Knowledge Factory Research Articles

An impact of ontology-based service-oriented ecosystems on digital transformation of railway transport and engineering education

The scientific novelty of the article is to ground the digital transformation of railway universities through the development of an ontology-based service-oriented ecosystem. The analysis of scientific publications and results of technical and technological initiatives in the field of railway transport revealed that the industry business ecosystem based on ontologies would determine the nature of digital transformation in railway universities. This idea, however, has not yet been sufficiently developed in education studies. It is obvious that ontologisation will require new conceptual solutions and tools to be implemented. The authors propose a new didactic concept called "knowledge factory". The implementation of this didactic concept requires the development of ontology-based didactic tools. In particular, standardisation of education content through the concepts and relations in ontologies makes it possible to develop a web-application such as an intelligent tutoring agent. The study involved two stages. The first stage - conceptual - grounded the new "knowledge factory" didactic concept and the ontological model of interaction between the railway industry and railway universities. For this purpose, the authors applied the methods of ecosystem and ontological-semantic approaches. At the second stage - practical - an attempt was made to develop a prototype of an intelligent tutoring agent. With this purpose a fragment of ontology for the education course "Artificial Intelligence Systems in Transport: Agent-Based Approach" was developed. The top-down method was applied to develop this ontology. What is also emphasized is that the findings are to a large extent transferable to many industries.

Doing Academia Differently: “I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society”

130 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Laura Bisaillon, Alana Cattapan, Annelieke Driessen, Esther van Duin, Shannon Spruit, Lorena Anton, and Nancy S. Jecker Doing Academia Differently: “I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society” A great deal of harm is being done by belief in the virtuousness of work. — Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” We are committed to doing academia in particular ways, and not in others. — Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective I had decided that becoming a university professor might be a good fit; friends and colleagues had suggested that I would be valuable to a university, so I prepared for a restructuring of my family life.1 I read Tokarczyk and Fay’s Working-Class Women in the Academy and Babcock and Laschever’s Women Don’t Ask to gather understandings of the milieu I was entering. I now see that my preparations had not shined sufficient light on the social and structural factors that organize the contemporary university.... As it turns out, the restructuring of our lives within the working conditions, priorities , and rationalities of this professional milieu triggered unanticipated and painful effects.... Had Mountz published her article “Women on the Edge” before I decided on a career migration into the university system and, had I been fortunate enough to discover it, I would have made other career choices.2 1. The authors, who describe themselves as the Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective, indicate their personal narratives in this text using italics. 2. Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds., Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Bisaillon et al. 131 Introduction: Personal, Professional, and Political We are seven women who met at the Brocher Foundation in Hermance, Switzerland, in July 2017, where we had been selected to spend a few months as research fellows. This competitively awarded opportunity is open to persons fluent in English, from graduate students to senior scholars, with or without academic appointment, whose scholarship advances knowledge about the ethical, legal, and social implications of health and biotechnologies.3 When we found ourselves on the shores of Lake Leman with the gift of time, we began opening up to each other in unexpected, compelling ways. Whatever our vantage point in the hierarchy of the university system, we discovered that there was remarkable overlap in our experiences as women in academia. When we began writing, our authoring team was composed of two graduate students, four faculty members at the assistant professor rank, and one full professor , residing in Canada, the Netherlands, Romania, the United Kingdom , and the United States. Our plural subject position led us to underexplored and imaginative responses to broader social issues, which we share in this article as the “Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective.” We analyze our experiences from our standpoint as women health researchers laboring in the academy. Our similarities and differences were exciting entry points for discussion and analysis: we are all of eastern or western European descent. We have different countries of birth, mother tongues, ages, disciplinary training and career trajectories, relationships to chronic illness and disability, marital status, and experiences with parenthood. We bring the troubles and contradictions we experience as academics into conversation with each other. We seek to productively illustrate and emphasize that the tensions we see around us, and also feel within us, arise as a result of how the academic system is organized, produced, and sustained across time, place, and space. Press, 2003); Alison Mountz, “Women on the Edge: Workplace Stress at Universities in North America,” The Canadian Geographer 60, no. 2 (2016): 205–18. 3. We experienced this fellowship as a valuable opportunity. But we also recognized that our access to it was mediated by social, economic, or other obligations . As countries in the global north continue to tighten their national border regimes, marginalized academics, especially those from the global South, were less likely to succeed in getting a Swiss visa or securing relevant temporal and economic resources. 132 Bisaillon et al. The promise here, we posit...

