Jacob L. Cybulski

Professional education using e-simulations : benefits of blended learning design

The use of digital, Web-based simulations for education and training in the workplace is a significant, emerging innovation requiring immediate attention. A convergence of new educational needs, theories of learning, and role-based simulation technologies points to educators’ readiness for e-simulations. As modern e-simulations aim at integration into blended learning environments, they promote rich experiential, constructivist learning. Professional Education Using E-Simulations: Benefits of Blended Learning Design contains a broad range of theoretical perspectives on, and practical illustrations of, the field of e-simulations for educating the professions in blended learning environments. Readers will see authors articulate various views on the nature of professions and professionalism, the nature and roles that various types of e-simulations play in contributing to developing an array of professional capabilities, and various viewpoints on how e-simulations as an integral component of blended learning environments can be conceived, enacted, evaluated, and researched.

Creative problem solving in digital space using visual analytics

Interactive visual analytics has a unique process of creative design.Data visualization tools can foster personal and collective creativity.Narratives and metaphors enhance communication of analytic insights.Creative visual analytics supports exploration of big and messy data sets.Human intuition is needed in business decision-making and problem-solving. This article presents a framework for understanding and explaining digital creativity within the growing area of interactive visual analytics. Through the study of extant literature, existing software products, and our own development experience, various aspects of digital creativity are explored in the context of interactive visual analytics and its application to decision-making and problem-solving.The proposed framework explores and fuses a number of models of individual, social, and domain creativity. It explains the challenges of the analyst navigating through rapidly growing and ubiquitous digital data with an objective to explore it, discover its meanings and associations, as well as solve problems and arrive at effective business decisions. As a creative process, interactive visual analytics differs from other forms of digital creativity, as it utilizes analytic models, relies on the analysts mental imagery and involves an iterative process of generation and evaluation of ideas in digital media, as well as planning, execution, and refinement of the associated actions. This process is also characterized as collaborative and social by nature as it comprises of analysts from data, problem, and visual domains, who share ideas and actions during analytic activities.We conclude by suggesting that interactive data visualization may provide opportunities for lay people to creatively engage with data analytics to explore the vast data resources that are freely available and in so doing, gain and communicate insights which may have the potential to impact their private lives and the world at large.

Requirements Engineering for Web-Based Information Systems

This chapter overviews the existing methods of requirements analysis as prescribed by some of the best-known web-development methods. It also discusses the pre-eminent importance of stakeholder analysis, identification of stakeholder views and concerns, and the processes governing elicitation of web systems requirements. The chapter finally derives a model of concern-driven requirements evolution from several case studies undertaken in the area of web-enabled employee service systems.

Automating Requirements Refinement with Cross-Domain Requirements Classification

Introduction of software reuse into the development process significantly alters the life-cycle model, and has a tremendous impact on all of its software development phases. This also includes the phase of requirements engineering, its activities and the tools used in the process. To deal with the consequences of incorporating reuse in the early phases of software development, we suggest the use of a special process model, capable of simultaneously meeting the goals of software reuse and the goals of requirements engineering. The RARE (Reuse Assisted Requirements Engineering) method proposes such a model. RARE places a particular emphasis on two aspects of requirements processing, i.e. requirements classification and domain mapping. Both of these aspects are especially helpful in the automation of requirements refinement into reusable designs.

Metaphors in Interactive Visual Analytics

We intuitively understand primary metaphors because they spring from our lived experience as humans. This paper explores the role of primary metaphor in interactive visual analytics. We describe and provide examples of several primary metaphors that can be used in designing and communicating visual representations. We also illustrate how rich and immersive visual analytics environment can support intuitive interaction based around natural metaphors.

Using business intelligence to support the process of organizational sensemaking

Making sense of an organization overwhelmed with data becomes a problem for decision makers at all levels of business planning and operation. Although scholars have suggested several technological solutions such as business intelligence as being useful in helping busy executives to make decisions, we still know little about assisting business stakeholders in the process of understanding their organizational complexity before such decisions could even be formulated. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities in using BI technologies to make sense of a business environment. We analyze the views and opinions of developers, analysts, consultants, and users of business intelligence, who are experienced in using the technology beyond decision making to support organizational sensemaking. Our results highlight the need for creating and maintaining individual; and organizational identity and enacting this identity on the business and its environment.

