Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This study looked at the implementation of a collaborative learning model at two schools in Sydney designed to realise the principles recommended by reform documents such as the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) and policy documents including Numeracy, A Priority for All (DETYA, 2000). A total of 158 year seven and year eight students ranging in age from 12 to 15 years old from two schools participated in the study. In all, seven classroom teachers participated in the study each completing two topics using the collaborative learning model. Four research questions were the focus of the current study. Three research questions were drawn from eight principles identified in the literature regarding what constitutes effective mathematics learning. These questions related to the nature of collaboration evident in each classroom, the level of motivation and self-regulation displayed by students in the different types of classrooms and the relationship between learning mathematics within the collaborative learning model and real-world mathematics. A final research question examined the degree to which the concerns of teachers relating to preparing students for examinations are met within the collaborative learning model. Several different data collection strategies were adopted to develop a picture of the different forms of activity evident in each classroom and the changes that took place in each classroom during and after the implementation of the collaborative learning model. These included classroom observations, interviews with student and teacher participants, questionnaires and obtaining test results. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were used to reduce the data collected. Factor scores and test results were compared using t-tests, ANOVAs and Mann Whitney nonparametric tests. Data collected from interviews and classroom observations were analysed using a grounded approach beginning with the open coding of phenomena. Leont’ev’s theoretical approach to activity systems (1972; 1978) was then used to describe the changing nature of classroom activity with the introduction of the collaborative learning model. Within the collaborative classrooms there were a greater number of mathematical voices participating in classroom discussions, a breaking down of traditional roles held by teachers and students, and dominant patterns of collaboration evident in each classroom reflecting pre-existing cultural ways of doing. Furthermore, there was some quantitative evidence suggesting that student levels of critical thinking, self-regulation and help seeking increased and students were also observed regulating their own learning as well as the learning of others. Classroom practice was also embedded in the cultural practice of preparing topic tests, enabling students to use mathematics within the context of a work group producing a shared outcome. Finally, there was quantitative evidence that students in some of the collaborative classes did not perform as well as students in traditional classrooms on topic tests. Comments from students and teachers, however, suggested that for some students the collaborative learning model enabled them to learn more effectively, although other students were frustrated by the greater freedom and lack of direction. Future research could investigate the effectiveness of strategies to overcome this frustration and the relationship between different types of collaboration and developing mathematical understanding.

Mobile collaborative work is a developing sub-area of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). The future of this field will be marked by a significant increase in mobile device usage as a tool for co-workers to cooperate, collaborate and work on a shared workspace in real-time to produce artefacts such as diagrams, text and graphics regardless of their geographical locations. A real-time collaboration editor can utilise a centralised or a replicated architecture. In a centralised architecture, a central server holds the shared document as well as manages the various aspects of the collaboration, such as the document consistency, ordering of updates, resolving conflicts and the session membership. Every user's action needs to be propagated to the central server, and the server will apply it to the document to ensure it results in the intended document state. Alternatively, a decentralised or replicated architecture can be used where there is no central server to store the shared document. Every participating site contains a copy of the shared document (replica) to work on separately. Using this architecture, every user's action needs to be broadcast to all participating sites so each site can update their replicas accordingly. The replicated architecture is attractive for such applications, especially in wireless and ad-hoc networks, since it does not rely on a central server and a user can continue to work on his or her own local document replica even during disconnection period. However, in the absence of a dedicated server, the collaboration is managed by individual devices. This presents challenges to implement collaborative editors in a replicated architecture, especially in a mobile network which is characterised by limited resource reliability and availability. This thesis addresses challenges and requirements to implement group editors in wireless ad-hoc network environments where resources are scarce and the network is significantly less stable and less robust than wired fixed networks. The major contribution of this thesis is a proposed framework that comprises the proposed algorithms and techniques to allow each device to manage the important aspects of collaboration such as document consistency, conflict handling and resolution, session membership and document partitioning. Firstly, the proposed document consistency algorithm ensures the document replicas held by each device are kept consistent despite the concurrent updates by the collaboration participants while taking into account the limited resource of mobile devices and mobile networks. Secondly, the proposed conflict management technique provides users with conflict status and information so that users can handle and resolve conflicts appropriately. Thirdly, the proposed membership management algorithm ensures all participants receive all necessary updates and allows users to join a currently active collaboration session. Fourthly, the proposed document partitioning algorithm provides flexibility for users to work on selected parts of the document and reduces the resource consumption. Finally, a basic implementation of the framework is presented to show how it can support a real time collaboration scenario.

