The Development Of Computer Science A Sociocultural Perspective

Addresses current issues of research into socio-technical systems (STSs). Provides suggestions on how social knowledge can synergize with technical knowledge.

Covers the development, design, and utilization of virtual organizations and communities and the resulting impact of these venues.

For many years Esko Ukkonen has played a major role in the advancement of computer science in Finland. He was the key person in the development of the school of algorithmic research and has contributed considerably to post-graduate education in his country. Esko Ukkonen has over the years worked within many areas of computer science, including numerical methods, complexity theory, theoretical aspects of compiler construction, and logic programming. However, the main focus of his research has been on algorithms and their applications. This Festschrift volume, published to honor Esko Ukkonen on his 60th birthday, includes 18 refereed contributions by his former PhD students and colleagues, with whom he has cooperated closely during the course of his career. The Festschrift was presented to Esko during a festive symposium organized at the University of Helsinki to celebrate his birthday. The essays primarily present research on computational pattern matching and string algorithms, two areas that have benefited significantly from the work of Esko Ukonen.

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives, ISSEP 2015, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in September/October 2015. The 14 full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. The focus of the conference was on following topics: sustainable education in informatics for pupils of all ages; connecting informatics lessons to the students’ everyday lives; teacher education in informatics; and research on informatics in schools (empirical/qualitative/quantitative/theory building/research methods/comparative studies/transferability of methods and results from other disciplines).

This book presents the user-facing aspects of digital media, from the web and computer games, to mobile technologies and social media, and demonstrates how these are continuously growing and developing. The convergence of IT, telecommunications, and media is bringing about a revolution in the way information is collected, stored, accessed and distributed. Rae Earnshaw's book explores the principal factors driving this and the ways in which social and cultural contexts are affected by media content. This is Professor Earnshaw's fourth book in a series that focuses on digital media and creativity, and through the use of Case Studies; the theoretical, practical and technical aspects of digital media are examined. Readers are informed about how the user as content creator, publisher and broadcaster is changing the traditional roles of news media, publishers and entertainment corporations. Topics such as the evolution of digital imaging and the phenomenon of social media are discussed in relation to this. Professor Earnshaw also demonstrates how changes in technology produce shifts in the ways that consumers utilize it, in an increasing variety of application domains such as e-books, digital cameras, Facebook and Twitter. State of the Art in Digital Media and Applications will be invaluable for readers that want a comprehensive look at how emerging digital media technologies are being used, and how they are transforming how we create, consume, exchange and manipulate media content.