Knowledge sharing and information security have become well-established concepts in academia and within organisations. Knowledge sharing aims to encourage individuals to share tacit and explicit knowledge with colleagues and stakeholders, yet on the other hand, information security initiatives aim to apply controls and restrictions to the knowledge that can be shared and how it can be shared, where the primary focus is usually on protecting explicit knowledge or information. This thesis draws attention to the largely unexplored and under-developed area of knowledge protection ; it investigates the paradoxical and concurrent nature of knowledge sharing and information security practices by exploring their relationship and understanding how this can affect an organisation and subsequently identifies ways of achieving a balance between the two practices. The empirical work was carried out through an interpretivist case study approach in the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) an organisation that combines knowledge and expertise from partnerships with academia, industry and the UK government, in order to deliver innovative low carbon solutions. A novel team-based action learning approach was developed to generate individual, team and organisational learning and to help initiate change; the data was collected from three project teams about their knowledge and experiences of knowledge sharing and information security practices, which was then analysed and further supplemented with the ETI s organisational perspective and the researcher s own experience of collaborating with the ETI to contextualise the findings. Eight predominant overarching themes were identified that play an important role in and influence the organisation s knowledge sharing and information security practices. When looking at the practices of knowledge sharing and information security independently at the ETI, proactive and conscious efforts towards achieving the goals of each practice are evident. Knowledge is recognised as the ETI s core product and its effective dissemination is key for the organisation s success, which is why there is a keen attitude towards improving knowledge sharing internally and externally. On the other hand, a great deal of importance is given to protecting valuable knowledge and meeting stakeholders confidentiality requirements, thus, there are good systems, access controls, and information restrictions in place. In addition, strict legal and approval processes to protect information value and accuracy are implemented. However, when both knowledge sharing and information security - practices are compared from a broader perspective, evidence of issues arising from their conflicting nature is evident. Moreover, operating in a complex governance structure with various expectations and contractual agreements with stakeholders regarding confidentiality, has created a protective culture in the organisation surrounding its knowledge, which causes a hindrance to formal and informal knowledge sharing (including both, tacit and explicit forms) and makes identifying opportunities for fully exploiting knowledge and Intellectual Property an ongoing operational challenge. The research process facilitated the achievement of effective learning at individual, team and organisational level for the ETI about its practices, identification of challenges and areas of improvement, incorporation of learning and recommendations into its knowledge management strategy alongside existing activities to improve knowledge sharing. The contents of this thesis particularly the eight themes that have emerged from the research findings - are also contributing significantly to a project the organisation is carrying out to reflect on and review what has been learned from operating the ETI for the last 10 years. The thesis contributes to the existing body of knowledge, theoretically and practically, in the disciplines of knowledge management and information security; what was predominantly overlooked by previous literature, the empirical research findings surface evidence of the relationship between knowledge sharing and information security practices, showing their interconnectedness, and, the negative consequences of the two practices being treated and managed separately. For the action learning arena, a novel methodological approach underpinned by the action learning philosophy has been introduced that demonstrates how team action learning (i.e. using intact teams as opposed to conventional action learning teams) can be used to engage employees to share and combine their knowledge on real organisational issues, generate new learning and develop actions to initiate improvements in the organisation.

Study Supervisor: . Completed: 2008 / Purpose – To investigate the utilisation of intranet as a knowledge management (KM) tool in South African organisations Findings – The intranet is under utilised in many South African organisations, only 25 percent of the organisations represented in the survey has indicated to have been using the intranet as a tool to facilitate knowledge management. Most respondents indicated that emails and meetings were most effectively utilised as knowledge management tools in their respective organisations. The study also reveals that the content on the intranet is mainly focused on policies, employee contacts and communication bulletins. Employees do not contribute directly to the intranet content, hence the content on the intranet is mainly generic in nature; Information Technology (IT) teams, management and Human Resource (HR) teams are the main contributors of the intranet content. Research limitations/implications – Further research is needed to compare and deduce the benefits of utilising the intranet as a knowledge management tool with regard to business performance indexes such as, competitive advantage, market share, profits, long term growth, bottom line, sales, turnover, cost savings, etc.

Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M.A.(Philosophy)

Number pattern generalisation is often regarded a difficult topic for students to learn. To explore this perception, the present study undertakes an empirical investigation with the main aim of providing a comprehensive description of how 14-year-old secondary school students in Singapore generalise figural patterns and justify their generalisations when varying the formats of pattern display and the types of function. Comprising two interrelated parts, the study first examines 515 students’ strategies and justifications and probes systematically the influence of the formats of pattern display and the types of function on their generalisations through a specially developed paper-and-pencil test. The other part, through a specially designed questionnaire, looks at their beliefs about which strategy would best help them to derive the rule for predicting any term of a figural pattern as well as their ability to construct the rule using their choice of strategy. The first part uses an independent-measures research design to examine whether different formats of pattern display have any effect on students’ rule construction and a repeatedmeasures research design to determine whether their rule construction is influenced by the different types of function. In the second part, a survey study is employed with all students asked to identify their choice of best-help generalising strategy. This is then followed by interviews with 16 of the 515 students to probe whether they are able to derive a correct functional rule using their chosen strategy. This study complements many previous studies mainly undertaken in the west in that its findings indicate that the more academic students are competent in developing a functional rule for linear patterns but falters when working with quadratic patterns. There is a widespread failure of the less academic students in both linear and quadratic patterns, confirming the oft-regarded view that expressing generality is elusive. Successful students perceive the patterns in several ways and generate wide-ranging functional rules, predominantly symbolic, to describe them. They employ a variety of generalising strategies, especially the figural type, and some of which are new in the literature. Both the test and the survey confirm that the figural strategy involving the breaking up of the whole configurations into non-overlapping parts is their clear favourite. For rule justification, verifying it using the numerical cues and drawing diagrams to explain its development are their favourite approaches. Task features such as the format of pattern display and the type of functions do contribute to student difficulties in generalisation. Based on these findings, some useful teaching strategies for teachers and teacher educators are then suggested to help them improve their teaching of pattern generalisation. The findings also point the direction for future research studies on pattern generalisation by suggesting some recommendations for researchers.

This study investigates students’ construction of the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom, that is, ESP teaching and learning, and uses the Participatory Design (PD) approach to the design of educational technology as a means to improve and refine our understanding of their construction of the classroom. The study was carried out with Brazilian university students on a Computer Science course. Following general guidelines of the PD approach, the researcher invited an ESP teacher, a number of students, and a Software Engineer to collaboratively design a Web Portal to support ESP teaching and learning. The research questions were: (i) how do students construct the ESP classroom? and (ii) to what extent does students´ involvement in the process of designing educational technology for ESP bring to light different elements of this construction? Data were collected in two phases. Firstly, an initial interview was carried out and then records of students´ participation in the workshops, their entries in an online diary and a final interview were collected. A bottom up approach was adopted to categorisation of the beliefs constituting the students’ construction of the classroom, and the analytical framework outlined by Benson and Lor (1999) was used to help to interpret and group these classifications. The final model of the students’ construction identified four groups of beliefs, clustered around the ideas of accumulation, communication, autonomy and unease with what the ESP course offered. The use of Participative Design as a method to facilitate the collection of data about the students’ construction of the classroom was found to be effective in enabling the research to move from an description based on students’ de-contextualised descriptions of the classroom in the initial interviews, to a more articulated and detailed level of description that emerged from involvement with the design task.

This study sought to capture how science teachers view scientific knowledge from a philosophical-epistemological perspective. The philosophical themes investigated were scientific method, criteria of demarcation, patterns of scientific change and problems related with the construction of reality. Furthermore, an attempt was made to investigate the relation teachers' views on these matters both to certain curricular issues (the question of integration and the meaning of the terms "content" and "process") and to some pedagogical issues (assumptions about learning, instruction and aspects of classroom activities). For this purpose, a framework was proposed for the analysis of the relevant issues. This framework consists of a number of distinctions. These distinctions were organised employing the technique of systemic network analysis, so as to lay the basis not only for the construction of the research instrument but also for the analysis of the empirical evidence. The epistemological systems taken into account in the a-priori analysis are: inductivism, hypothetico-deductivism (Popper, Lakatos), contextualism (Kuhn) and relativism (Feyerabend). At the ontological level, the contrast is mainly focused on the differences between idealism and realism (pragmatism is also included). Three stages can be distinguished in the analysis of the data. The first stage is a systematic description of the data and shows that the dominant pattern in teachers' philosophical and epistemological views . tends to be close to contextualism. It indicates that teachers tend to prefer the introduction of integrated science curricula, and in terms of pedagogy, to stress pupils' ability to think in abstract terms, as well as to emphasise a teacher-centred approach. In the second stage, a classification of responses into distinct categories (i.e. inductivism, relativism, etc.) was made on the basis of each individual following consistently a particular path of the network. The outcome suggests that indeed the Kuhnian system of thought is favoured consistently more than any other system. The third stage is an analysis of the correlations of teachers' views within and across the three components (philosophical, curricular and pedagogical). On the basis of this analysis, a tentative conclusion is that there are two relatively autonomous regions of "educational theory" as held by teachers, namely epistemological and pedagogical views on the one hand and ontological and curricular views on the other.