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.

<p>Collaborative music making on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, but no applications have yet caught on with the vast number of laptop and bedroom studio musicians active today. This is strange considering the inherent social and interactive nature of music, especially amongst trends like Web 2.0 where collaboration and user-generated data is key. In this paper I study the problems these applications face, and why they do not have a greater appeal to musicians. With the results I develop and evaluate my own framework, known as Crescendo Online: a multi-user sequencing and modular synthesis environment, intended to pave the way for a new type of online music creation platform.</p>

<p>This paper presents the results of a workplace study of two smaller companies in the design industry. The core issue has been to investigate the companies use of technical tools and to what extent social praxis influence the daily work. The methods used are based on a qualitative analysis of interviews and observations. Various kind of work procedures, such as verbal and computerized, have been identified, but the most important occurrence was how spontaneous conversations between employees required certain flexibility, since the actors repeatedly were required to change focus and quickly perceive different information. For that reason, a thesis has been defined regarding how the use of spontaneous communication put an indirect need of a flexible working environment and also how this lead to more significant participation and exchange of information, as well as more awareness at the companies.</p>

<p>Traditional education system on campus has been using as a legacy over decades to support educational learning. The major change over time has been made by the use of technology supporting students in the academic community. As the majority of students in higher education today belong to the digital-age-student generation, they frequently use online technology to interact with instructors, other learners, and to access online materials. In this study, the result is primarily presented from campus students’ perceptions, to gain a deeper understanding of how social media is being used to support educational and collaborative/cooperative learning. Although, almost all the respondents are frequent social media users, only a quarter of them use such media regularly for academic purposes. Through use of social media in academia, students have encountered with benefits─ as convenience, possibility of interaction anywhere/anytime, time-saving, low price and many others─ in addition to facing to limitations─ such as less effective or spontaneous contact, connection problems, lack of platform compatibility, less creative and innovative thinking, and other issues─ which have been discussed in this study.</p><p>This thesis adopted a qualitative research and the characterization of knowledge that is used is exploratory research method with the use of interview as a tool for empirical data collection. Twenty interviews have been conducted with Uppsala University higher education students within random subject disciplines. Among many different social media, the most frequent ones used by majority of students are e-mail, a common asynchronous media to interact with instructors and other learners; and Instant Messaging (IM), a synchronous communication way to interact with co-workers, classmates, or group-mates. Furthermore, learners use social media to coordinate their collaborative/cooperative work, share documents and ask questions. Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and other popular social media are also sometimes used for educational purposes.</p><p>The findings indicate that social media seems particularly beneficial for supporting educational learning; though there are some negative aspect and limitations. Learners look at using the technology and social media as a complement to support their studies and collaboration/cooperation. However, not many of them consider using such media as a substitute for face-to-face interactions and the traditional campus education. By drawing on this thesis and the previous studies, proposition on how use of social media supports educational learning in the future has been emerged.</p>

The use of technology as an effective educational tool has been an elusive goal in the past. Specifically, previous attempts at using small personal computers in the classroom to aid students as collaborative and note-taking tools have been met with lukewarm responses. Many of these past attempts were hampered by inferior hardware and the lack of an efficient and user-friendly interface. With the recent introduction of Tablet PC products on the market, however, the limitations imposed on software developers for mobile computing systems have been dramatically lowered. We present a collaborative annotation system that allows students equipped with tablet computers to work cooperatively in either an ad-hoc or a structured wireless classroom setting. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

