in the late 1960’s there has been continued debate on the impact of technology, organisations and staff within those organisations. Enid Mumford was one of the key researchers who looked at the Socio-Technical implications through the decades, and as part of her research she developed the ETHICS method to help improve the integration of technology in organi...

There are both technical and social issues regarding the design of sustainable scientific software. Scientists want continuously evolving systems that capture the most recent knowledge while developers and architects want sufficiently stable requirements to ensure correctness and efficiency. A sociotechnical ecosystem provides the environment in which these issues can be traded off.

We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explic...

1Performance Analysis of Telecommunication Systems research group Universiteit Antwerpen and iMinds Interdisciplinary institute for Technology Middelheimlaan 1, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium. [email protected] 2School of Engineering, Aalto University Otakaari 4, 00076 Aalto, Helsinki, Finland. [email protected] 3Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking National Research ...

The focus of this paper is how to evaluate the pedagogical soundness of a mobile learning environment in which many users (both teachers and learners) may not have previously encountered mobile technology, so may be uncertain how best to deploy it to achieve their goals. Drawing on concepts from Activity Theory and the socio-cognitive engineering method described by Sharples (2000), it describe...

If socio-technical congruence can bring about benefits such as better performance to a software development project, then actions that improve the level of congruence have a potential to increase the overall project value. However, those actions may also incur a cost, and bring additional risks into the project. We propose a number of alternative actions for increasing sociotechnical congruence...

CSCL is based on the idea that computer applications can scaffold and implement advanced socio-cognitive processes for knowledge sharing and knowledge building. But do we really understand these processes that are supposed to be implemented? This paper will focus on the "epistemological infrastructure" of CSCL. We will analyze three models of innovative knowledge communities in order to better ...

This paper is an invitation to carry out science and engineering for a class of socio-technical systems where individuals — who may be human or artificial entities — engage in purposeful collective interactions within a shared web-mediated social space. We put forward a characterization of these systems and introduce some conceptual distinctions that may help to plot the work ahead. In particul...

Although known item searching for music can be dealt with by searching metadata using existing text search techniques, human subjectivity and variability within the music itself make it very difficult to search for unknown items. This paper examines these problems within the context of text retrieval and music information retrieval. The focus is on ascertaining a relationship between music rele...

The Internet is rapidly transforming a range of human activities; socio-cognitive theory assumes that engagement in transformed activities, over time, transforms human cognition. Four hundred and six college students completed four modified cognitive assessment system subtests, each assessing one dimension of the PASS model of cognitive processing (i.e., planning, attention, simultaneous and su...