This study has investigated the search options and features teachers use and prefer to have, when personalising their online search for teaching resources. This study focused on making web searching easier for UK teacher practitioners at primary, secondary and post-compulsory levels. In this study, a triangulated mixed method approach was carried out in a two phase iterative case study involving 75 teacher practitioners working in the UK educational setting. In this case study, a sequential evidence gathering method called ‘System Development Life Cycle’ (SDLC) was adapted linking findings obtained from the structured questionnaires, observations and semi-structured interviews in order to design, develop and test two versions of an experimental search tool called “PoSTech!”. This research has contributed to knowledge by offering a model of teachers’ web information needs and search behaviour. In this model twelve search options and features mostly used by teachers when personalising their search for finding online teaching resources via the revised search tool are listed, in order of popularity. A search options is selected by the teacher and features is the characteristic of an option teachers experiences. For example, search options 'Subject', ‘Age Group’, ‘Resource Type’, ‘Free and/ Paid resources’, ‘Search results language’, and search features that ‘Store search options selected by individual teachers and their returned results’. Teachers’ model of web information needs and search behaviour could be used by the Government, teacher trainers and search engine designers to gain an insight into the information needs and search behaviours of teachers when searching for online teaching resources by means of tackling technical barriers faced by teachers, when using the internet. In conclusion, the research work presented in this thesis has provided the initial and important steps towards understanding the web searching information needs and search behaviours of individual teachers, working in the UK educational setting.

No description available.

Class of 2012 Abstract / Specific Aims: To determine the attitudes of medical students towards pharmacists and the roles they play on the healthcare team and how these views change after attending an inter-professional workshop with other University of Arizona healthcare students. Methods: Questionnaires administered during a regularly scheduled class collected rating of teamwork and collaboration, roles for pharmacists in health care settings, and medical student’s expectations of the pharmacist when they are practicing physicians. Previous inter-professional workshop experience, negative experience with a pharmacist, age and sex was also collected. Main Results: Medical students’ attitudes regarding the roles of pharmacist in health care settings became more positive after attending the IPE workshop compared to their attitudes before attending the IPE workshop (X2 = 7.671, p-value = 0.005) and was maintained 1 year after the workshop (X2 = 6.304, p-value = 0.012). Medical students expected pharmacists to be more capable and had higher expectations for them after attending the IPE workshop (X2 = 17.393, p-value = <0.001) and was maintained 1 year after the workshop (X2 = 5.955, p-value = 0.015). Conclusions: This study demonstrated that the inter-professional workshop is successful in changing the attitudes of medical students towards pharmacists and the roles they play on the healthcare team. The medical students maintained this change in attitude one year after the inter-professional workshop.

The aim of the study was to obtain new insight into the phenomenon of knowledge management (KM) in modern-day organisations and the role Human Resources (HR) plays in facilitating access to knowledge via knowledge holders (employees). The study aims to contribute to both theoretical and practical use of KM and HR in the South African context. A qualitative methodological approach, modern qualitative research, and more specifically the grounded theory approach of Strauss and Corbin was used to carry out the research. The study’s unit of analysis was individuals, viz knowledge managers in organisations or individuals knowledgeable about the topic within organisations in South Africa’s Gauteng Province. The particular qualitative selection procedure used was theoretical sampling with snowball or chain sampling employed as sampling method. Although multimethods of data collection were used, the principal method consisted of unstructured in-depth interviews supported by participant observation. Three preliminary interviews were conducted during the feasibility study and followed by seven focussed interviews. The unstructured data was systematically analysed utilising the grounded theory methodology aimed at the development of a substantive theory. Three themes, namely Organisation, Human Resources and Knowledge Management were found to be particularly prominent in influencing the role HR plays in relation to and in support of KM in organisations. Three categories developed from the data analyses were the importance of organisational knowledge, management of knowledge and linking people to share knowledge. This triad formed the cornerstones of the theory. After conclusion of the data analysis a literature review was conducted to establish what the current literature reveals on the topics of KM and HR. To further substantiate the theory, it was compared with prominent concepts from the relevant theoretical and empirical research. From this it became clear that the role of HR in the knowledge organisation had changed and the prime focal point of HR would be the facilitation of knowledge sharing by linking people with one another and creating opportunities during which they could request and discuss specific knowledge. These linking processes may entail structural and paradigm adjustments, and initiating and encouraging informal shared learning opportunities. This resulted in changes in the role of HR and human resource management (HRM) practices, philosophies, and principles. As key holders of knowledge assets, employees have to be approached and managed differently, and at the same time understand their roles and responsibilities in the knowledge organisation. Essentially, optimal knowledge creation and use need to take place in a trusting environment and culture that supports, motivates and acknowledges knowledge sharing amongst employees. This study stresses the importance of the relationship between and the dependence of KM on HR and human resources in knowledge organisations. This would however require changes in the HR field and recommendations in this regard were made. / Dr. Willem Schurink