Интеграция образования, науки и производства по модели "фабрика знаний" (на примере транспортной отрасли)

Интеграция образования, науки и производства по модели "фабрика знаний" (на примере транспортной отрасли)

Faculty in Tamara-Land: Taylorism, Ritual, and Performance

More than twenty year after a postmodern analysis of Disney, we find more examples of Tamara emerging in different environments. One such environment is higher education, where the combination of political rather than technical deskilling drives the re-creation of the university as a knowledge factory, opening new fronts for emancipatory struggle outside more thoroughly examined professions. This has been exacerbated by a politicized “narrative drift” that has wholly reconstructed the common understanding of Taylor and scientific management. The emergence of faculty in Tamara-land serves to demonstrate that the need for critical management and emancipatory processes remain significant despite years of research and consideration.

Мобилизация и реорганизация российской науки и образования в годы Первой мировой войны

The article explores the impact of the World War I on motivation, structuring and self-identification of the Russian scientific community and its institutions. The transformation of scientific and educational institutions of Russia influenced by the World War I is analyzed as a process of creating a mobilization model of science organization and associated restructuration of the relationship between scientists, authorities and society. 
 The special attention is paid to the increasing role of the scientific community in provision of raw materials and rations to the front and rear, development of new weapons and military technologies, creation of new branches of the defense industry, and protection of monuments of science and culture. The project presents a holistic analysis of changes in research subjects, transformations of the ratio between applied and fundamental knowledge, natural sciences and humanities, the reinforcement of an image of science as a knowledge factory that became a basis for the plans of forming a network of scientific and research institutions.

Genesis, goals and achievements of Long-Term Ecological Research at the global scale: A critical review of ILTER and future directions

Since its founding in 1993 the International Long-term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) has gone through pronounced development phases. The current network comprises 44 active member LTER networks representing 700 LTER Sites and ~80 LTSER Platforms across all continents, active in the fields of ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological research. The critical challenges and most important achievements of the initial phase have now become state-of-the-art in networking for excellent science. At the same time increasing integration, accelerating technology, networking of resources and a strong pull for more socially relevant scientific information have been modifying the mission and goals of ILTER. This article provides a critical review of ILTER's mission, goals, development and impacts. Major characteristics, tools, services, partnerships and selected examples of relative strengths relevant for advancing ILTER are presented. We elaborate on the tradeoffs between the needs of the scientific community and stakeholder expectations. The embedding of ILTER in an increasingly collaborative landscape of global environmental observation and ecological research networks and infrastructures is also reflected by developments of pioneering regional and national LTER networks such as SAEON in South Africa, CERN/CEOBEX in China, TERN in Australia or eLTER RI in Europe. The primary role of ILTER is currently seen as a mechanism to investigate ecosystem structure, function, and services in response to a wide range of environmental forcings using long-term, place-based research. We suggest four main fields of activities and advancements for the next decade through development/delivery of a: (1) Global multi-disciplinary community of researchers and research institutes; (2) Strategic global framework and strong partnerships in ecosystem observation and research; (3) Global Research Infrastructure (GRI); and (4) a scientific knowledge factory for societally relevant information on sustainable use of natural resources.

The impact of knowledge management on job performance in higher education

PurposeThis is an empirical study of knowledge management performance (KMP) at a university and the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between knowledge management process (KMPR), KMP and job performance (JP).Design/methodology/approachThe data were collected using a questionnaire, as the instrument for the primary data collection, with total collected back responses of 207 from university lecturers who have actually participated. Structural equation modeling technique was used to fully analyze the data in order to determine what level of the relationship between knowledge management (KM) and JP existed.FindingsThe main findings were related to confirming the two main hypotheses of the research that were related to testing if there were relationships between the KMPR (represented by seven surrogate measures, namely, knowledge identification, knowledge creation, knowledge collection, knowledge organizing, knowledge storage, knowledge dissemination and knowledge application) and KMP, as well as if the KMP was related to the JP.Originality/valueThis paper focuses on investigating the actual role of KM at a university, which is assumingly a knowledge factory. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that presumes the importance of KM and specially when there is no proper KM regiment in place, the paper reports the limited influence KM has on staff JP. It is one of the few studies that fills the gap in the literature concerned with the relationship between KM and JP and perhaps the first to provide insights about the KM intricacies at a Jordanian University.

The National Mechatronic Platform. The basis of the educational programs in the knowledge society

The shift from the information society to the knowledge based society caused by the mechatronic revolution, that took place in the 9th decade of the last century, launched a lot of challenges for education and researches activities too. Knowledge production development asks for new educational technologies to stimulate the initiative and creativity as a base to increase the productivity in the knowledge production. The paper presents details related on the innovative potential of mechatronics as educational environment for transdisciplinarity learning and integral education. The basic infrastructure of that environment is based on mechatronic platforms. In order to develop the knowledge production at the national level the specific structures are to be developed. The paper presents details related on the structure of the National Mechatronic Platform as a true knowledge factory. The benefits of the effort to develop the specific infrastructure for knowledge production in the field of mechatronics are outlined too.

