Common Technological Platform Research Articles

The coming functionality mash-up in Personal Learning Environments

Current Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are focused very much on meeting the needs of the institution in providing a basic, common technology platform for teaching and learning. However monolithic VLEs are too hard to customize at the individual user level, and evolve far too slowly to meet teaching and learning of users who want their teaching and learning environments to be under their personal control. This paper explores how the concept of the Personal Learning Environment has influenced developments with learning technology, within the context of emerging social software, and examines a range of developments with existing VLEs that move them in the personalized direction. It contrasts the issues involved in bespoke extensions to VLEs as opposed to the incorporation of existing tools (mash-ups), and suggest that the latter approach offers the best hope to escape the bonds of a single VLE product by allowing teachers and learners to simply aggregate whatever tools and capabilities they desire from the Internet to use in their learning. Real progress is being made on several fronts, including the provision of interfaces to social software systems that support the building of applications that can be organized around a personal or group context, and in the development of specifications for learning tool interoperability.

Technology Standards, Patents and Antitrust

From the perspective of antitrust authorities, the multiplication of patents embodied in technology standards is a source of concerns. Certainly it is necessary and efficient that patents owners derive a revenue from the use of the standard. Yet by their function – ensuring compatibility between different products by promoting a common technology platform in a particular industry – standards generate potential for market power far beyond the legal protection conferred by patents. Patent holders may thus be tempted to leverage their position to make illegal profits. Such concerns arise in two different cases that have fuelled antitrust debates and economic research during the last decade. On the one hand, patent owners may be tempted to collude by coordinating their licensing policies. The difficulty here is that some coordination between them within a patent pool may actually be pro-competitive. After a brief introduction, we explain in the first part why, and on what conditions, patent pools should be accepted by antitrust authorities. On the other hand, patent owners may be tempted to manipulate the standard setting process by waiting for the wide adoption of the standard before charging excessive royalties to its users. We present this hold-up problem in the second part, and show how appropriate rules for standard setting processes can help mitigate it.

An introduction to basic enterprise resource planning concepts

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have dominated the large-scale business implementation landscape for over a decade. To that end, this research paper addresses some common misconceptions and planning difficulties encountered when such a system must eventually meet head-on with corporate values, culture and strategic initiatives. Although an ERP system is quite useful in integrating business processes within a common information technology platform, it does not provide much help in linking organisational strategic planning initiatives and objective measurement to the integrated processes that are implied by the software.

Technological concepts for modelling, monitoring and mapping the terrestrial cryosphere on continental to global scale

This paper focuses on modelling, monitoring and mapping concepts on a continental to global scale, using geo-referenced data from the terrestrial cryosphere as an example. The discussion takes a technological approach, showing how geographical information technology (GIT) and computer science can be used by scientists to improve the analysing capabilities of Earth observations from these often remote polar and mountainous areas. Huge amounts of geo-referenced measurements with relevance to the terrestrial cryosphere are presently available to the scientific community and the general public. This is a mixture of in situ and remote-sensing measurements, derived products and model results. The amount of data will probably increase exponentially in the future, particularly remote-sensing data. Making global analysis, including all available cryospheric variables, will require a common technological platform with the required data structures and analysing capabilities. A system of networked databases is one solution to the problem. The technology is available, but implementation of such a system will require a greater emphasis on GIT and data integration in the design of observation and analysis systems for the terrestrial cryosphere. Such an integrated approach will probably increase the capabilities of detecting climatic change, e.g. by applying advanced time-space statistical analysis. Results of climate models could also be integrated on a common platform along with geospatial measurements and different derived products.