Interactive Exploration of Data with Visual Metaphors

Visual Analytics (VA) is an approach to data analysis by means of visual manipulation of data representation, which relies on innate human abilities of perception and cognition. Even though current visual toolkits in the Business Analytics (BA) domain have improved the effectiveness of data exploration, analysis and reporting, their features are often not intuitive, and can be confusing and difficult to use. Moreover, visualizations generated from these toolkits are mostly accessible to specialist users. Thus, there is a need for analytic environments that support data exploration, interpretation and communication of insight that do not add to the cognitive load of the analyst and their non-technical clients. In this conceptual paper, we explore the potential of primary metaphors, which arise out of human lived and sensory-motor experiences, in the design of immersive visual analytics environments. Primary metaphors provide ideas for representation of time, space, quantity, similarity, actions and team work. Using examples developed in our own work, we also explain how to combine such metaphors to create complex and cognitively acceptable visual metaphors, such as 3D data terrains that approximate our intuition of reality and create opportunities for data to be viewed, navigated, explored, touched, changed, discussed, reported and described to others, individually or collaboratively.

A Hermeneutic Study of Pattern Mining as a Knowledge Creation Process: Exploring Multimedia Design Practices

In this paper, we discuss a special case of knowledge creation via pattern mining that was studied using a hermeneutic approach. The reported study explores the nature of knowledge creation by domain practitioners who do not communicate directly. The focus of this paper extends the traditional view of a knowledge creation process beyond organisational boundaries. The proposed knowledge creation framework explains the facilitated process of knowledge creation by its qualification, combination, socialisation, externalisation, internalisation and introspection, thus allowing the transformation of individual experience and knowledge into formalised shareable domain knowledge.

Application of hermeneutics to studying an experience mining process

In this paper we investigate an approach to eliciting practitioners’ problem-solving experience across an application domain. The approach is based on a well-known ‘pattern mining’ process which commonly results in a collection of sharable and reusable ‘design patterns’. While pattern mining has been recognised to work effectively in numerous domains, its main problem is the degree of technical proficiency that few domain practitioners are prepared to master. In our approach to pattern mining, patterns are induced indirectly from designers’ experience, as determined by analysing their past projects, the problems encountered and solutions applied in problem rectification. Through the cycles of hermeneutic revisions, the pattern mining process has been refined and ultimately its deficiencies addressed. The hermeneutic method used in the study has been clearly shown in the paper and illustrated with examples drawn from the multimedia domain. The resulting approach to experience elicitation provided opportunities for active participation of multimedia practitioners in capturing and sharing their design experience.

Process of Requirements Evolution in Web-Enabled Employee Service Systems

In recent times, according to the Association for Payroll Specialists, the adoption rate of web-enabled employee service systems (ESS) in Australia has accelerated to a point where one in 10 Australian firms now have such systems in place for employees to view and update their details online (Nixon, 2003). The main objective of web-based support for HR solutions was to replace paper-based documents and the multiple steps of the HR process with online data entry and interaction by employees and managers themselves. Furthermore, the adoption of such services was greatly influenced by the organizational strategic plans that basically translate into operational goals of improved productivity, data accuracy, and the reduction of paperwork and administrative overheads. Despite the optimism and success stories, these systems have their share of obstacles. One of these obstacles is the plain fact that only a fraction of employees have access to the web and computers (Lapointe, 1997). Such systems necessitate infrastructure support in the forms of increased security features, workflow and transaction management, and web administration. Moreover, these systems have been designed keeping in mind that the users will be casual and untrained. Also, the stakeholder base will be far wider than that of conventional non-web HR systems, which are traditionally used by HRstaff alone (Lapointe, 1998). The broad, diverse, and expanding stakeholder base, characteristic of web-enabled information systems (WBIS) in general (Nazareth, 1998; Carter, 2002; Standing, 2002; Stevens and Timbre11, 2002), raises the issue of multiple and possibly conflicting viewpoints regarding the various facets of the web system (Easterbrook, 1994; Sommerville et al., 1997).