It has been three years since states began to implement the accountability and program improvement provisions of the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1990 (Perkins II), and policymakers are asking whether these provisions are working. We know, from previous National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE) research, that states adopted systems of mea...

Our research explores meta-design as an innovative framework in the design of an emerging type of software-intensive systems called participative software systems. The fundamental challenge facing this approach is achieving the best fit between the software system and its ever-changing context of use, problems, domains, users, and communities of users. Our objective is to define the scientific ...

Participative software systems are a new class of software systems whose development does not end at the deployment but requires continued user participation and contribution. They need to provide both solutions to users and a participation framework that entails technical and social challenges. Metadesign is a promising approach to guide the development of participative software systems. Drawi...

In a distributed eLearning environment, the development of learning objects is a participative task. We consider learning objects as knowledge pieces, which are subject to the management processes of acquisition, delivery, creation and production. A multiple-tier architecture for participative knowledge production tasks is introduced, where knowledge-producing agents are arranged into knowledge...

AbstrAct In this article we outline a relational approach to experience which we have used to develop a practitioner oriented framework for analysing user experience. The framework depicts experience as compositional, emotional, spatio-temporal, and sensual, and as intimately bound up with a number of processes that allow us to make sense of experience. It was developed and assessed as part of ...

This research investigates the relationship between the hierarchical level of managerial personnel and individual differences in their leadership styles, specifically the degree to which they are disposed to the use of participative versus autocratic decision-making strategies. Analysis of self-report data collected from four different levels of managers suggests a greater propensity for use of...

The presented work investigates process models for participatory spatial decision processes, especially focusing on IT-supported procedures. Results of this work are process patterns according to different classes of problem complexity, accompanied by operational instructions for conducting the procedure, and requirements for the supporting software tools. The aim of this paper is to explain th...

Research into future air vehicles incorporating novel technologies is characterized by a high number of interacting disciplines which need to be considered. Despite advances in numeric interfacing techniques for participative Multidisciplinary Design and Optimisation (pMDO), it is not well understood how to build a team of specialists who jointly operate shared tools and gain system level insig...