No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, August 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-91).

<p> Storytelling is an effective means of imparting knowledge, beliefs, and traditions. In its multimedia form, digital storytelling has been made popular by the digital storytelling movement led by the Center for Digital Storytelling established in 1998. While digital storytelling has existed for a few decades, its use in education has been researched relatively recently over the past fifteen years (Holtzblatt &amp; Tschakert, 2011). As a result, it is important that continued research is done in order to understand how students are learning through digital storytelling. The constructivist environments created through digital storytelling classes and workshops need to be researched in order to gain a deeper understanding of students&rsquo; learning processes and to ascertain how to continue to create effective learning environments for them. In this study, the researcher endeavored to determine how the use of digital storytelling exercises is providing quality, learning experiences for students by examining the process of creating digital stories through the lens of social learning theory. This was done by analyzing data from an in-person interview conducted with the founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Joseph Lambert, the examination of another published interview from Lambert&rsquo;s (2013) book, <i>Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community </i>, as well as other publications. Utilizing Honebein&rsquo;s (1996) seven pedagogical goals of constructivist learning environments to design the categories of coded data, the researcher created a set of guidelines that served as a framework of assessing to what extent digital storytelling workshops created constructivist learning environments. By analyzing the themes that emerged from the data, the researcher concluded that Lambert&rsquo;s digital storytelling work at the Center for Digital Storytelling, reflected all seven essential characteristics of constructivist learning environments in a significant manner, thereby indicating that the workshops at CDS were indeed constructivist environments.</p>

<p> For several decades, the intensifying trend of researchers to believe that sharing research data is &ldquo;good&rdquo; has overshadowed the belief that sharing data is &ldquo;bad.&rdquo; However, sharing data is difficult even though an impressive effort has been made to solve data sharing issues within the research community, but relatively little is known about data sharing beyond the research community. This dissertation aims to address this gap by investigating <i><b>how data are shared effectively across research and public communities</b></i>.</p><p> The practices of sharing data with both researchers and non-professionals in two comparative case studies, Encyclopedia of Life and CyberSEES, were examined by triangulating multiple qualitative data sources (i.e., artifacts, documentation, participant observation, and interviews). The two cases represent the creation of biodiversity data, the beginning of the data sharing process in a home repository, and the end of the data sharing process in an aggregator repository. Three research questions are asked in each case:</p><p> &bull; Who are the data providers?</p><p> &bull; Who are the data sharing mediators?</p><p> &bull; What are the data sharing processes?</p><p> The findings reveal the data sharing contexts and processes across research and public communities. Data sharing contexts are reflected by the cross-level data providers and human mediators rooted in different groups, whereas data sharing processes are reflected by the dynamic and sustainable collaborative efforts made by different levels of human mediators with the support of technology mediators.</p><p> This dissertation provides theoretical and practical contributions. Its findings refine and develop a new data sharing framework of knowledge infrastructure for different-level data sharing across different communities. Both human and technology infrastructure are made visible in the framework. The findings also provide insight for data sharing practitioners (i.e., data providers, data mediators, data managers, and data contributors) and information system developers and designers to better conduct and support open and sustainable data sharing across research and public communities.</p>

Introduction: Previous literature indicates that standard economic analysis is often not well suited for the evaluation of research investments, necessitating the use of other methods. This work uses a mixed methods approach to investigate the economic value relationship between academia and industry, towards a holistic understanding of how research benefits arise and can be measured to provide greater insight into the drivers of the system, its sustainability, and economic competitiveness. Methods: Each of the pillars of the National Innovation System &#40;NIS&#41; model, adapted to assess the economic value relationship between academia and industry, were evaluated. The first research element (government) focused on the macroeconomic and regulatory context by evaluating the federal SBIR/STTR programs through an in-depth case study. The second element focused on the education and training system &#40;academia&#41; by assessing how technology transfer offices at universities measure research value. The final element of the study (industry) focused on communication infrastructures by investigating the digital tools used by medical technology firms to accelerate innovation beyond organizational boundaries. The academia and industry research elements each consisted of document review and semi-structured interviews. Results: While the federal SBIR/STTR programs were found to be a significant catalyst for the academic-industry economic value relationship, especially at the most crucial proof-of-concept stage, policy discrepancies between stakeholders might affect the desired program outcomes. Consensus measures and metrics were identified for both academia and industry, which inform the product and factor market conditions that drive academic-industry innovation capacity. In many cases, challenges behind these measures were also raised, highlighting the need for sensitivity to institutional mission, culture and other conditions when applying these measures. Valuation differences were also found to exist between public and private universities in entrepreneurial engagement and economic development. Conclusions: The measurement categories across both academia and industry describe adequate, dependable resources as the overarching product market theme and a talented and interconnected workforce as the overarching factor market theme. Taken together, they lead to more effective knowledge generation and diffusion, as well as a more informed NIS model with specific and practical utility for the economic value relationship between academia and industry. / Steven Ceulemans

