The paper considers the potential offered by lifelong learning as a tool for capacity building and development in rural areas, especially through the exploitation of contemporary technologies. The challenges and opportunities connected with small rural schools are particularly focused upon, and teachers working in them are proposed as ideal change agents potentially powerful to catalyse bottom-...

Information flows are weaker in a heterogeneous population when the performance of a new technology is sensitive to unobserved individual characteristics, preventing individuals from learning from neighbors’ experiences. This characterization of social learning is tested with wheat and rice data from the Indian Green Revolution. The rice-growing regions display greater heterogeneity in growing ...

The advance selling strategy is implemented when a firm offers consumers the opportunity to order its product in advance of the regular selling season. Advance selling reduces uncertainty for both the firm and the buyer and enables the firm to update its forecast of future demand. The distinctive feature of the present study of advance selling is that we divide consumers into two groups, experi...

OurWeb is a system designed for on-line communities to foster engagement into purposeful activities associated with collaboration. In this paper we present the features and functionality of OurWeb, and report the experiences acquired from a university course, where the course structures were designed to emulate an on-line community and the students were required to act as members of a learning ...

On-line review systems have been proved to be sensitive to fraud and have shown some shortcomings due to their reliance on using numerical ratings as reviews. For that reason, and supported by recent work on the field, we aim to address the problem of fraud in this type of systems, by designing a mechanism based on pairwise comparisons – encapsulated as opinion polls – coupled with an incentive...

This paper reports our experiences with evaluating BPMN tools in the context of a project on developing an Australian process standard for the lending industry. We present the framework, the methodology and some of the major results of the evaluation. This can provide guidance for other researchers and practitioners with similar goals and constraints, in both the private and the public sector. ...

In this paper we report findings of the first phase of an investigation, which explored the experience of learning amongst high-level managers, project leaders and visitors in Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) “Cube”. “The Cube” is a giant, interactive, multi-media display; an award-winning configuration that hosts several interactive projects. The research team worked with three grou...

This article focuses on the effect of the perceived cohesiveness of experiences, whether composed of single or multiple parts, on their overall hedonic evaluations. Four experiments demonstrate the effects of partitioning on decision makers evaluation of extended experiences. First, patterns (i.e., improving vs. deteriorating trends) strongly influence how experiences are evaluated. Second, inc...

Based on a study of a three-day workshop between users and developers, we show how artifacts like computer prototypes can be used to trigger productive discussions. We demonstrate how clashes between contextualized artifacts and the practitioners' (users) conceptions and experiences of their work practices trigger new understandings of current practice as well as possible futures. In this way, ...

Background Patients’ experiences are an import guide to improvements in developing an Emergency Department (ED). Therefore, in 2009, when the ED at Nykoebing Hospital was established, a large group of patients were interviewed few hours after arrival. They generally expressed high degree of satisfaction with the treatment. Now, three years after, a comparable population has been interviewed to ...