Agonistic Academe: Dialogue, Paralogy, and the Postmodern University

The birth of the neoliberal university might be traced back to 1996, when a relatively unknown associate professor of Comparative Literature at the Universite de Montreal caused a stir by publishing a book that showed how colleges and universities are run more like businesses or corporations than educational institutions. Widely read and cited, Bill Readings' The University in Ruins (1996) was a shot across the bow of academe. It announced that business values were supplanting academic values in the administration of universities--and laid the groundwork for a chorus of ever more dystopic political and economic accounts of the state of higher education. Readings' book was highly influential and convinced a lot of folks whose primary area of research was not higher education to start thinking and writing about the corporate conditions of academe. Over the course of the next dozen (1996-2008), many other fine accounts of the corporate logic of the contemporary university and its implications came out including CUNY sociologist Stanley Aronowitz's The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (2001), former Harvard President Derek Bok's Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (2003), freelance journalist and New America Foundation fellow Jennifer Washburn's University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (2005), and more recently, Ohio State University English professor, Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (2008). From Bok reporting how he received year after year one proposition after another to exchange some piece or product of Harvard for money--often, quite substantial sums of money (x) to Donoghue boldly predicting that while professors have only been around for the last eighty years (xi), don't count on them being around for the next eighty, each of these studies provided a slightly different voice to the growing chorus that the economic base of higher education in America has in fundamental ways, changed. For the most part, the consensus has been that the financial changes within the university have been for the worse--and are not reversible. However, of late, there seems to be a change in tone in discussions about the fate of the university. Whereas just five ago, Frank Donoghue could proclaim offer nothing in the way of uplifting solutions to the problems that I describe (xi), after the collapse of the economy (which occurred after the publication of Donoghue's book), this no longer seems possible--or at least responsible. With so many academics underemployed and unemployed, and so many students strapped with debt that will take most of their working lives to pay off and fewer real employment opportunities, academics now seem ready to get down to problem-solving--rather than merely bemoaning changes in academic culture. Though the financial hurricane of 2008 may not have destroyed the corporate practices of universities, as a number of more recent studies show, the house of higher education is still tenuously standing--though desperately in need of reform. In this article, I would like to argue that what is needed in conversations about higher education in America are not more accounts about the growing corporatization of the university, increasing focus on research and specialization, diminishing faculty academic freedom, and rising costs and student debt. By now, most will agree that these and other changes have occurred in the American higher educational system. Rather, what is needed is more inquiry on the university from the point of view that there may be no going back to the way things were; that what we might call the university (that is, the model used at least since 1915, the founding year of the AAUP) is dying--if not dead--and that the new university that is emerging out of the ashes of the modern university will be fundamentally different. …

The knowledge factory: in/corporation of cognitive capitalism in the university

The large-scale changes that are happening in the global context are permeating every area of contemporary life. University institutions are not immune to these changes and are becoming articulated within a unique logic, creating new "cultures" related to the production of knowledge and training. This material-semiotic framework seeks to reproduce itself through particular assemblages strongly imposed on the subjects involved, leaving little room for the generation of critical thinking that can escape commodification and creating various forms of subjectivity in line with the dominant values of cognitive capitalism. Nevertheless, alternatives to this logics are present, either through the "exodus" of institutions, either by making critical strands "inside" the structures of domination that form university space.

The knowledge factory: in/corporation of cognitive capitalism in the university

Los cambios a gran escala que se estan sucediendo en el contexto global estan permeando todas y cada una de las areas de la vida contemporanea. El espacio universitario no esta ajeno a estos cambios y tambien se esta transformando de modo articulado con el pensamiento unico, generando nuevas “culturas” relacionadas con la produccion de conocimiento y la formacion. Este entramado semiotico-material busca su reproduccion a traves de ensamblajes particulares que se imponen con fuerza sobre los sujetos que participan, dejando poco espacio para la generacion de pensamiento critico que escape de la mercantilizacion galopante y creando diversas formas de subjetividad acorde con los valores dominantes del capitalismo cognitivo. Aun asi, tambien se pueden observar referentes alternativos que responden a estas logicas, bien a traves del “exodo” respecto de estos espacio de poder, bien por busqueda de una incidencia “desde dentro” sobre las estructuras de dominacion que configuran este espacio universitario.

Beyond the Knowledge Factory?

A review of Nussbaum, Martha C. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Edu-factory Collective. 2009. Toward a Global Autonomous University. New York: Autonomedia. Roggero, Gigi. 2011. The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and America, translated by Enda Brophy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bailey, Michael and Des Freedman, eds. 2011. The Assault on Universities: A Mani- festo for Resistance. London: Pluto Press.