Diamond is of interest as an advanced functional material, since the extreme physical properties of diamond, suggests it is ideally suited to a range of new demanding applications. In this context, the thesis explores basic surface chemical properties of diamond thin films, along with electrochemical, electronic and electron emission processes involving this material. New experiments are reported concerning the nature of surface conductivity on diamond. Measurements clearly show that the conductivity only arises if a hydrogenated diamond surface is exposed to water vapour, in the presence of chemical species capable of acting as electron acceptors. The conduction properties of surface conductive diamond in aqueous solution are also studied, and the first detailed electrochemical investigations of this material are described. Comparative electrochemical studies of nanocrystalline and boron-doped diamond have been performed. Investigations of electrode stability, and the accessible "potential window" are described, as well as the behaviour of a range of 'redox' systems, including transition metal complexes, metal deposition/stripping, and bio-related organic species. Significant differences between the behaviour of nanodiamond and microcrystalline boron-doped material are observed. A range of surface chemical and threshold photoemission studies of diamond thin films are reported. The results indicate that quantum photoyields (QPYs) are insensitive to the diamond "quality", although the wavelength selectivity is dependent on it. The adsorption of oxygen strongly reduces the QPY, although this only occurs slowly in the presence of O₂ because of a low reactive sticking probability. Much more rapid uptake of oxygen and consequent reduction of photoyield is observed in the presence of atomic O or electronically excited dioxygen O₂*. The presence of alkali metals on the diamond surface increases the QPY, and reduces the sensitivity of the QPY to surface oxygen. Significant differences between the surface chemical properties of Li, and other adsorbed akali metals (K and Cs) are observed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2001. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 498-521). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ66364.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Southern California, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 334-344).

In recent years the funds spent on research and development (R & D) have grown considerably. An indication of the extent of the growth in the U.K. was given by Hart (1) who noted that in 1900 approximately 0.05% of the gross national product was spent on research. This percentage increased to 0.25% in 1938, 1.6% in 1954 and 2.7% in 1962. Villiers (2) quotes a similar growth in the U.S., where research expenditure grew from <1% of gross national product in 1947, to about 3% in 1962. (In the U.K. it appears, from some statistics produced by the Ministry of Technology (3), that research expenditure has remained at about 2.7% of GNP over the period 1962-1967). The allocation of these resources poses a number of challenging questions in governmental, industrial and academic spheres. At a national level the kind of questions that might be asked are (a) what proportion of the gross national product should be devoted to government sponsored research, or (b) how should funds be divided between the claims of the aerospace, computer, or machine tool industries, or (c) how should funds be divided between the competing claims of the nuclear physicists and marine biologists. The large industrial concern is faced with similar problems though the resources involved are smaller. ICI for example spent about £30M on R & D in 1968, and during the later 1960's, the growth rate was about 8% per year. The Company must decide on the total amount to be spent on R & D and how it is to be allocated between different Divisions of the Company and different research categories. At lower levels of management two of the questions arising are (a) which projects shall be selected, and (b) how should the flow of resources to projects be controlled. It is now generally accepted that there is a need for techniques for assisting in the management of R & D. Jones (4) summed up the situation well when he wrote "It is not surprising that there is an increasing amount of discussion on the management of R & D for profit. Business becomes increasingly competitive and R & D activities, just as those of production and marketing must be examined to see how they can best play their part." Already a large number of relevant papers have been published, but as yet no significant breakthrough has been achieved. An important feature of the literature has been the concentration on theoretical models as a means of assisting research managers: reports of new methodology considerably out-number reports of practical testing of the methods in research laboratories. Throughout the author's research the opposite bias, that is to say towards a practical rather than a theoretical approach has been maintained. This was facilitated by the author completing most of his research in the R & D Department of the Mond Division of ICI (of which he is a member). The research presented in this thesis began with the very general objective of examining and developing methods for the allocation of resources (capital and manpower) to R & D and so Chapter 1 discusses some relevant methods that have been proposed in the literature. It was later decided to concentrate on the development of an improved system of project evaluation and control. Chapter 2 analyses an established system in this field, and looks at past projects to demonstrate some of the problems such a system should accept. Later chapters present the system that was developed during the research and record experience of testing the various procedures on a number of Mond Division R & D projects. As these are either still in progress or are only recently completed it has been necessary, for reasons of security, to limit descriptive detail and to normalize numerical data. Such normalization has been made in a manner that preserves the essential financial characteristics of the project. It is well perhaps, in the Introduction, to distinguish between the terms research and development. Following Baines, Bradbury and Suckling ( (5), page (2) ) process definition will be the term used to cover the steps required to take exploratory production activities from laboratory scale to full-scale. Development will refer to the problems of opening up a business area with a new product and will include economic assessment and marketing activities. For the most part these activities are closely linked to research activities and are usually performed by members of the same project team. The convention followed in the thesis will be to use the term 'research' to refer to all the activities of the project team and to assume that these also include some development activities as defined above. Only when discussing the work of others who have used the term R & D, or when there is a reason to emphasise the commercial exploitation content of a project will the word development be used.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Essen, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references.