This dissertation studies the factors that negatively impact the accuracy of the collaborative filtering recommendation systems based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). The keystone in the recommendation system is the rating that expresses the user's opinion about an item. One of the most significant issues in the recommendation systems is the lack of ratings. This issue is called "cold-start" issue, which appears clearly with New-Users who did not rate any item and New-Items, which did not receive any rating. The traditional recommendation systems assume that users are independent and identically distributed and ignore the connections among users whereas the recommendation actually is a social activity. This dissertation aims to enhance NMF-based recommendation systems by utilizing the imputation method and limiting the errors that are introduced in the system. External information such as trust network and item categories are incorporated into NMF-based recommendation systems through the imputation. The proposed approaches impute various subsets of the missing ratings. The subsets are defined based on the total number of the ratings of the user or item before the imputation, such as impute the missing ratings of New-Users, New-Items, or cold-start users or items that suffer from the lack of the ratings. In addition, several factors are analyzed that affect the prediction accuracy when the imputation method is utilized with NMF-based recommendation systems. These factors include the total number of the ratings of the user or item before the imputation, the total number of imputed ratings for each user and item, the average of imputed rating values, and the value of imputed rating values. In addition, several strategies are applied to select the subset of missing ratings for the imputation that lead to increasing the prediction accuracy and limiting the imputation error. Moreover, a comparison is conducted with some popular methods that are in common with the proposed method in utilizing the imputation to handle the lack of ratings, but they differ in the source of the imputed ratings. Experiments on different large-size datasets are conducted to examine the proposed approaches and analyze the effects of the imputation on accuracy. Users and items are divided into three groups based on the total number of the ratings before the imputation is applied and their recommendation accuracy is calculated. The results show that the imputation enhances the recommendation system by capacitating the system to recommend items to New-Users, introduce New-Items to users, and increase the accuracy of the cold-start users and items. However, the analyzed factors play important roles in the recommendation accuracy and limit the error that is introduced from the imputation.

Kentucky has a rich cultural and artistic tapestry that is part of the economic future of the state. An important consideration of this future is the artist-member organizations that serve Kentucky creatives and how they work together collaboratively, both internally and externally. The objective of this study was to see how ten different organizations viewed themselves and interacted with their communities in the way in which they are structure, or lack a definite structure as is the case with several different groups. Through web analysis and a series of interviews with organizations that provide benefits to Kentucky artists, we learn that there are no strict definitions to what these organizations are and that to continue, they will have to continue to become flexible and open to changes that may come their way.

Collaborative innovation is an important mechanism for firms to exchange and acquire external knowledge. Through collaboration, innovators convene and form networks that, in return, help overcome the boundaries of knowledge transfer. To have a better understanding of actors’ collaborating behaviours in innovation networks, we identify three pairs of roles: 1) do actors make connections or bonds with their partners? 2) do actors exchange their knowledge with internal or external partners? 3) do actors absorb or distribute knowledge? We examine the distribution and evolution of actors’ roles from these three perspectives by using social network analysis. In this thesis, we use thousands of patent data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, to investigate the actors’ behaviours in the chemical industries of two Canadian regions, i.e. Montreal and Windsor-Sarnia. Based on the results of our analysis, Montreal, acting as a public-dominated region, shows a more complex distribution of roles, while Windsor-Sarnia with a private orientation indicates a simplex pattern. From the evolution perspective, the network of Montreal is more stable and diversified, with key actors being active in the local network for more extended periods. Unlike Montreal, Windsor-Sarnia faces a higher level of mobility and globalization.

This thesis examines the work of nonprofit organizations collaborating with communities to build civic capacity in North Highland Park, a neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. Place-focused planning strategies during the twentieth century diminished civic capacity in the community and fostered isolation. Today, collaborative community work in Highland Park is incorporating the assets, resources and knowledge held in the community into strategies to improve quality of life using collaborative learning. A case study approach closely analyzes community engagement and revitalization processes in North Highland Park between 2011 and 2017. Nonprofit organizations mobilized and led a group of community-based collaborators, including nonprofit staff members, government officials, nonprofit funders, and residents. In Highland Park, nonprofit organizations collaborate with communities, emphasizing shared ownership and collaborative learning, to build civic capacity in the community.