From Business Administration to Business Creation: The Case of the Kalevala Global Business Creation School

IntroductionThe University is the ultimate knowledge factory. Nations compete, among other things, on the quantity of academic and scholarly knowledge created. Research and development expenditure, as a percentage of GDP, is an established macro-level measure of innovation and so is the number of patents. The university system accounts for a lot of the quantity.But what is the

From Business Administration to Business Creation: The Case of the Kalevala Global Business Creation School

IntroductionThe University is the ultimate knowledge factory. Nations compete, among other things, on the quantity of academic and scholarly knowledge created. Research and development expenditure, as a percentage of GDP, is an established macro-level measure of innovation and so is the number of patents. The university system accounts for a lot of the quantity.But what is the

The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory: Work and Organizational Redesign and Associated Challenges

The term “24-Hour Knowledge Factory” connotes a geographically dispersed team of workers in which members of the team are able to work on specific endeavors on a round-the-clock basis. There are five defining features of this form of work: (i) the same body of work is processed sequentially, and is handed from one unit to another (as opposed to working in parallel on non-overlapping sub-systems); (ii) the handover of work is characterized by very short cycle times (happens several times a day) and the frequency of handover is far greater than in traditional offshore work; (iii) the functional units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory operate in a peer-to-peer relationship where each functional unit audits the work of all other units (as opposed to a buyer auditing the work of a supplier); (iv) the knowledge transfer between the different work units, as well as the capture and transfer of work history between units, is effected through specialized mechanisms and a distributed human agency that called the composite personae; and (v) the constituent units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory feature very similar work capabilities, as opposed to the more traditional model of global teams where the distributed teams usually possess complementary work capabilities. The distributed units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory work on the same body of work and do very similar work – as a result the different units tend to have nearly identical capabilities. The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory is characterized by all these five factors operating concurrently on a distributed firm or a network of firms engaged in doing information work. We identify two sets of research issues surrounding this emergent phenomenon that fall within the technical paradigm and the organizational paradigm, respectively, of Information Systems.

Creating the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory concept involves separate and distinct global operating centers that facilitate the transfer of information from one work location to another, thus allowing for continuous operation. In this article the authors elaborate on this concept and discusses relevant current industry practices and technologies with respect to the implementation and commercial deployment of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory paradigm.

Creating the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory concept involves separate and distinct global operating centers that facilitate the transfer of information from one work location to another, thus allowing for continuous operation. This paper elaborates on this concept and discusses relevant current industry practices and technologies with respect to the implementation and commercial deployment of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory paradigm.

The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The term “24-Hour Knowledge Factory” connotes a geographically dispersed team of workers in which members of the team work on endeavors on a continous basis. This work has five defining features: (i) the same body of work is processed sequentially and handed one unit to another; (ii) the handover of work is characterized by short cycle times and the frequency of handover is greater than in traditional offshore work; (iii) the functional units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory operate in a peer-to-peer relationship where each functional unit audits the work of other units; (iv) the knowledge transfer between the different work units and work history between units is effected through specialized mechanisms and a distributed human agency called the composite personae; and (v) the constituent units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory feature similar work capabilities, as opposed to the more traditional model of global teams where the distributed teams usually possess complementary work capabilities. The distributed units of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory work on the same body of work and do very similar work; therefore, the units have nearly identical capabilities. The authors identify two sets of research issues surrounding this phenomenon that fall within the technical paradigm and the organizational paradigm of information systems.

Leveraging temporal and spatial separations with the 24-hour knowledge factory paradigm

The 24-H Knowledge Factory facilitates collaboration between geographically and temporally distributed teams. The teams themselves form a strategic partnership whose joint efforts contribute to the completion of a project. Project-related tasks are likewise distributed, allowing tasks to be completed on a continuous basis, regardless of the constraints of any one team's working hours. However, distributing a single task between multiple teams necessitates a handoff process, where one team's development efforts and task planning are communicated from one team ending their shift to the next that will continue the effort. Data management is, therefore, critical to the success of this business model. Efficiency in data management is achieved through a strategic leveraging of key tools, models, and concepts.

24-Hour Knowledge Factory Paradigm And Its Role In It Collaborations In Organizations

A new paradigm based on the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory is emerging in software development, where groups spanning the globe collaborate on the same work product over the entire 24 hour day, as a means to reduce development time and costs. This paradigm supports a gain in productivity but requires smooth transfer of knowledge — such as the rationale behind key architectural decisions -- among distant development teams. Distant collaboration is seen in conventional wisdom as a barrier to overcome because of the challenges in coordinating work amongst remote sites. In this paper, we report a case study comparing a co-located team and a distributed team to provide empirical evidence of the utility of Internet-based collaborative platforms. Our evidence show that context-driven knowledge transfer via Internet can provide an effective mechanism for transcending geographic barriers through the use of intuitive interfaces and visualizations. When applied in conjunction with existing versioning systems and code repositories, these interfaces and visualizations can allow developers to gain several benefits: rapid contextual understanding of the previous teams’ contributions; and more effective handling of management tasks such as task assignment and planning.