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The organisations of higher education are constantly changing. Universities, colleges, private schools and online universities refine their pedagogical methods and learning models in a competitive market. This article is a study on whether one such model helps students to gain new knowledge. A study of the LAB studio model (LSM), which is a pedagogical model developing connections between working-life based problems and the recognition and development of business-related prototypes and start-up companies, is presented. The LSM, theoretically grounded in a constructivist view of learning with a project-based education at its core, has the key goal of educating entrepreneurial competences in higher education. Based on the case study, comprisinga literature review of knowledge creation and a survey, the qualitative results analysis suggests that LSM offers a promising support for knowledge creation. The results lead to the conclusion that LSM provides support especially for the various modes of the SECI model, such as socialisation and internalisation, and seems to support organisational knowledge creation aspects as well.

Citizen science has rapidly spread in the last decades around the world as a genuine interactive and inclusive opportunity for engaging citizens in the continuous collection of data relevant for science, governance, businesses, communal living and individual concerns. The present–day abundance of ICT technologies has caused the proliferation of two data collection methods in this field: participatory (user-centric) and opportunistic (device-centric). As a result, citizen observatories have become big data systems, with large scale volumes of data that come and go to millions of users.; about any social or environmental phenomenon (e.g. transit, air or weather) and comes in different formats (e.g. XML, Plain Text, CSV) and through different platforms (e.g. websites, mobile apps, sensor networks). This study reviewed the last 10 years of citizen science literature through a systematic literature review. This study identified 108 citizen observatories, which were deeply studied and clustered to identify global and European trends in environmental applications, practices, engagement techniques and technology uses. Challenges and recommendations from the literature in the field were classified to understand the common present and future path for the discipline. Furthermore, a survey and interviews were applied to stakeholders in Finland to gain broader understanding of the field country–wise. This study, provides the first comprehensive insight of the broad scale of contemporary ICT enabled citizen observatories in social and environmental dimensions.

The User 2020 vision is of the changing needs and habits of a user in the future digital world. In order to understand the needs of the future users, we need to look at how users and technology have changed during recent years. The different generations of users are products of their own time and environment, and each has had its effect on the development of technology. The closer we come to the current generation, the bigger is the effect of technology on the characteristics of that generation. User needs guide the technology and the technology shapes the users. This WWRF Outlook analyses this evolutionary process.The basis of this Outlook lies in studies of user generations. Although it’s controversial to do so, users have been divided into generations based on their ability and willingness to use ICT solutions. Whether the users are digital ‘tourists’, ‘immigrants’ or ‘natives’ is mainly determined by the era in which they were born. This is due to the fact that digital natives, born in an already “fully” digitalized world with a plethora of ICT services, have a much closer relationship to these solutions than generations before them. This has also shaped the users perspectives and had an effect on their future needs.Human needs have been studied much longer than user generations per se. Psychologist Maslow presented a characterization of human needs as early as 1943. This basic characterization was later studied with an evolving environment in mind. Although the basic needs have remained the same, the tools to achieve these goals have changed. This has shaped the users and their future needs and well as created situations in which some higher-level needs may override lower-level needs. Regardless of the time, we will always have a number of generations with differing needs for the solutions. For this purpose we have created various personas for User 2020.The last part of this Outlook focuses on future challenges and how these challenges can be met. The user experience has played an important role in ICT services for some time and will do so in future. The evolved user and their dynamic needs require services to be dynamic and evolve with the changing needs of the user.

There has been rising academic interest in including computer game programming in CS1 curriculum during the past years, and many experience reports exist on the topic. Still, there is a need for knowledge on student reception, that is, how the students themselves view the game theme on a CS1 course. In this paper we review our CS1 course feedback from the years 2008–2013, of which three first years were carried out without games, while the latter three years part of our weekly assignments, plus a bigger course assignment, have been “game-themed”. We found that over 90 % found contextualization through games fun, motivating or rewarding in some other way. Less than 10%of the respondents have somewhat a negative overtone about the course theme. At the same time, dropout rate has declined more than 12 percentage points. peerReviewed

We present an efficient optical network based on a proven concept with a distributed medium access control mechanism that guarantees fairness and offers unique support for multicast as well as mobile packet traffic. The prototype implementation is also described together with an example application: a distributed IP-router.