In the Denver metropolitan area, many elementary school principals have been focused more on management than on instructional leadership issues, even though school administrators have been charged with overseeing academic achievement based on state and federal standards. According to research, participating in these 2 disconnected roles hinders principals' ability to achieve the academic and social success of their students. Guided by Bandura's self-efficacy theory and Hallinger's distributed leadership theories, this qualitative study explored factors that influenced 6 principals' adoption of the instructional leadership role to learn how principals might shift from managing the school to becoming its instructional leader. The selection criteria for the participants were that each principal was based in a linguistically and culturally diverse, low-income community and led successfully as noted in the School Performance Framework. Data from individual interviews and a focus group were triangulated with observational data (3 observations of participants in their work role at their individual school sites) and researcher field notes. Data analysis used open coding, from which 3 core themes emerged: voice, focus, and alignment of resources. Based on these findings, the proposed project, presented as a position paper, recommends the development of a district-level policy directed toward the building of a school-site infrastructure that supports elementary principals in the role of instructional leader. The implications for positive social change at the local level include providing recommendations that might enable administrators as the instructional leader to develop and oversee an infrastructure conducive to the academic and social success of the students they serve, thus increasing the number of successful schools throughout the district study site.

This study examines the effect of first-year college student participation in cooperative learning activities on the development of need for cognition, using pre-test and post-test data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNSLAE). I used Pascarella's (1985) General Causal Model for Assessing the Effects of Differential Environments on Student Learning and Cognitive Development as the theoretical foundation for my study. I examined whether cooperative learning (students teaching each other, faculty encouraging students to work together outside of class, participation in study groups, and students working together outside of class) influenced the development of need for cognition among first-year college students while controlling for student background characteristics, institutional characteristics, academic experiences, and other college student experiences. The results of my study indicate that participation in cooperative learning activities positively influenced the development of need for cognition among first-year college students. This study adds to the literature because it is the first to demonstrate the relationship between cooperative learning and need for cognition. The results are relevant to higher education policy because the study provides evidence that cooperative learning helps students develop a propensity to engage in the thinking process, which will likely impact them throughout their lives. Cooperative learning is considered a good practice in liberal education, so the result of this study provides evidence that liberal education supports positive outcomes related to cognitive processing, which is critical to higher education.

In this study, the students in my Year 8 high school mathematics class and I set out to develop a functional and effective collaborative peer interactive classroom learning environment. This research was informed by the multiple theoretical perspectives of collaborative learning in mathematics education, Vygotskian learning and teaching approaches, and the Constructivist referent for pedagogic practices. Merging these perspectives into a viable foundation for our classroom practices led to the successful development of our collaborative peer interactive classroom learning environment.Working in groups of three or four, the students developed their social norms and utilised a collaborative approach to their learning of mathematics. Groups engaged in discussion, explanation, negotiation, peer teaching, giving help, receiving help and consensus building as part of their daily routine in our classroom. I kept qualitative and quantitative records of our progress as we worked to improve our collaborative peer interactive classroom learning environment during the first six months of the school year. I collected daily fieldnotes, audio and video recordings, observations taken by researcher colleagues, learning environment surveys and a variety of other artefacts. All of this data was analysed daily, weekly and monthly, so producing the monthly narratives upon which we based our determination of the success of this implementation.By adopting a Vygotskian perspective we utilised our peer interactive environment to develop and enhance 'scientific' and 'everyday' concepts through individual and group dynamic, overlapping (multiple) 'zones of proximal development' as well as our classwide 'zone of proximal development'. Our constructivist perspective aided us in focusing on our prior knowledge and experiences, which in turn enhanced the effectiveness of our collaborative ++ / classroom learning environment. We utilised the MCI and CLES learning environment measures to direct our endeavours to further improve our collaborative peer interactive classroom learning environment. The detailed analysis of the data from Months 1, 2 and 3 of this implementation, coupled with highlight analysis of the data from Months 4, 5 and 6, led me to conclude that teachers and their students can develop a functional and effective collaborative peer interactive classroom learning environment based on the multiple theoretical perspectives utilised in this study.This research improved my practice as a teacher and provided a functional and effective collaborative peer interactive classroom learning environment for the students to work in. It informed many of the calls for further research of this type and established that the theoretical concepts, upon which the implementation was founded, were valuable and useful in the practical setting of our collaborative peer interactive classroom. The findings are also valuable for the support which they offer to the latest movements in education, particularly the student-centred, outcomes-based approaches to learning and teaching. These approaches advocate the use of collaborative learning environments, and this study provides strong guidance as to how such environments can be successfully implemented.