The intent of this study was to determine whether implementation of the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) model, that has proven successful in psychiatric settings, was equally effective in reducing restrictive practices in public school settings. Many peer-reviewed, published reports suggest that educators are poorly prepared to manage the extremely challenging behaviors of aggression and non-compliance, which are common in students classified with an emotional disturbance (ED). Too often educators rely on ineffective, potentially harmful interventions such as seclusion and restraint, which adversely impact students as well as staff. The nonrandom sample was comprised of students enrolled in two segregated special education schools located in large communities in northwestern Pennsylvania. The enrollment was 69 students in School A and 26 students in School B. The schools serve students, kindergarten through twelfth grade. All students were evaluated and classified as ED by their referring home school district as per Chapter 14 Regulations of the Pennsylvania Department of Education and received one-hundred percent of their special education program in this restrictive school-based environment. This study used a quasi-experimental, pre-test-post-test research design and used two separate existing electronic data sources to test for relationships between the implementation of the CPS model and identified variables (standardized measures of externalizing maladaptive behaviors, incidents of aggression, noncompliance, and disruption, as well as incidents and duration of seclusion and restraint). The analyses included frequency comparisons, a series of Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests, a series of dependent samples T-tests, and two-way repeated measures analyses of variance. Implementation of the model reduced the incidents of aggression, noncompliance, and disruption, as well as incidents and duration of seclusion and restraint. However, only one of the schools in the study demonstrated a statistically significant reduction of aggression incidents and the use of restraint procedures. The results suggest that when implemented with fidelity, the research-based CPS model is a promising, preventative behavior approach for students classified with ED in a segregated special education school. / School of Education / Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program for Education Leaders (IDPEL) / EdD / Dissertation

Traditional education system on campus has been using as a legacy over decades to support educational learning. The major change over time has been made by the use of technology supporting students in the academic community. As the majority of students in higher education today belong to the digital-age-student generation, they frequently use online technology to interact with instructors, other learners, and to access online materials. In this study, the result is primarily presented from campus students’ perceptions, to gain a deeper understanding of how social media is being used to support educational and collaborative/cooperative learning. Although, almost all the respondents are frequent social media users, only a quarter of them use such media regularly for academic purposes. Through use of social media in academia, students have encountered with benefits─ as convenience, possibility of interaction anywhere/anytime, time-saving, low price and many others─ in addition to facing to limitations─ such as less effective or spontaneous contact, connection problems, lack of platform compatibility, less creative and innovative thinking, and other issues─ which have been discussed in this study. This thesis adopted a qualitative research and the characterization of knowledge that is used is exploratory research method with the use of interview as a tool for empirical data collection. Twenty interviews have been conducted with Uppsala University higher education students within random subject disciplines. Among many different social media, the most frequent ones used by majority of students are e-mail, a common asynchronous media to interact with instructors and other learners; and Instant Messaging (IM), a synchronous communication way to interact with co-workers, classmates, or group-mates. Furthermore, learners use social media to coordinate their collaborative/cooperative work, share documents and ask questions. Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and other popular social media are also sometimes used for educational purposes. The findings indicate that social media seems particularly beneficial for supporting educational learning; though there are some negative aspect and limitations. Learners look at using the technology and social media as a complement to support their studies and collaboration/cooperation. However, not many of them consider using such media as a substitute for face-to-face interactions and the traditional campus education. By drawing on this thesis and the previous studies, proposition on how use of social media supports educational learning in the future has been emerged.

Abstract Due to the fast growing of the globe economy, on the steady quality of the electronic equipment for accurate electrical machinery that the industries application, are requested strictly. The maintenance management in the electric power companies is the main reason that influences the steady quality of the electric system equipment. High level maintenance is expected and the third party service company joint to the market. The main managed strategy leads to "customer satisfaction " and " customer requirement¡¨. Electric equipment supplier focus on sales business, not offering an complete maintenance service, therefore, the related orders often has been shifted to third party. To set up a collaboration solution which solves this problem, it is our researching target with valve. According to the predicament of maintenance system of the power industries, and the discussion and writings via the domestic and foreign language, this research uses ¡§Supply chain, &¡§Value system¡¨. To analyses with ¡§QFD¡¨ and modified ¡§CCM¡¨ then build up a conclusion according with the collaboration maintaining system for triple player. Keywords: Collaborative maintenance management System, Supply Chain Management, Value System, Quality Function Deployment, Collaboration Coordination Mechanism.