The research aims to develop an understanding of the extent to which collaboration occurs through the use of online technologies in the project management environment. Given the breadth of the technological landscape, this research focuses on the use of online collaborative toolsets (OCTs). The research investigates six Project Management Environments (PMEs) and their use of OCTs, and uses a Collaboration scale developed specifically to measure the level of collaboration existing within each PME. The Collaboration scale presents collaboration not as a single entity, but as a scale ranging from low to high across six elements. Central to this theory is that for collaboration to exist, all elements must rate highly against the scale. The research argues that although all collaborative elements are found within a PME, it is the level of each element that determines the degree to which collaboration is occurring. A case study approach incorporated three broad strategies to collect data. The first strategy included a Likert questionnaire using the Dichotomous scale, which was administered to collect data on the operations of the individual projects. The second strategy included interviews that asked the project manager of each case specific questions regarding the PME. The third strategy involved desk research to scan for literature and web artefacts. The conclusions drawn from this research are: 1. OCTs can contain a variety of features, several of which are common amongst all. The research identified common requirements and use of the OCTs within the cases. 2. Although OCTs are capable of facilitating a high level of collaboration, Project Managers do not use OCTs for this purpose. The different project environments reviewed are not necessarily collaborative, nor do they use OCTs to assist with collaborative exercises. 3. OCTs are used predominantly for cooperation and coordinating activities within the PME. 4. Collaboration in the PMEs reviewed exists in degrees, at times being identified with cooperative functions, and at other times coordinating functions. 5. The findings demonstrate a pattern of collaboration, which is consistent across all cases. This pattern demonstrates a variation in the collaborative elements across the PME, and indicates a priority that may exist in regard to how these elements are prescribed within the actual project environment.

This project aims to examine the effects of incorporating collaborative learning methods extensively in a core first-year mathematics subject and to investigate students' individual learning style preferences, their attitudes towards group-work in mathematics and the objectives for setting group work, their attitudes towards using computers, in particular, Mathematica and their concerns regarding the assessment of group-based work. Following the rapid increase in the use of technology in education over the last decade, one would perhaps expect to find an overabundance of literature regarding the effects of its use. However, the number of technology related research studies has been surprisingly low, especially those pertaining to the curriculum area of Mathematics at the tertiary level. The availability of quality software, the need for curriculum redesign, and limited research on the effectiveness of computers as a teaching tool, are factors to have hindered the rate of implementation and of subsequent research. Also, despite the rapid growth in the use of collaborative methods of learning, and widespread belief in the importance of such methods, there have been calls for increased research especially at the tertiary level, and particularly in engineering education looking at students who have to study mathematics because it is a requirement and not because they are majoring in mathematics, therefore needing to determine how best to make their learning a meaningful and enjoyable experience. This project aims to investigative the effects of incorporating a rich collaborative learning based curriculum in either face-to-face or computer-supported environments in the subject Mathematical Modelling 1. The carrying out of this project is a response to the lack of research in a curriculum area of tertiary mathematics. Within the context of mathematics, issues of attitude, gender differences, motivation and achievement are considered. The chief purpose of this investigation is to explore the effectiveness of collaborative learning in mathematics at university, and to provide some insight as to what degree, if any, the use of such methods enhance mathematics learning. The research uses an experimental methodology, an attitudinal questionnaire and indepth interviews to elicit students' feelings and/or opinions toward the incorporation of collaborative learning. The questionnaire sought demographic information from the students, namely, name, age, gender, length of stay in Australia and language spoken at home, and investigates the role of these factors in the effectiveness of, and interest during the tutorial and laboratory sessions a time when students were working on collaborative-based activities. This project maintains interest in the use of collaborative problem solving, and the belief that the findings could be of international significance if the effectiveness of this style of learning can be finnly established. It is also hoped that grounding the collaborative activities in the literature, and providing statistical and theoretical support for their use might promote them more widely in mathematics in particular and more generally, across universities in Australia. The broad issue of whether the use of collaborative learning enhances mathematics learning can be broken down into a number of specific inquiries. The key research questions may thus be expressed as follows: I. What are tertiary students' preferred learning styles? 2. What are students' opinions about group work in mathematics? 3. Does collaborative group work foster a deep, meaningful understanding of mathematics? 4. What are students' attitudes about using CAS such as Mathematica? 5. What are students' attitudes about the assessment of group-based work? 6. Are there any differences in students' learning style preferences across the various demographics? 7. Are there any differences in students' attitudes towards collaborative learning methods across the various demographics? 8. Are there any differences in students' attitudes towards the use of Mathematica across the various demographics? 9. Are there any variations in students' attitudes towards the assessment of group work in mathematics across the various demographics? This study does not claim to fill the void into the effectiveness of computers or collaborative learning methods, but should provide greater insight and support to future research.

Software systems are getting larger and more complex, while the requirements are becoming vaguer and more rapidly changing. These trends make current software development more and more likely a team work. To integrate multiple developers into a coherent structured management process and make team software development a positive-sum game for both higher productivity and better quality, many team soft ware development methodologies have been proposed and practised. An emerging methodology is collaborative programming, which allows a group of programmers to work together on the same source code for design, implementation of individual components, and integration of individual components. Compared with other team software methodologies that only address needs in some phases or situations, collaborative programming is more adaptive to the variety of different phases or situations in a team software development process. A core technical component in collaborative programming is collaborative editing, which allows a group of programmers to view and edit the same source code. To support different phases or situations in an Internet-based collaborative programming process, collaborative editing must meet the requirements of supporting unconstrained, responsive, real-time collaborative editing; unconstrained, syncretic, non-real-time collaborative editing; and smooth, flexible switching between real-time and non-real-time collaborative editing. This thesis research contributes several novel techniques to address these requirements, and an Internet-based collaborative programming environment to integrate those techniques. These research contributions have advanced state-of-the-art technologies on col laborative editing for supporting Internet-based collaborative programming. First, we contribute a collaborative highlighting gestural communication technique for unconstrained, responsive, real-time collaborative editing. This technique is particularly effective in improving the quality of real-time interaction on text-based source code documents. The contribution to the operational transformation technology is the extension of the technology to support group awareness. It includes a package of operational transformation functions and transformation control algorithms for consistency maintenance in collaborative highlighting, and a flexible undo solution that has the capability of undoing any highlighting operation at any time. Second, we contribute a flexible operation-based merging technique for unconstrained, syncretic, non-real-time collaborative editing, which is efficient and has the capability of textually integrating all changes, and automatically detecting and resolving syntactic conflicts according to application-dependent user-specified policies. The contribution to the operational transformation technology is the extension of the technology to support unconstrained, syncretic, non-real-time collaborative editing. Its includes a log compression algorithm, a textual merging algorithm, and a syntactic merging algorithm. Moreover, we contribute a flexible notification technique to support flexible collaborative editing: unconstrained, responsive, real-time collaborative editing; uncon strained, syncretic, non-real-time collaborative editing; and smooth, flexible switching between them. The contribution to the operational transformation technology is the extension of the technology to support flexible collaborative editing. It includes a new transformation control algorithm that has a linear time complexity, two notification algorithms that support propagation and acceptance of any notifications at any time, and a notification propagation protocol that is efficient for both real-time and non-real-time collaborative editing.