http://hdl.handle.net/10362/2120 Thu, 23 May 2013 23:03:48 GMT 2013-05-23T23:03:48Z http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4054 Title: Virtual communities of practice: Investigating motivations and constraints in the processes of knowledge creation and transfer Authors: Correia, Ana Maria R; Paulos, Alice; Mesquita, Anabela Abstract: With accelerated market volatility, faster response times and increased globalization, business environments are going through a major transformation and firms have intensified their search for strategies which can give them competitive advantage. This requires that companies continuously innovate, to think of new ideas that can be transformed or implemented as products, processes or services, generating value for the firm. Innovative solutions and processes are usually developed by a group of people, working together. A grouping of people that share and create new knowledge can be considered as a Community of Practice (CoP). CoP’s are places which provide a sound basis for organizational learning and encourage knowledge creation and acquisition. Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP's) can perform a central role in promoting communication and collaboration between members who are dispersed in both time and space. Nevertheless, it is known that not all CoP's and VCoP's share the same levels of performance or produce the same results. This means that there are factors that enable or constrain the process of knowledge creation. With this in mind, we developed a case study in order to identify both the motivations and the constraints that members of an organization experience when taking part in the knowledge creating processes of VCoP's. Results show that organizational culture and professional and personal development play an important role in these processes. No interviewee referred to direct financial rewards as a motivation factor for participation in VCoPs. Most identified the difficulty in aligning objectives established by the management with justification for the time spent in the VCoP. The interviewees also said that technology is not a constrain Description: Paper presented at the ECKM09 - European Conference on Knowledge Management, 3- 4th, Sep., Università Degli Studi Di Padova, Vicenza, Italy. URL: http:// www.academic-conferences.org/eckm/eckm2009/eckm09-home.ht Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4054 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4051 Title: BIWiki: Using a business intelligence Wiki to form a virtual community of practice for portuguese master's students Authors: Neto, Miguel de Castro; Correia, Ana Maria R Abstract: Web 2.0 software in general and wikis in particular have been receiving growing attention as they constitute new and powerful tools, capable of supporting information sharing, creation of knowledge and a wide range of collaborative processes and learning activities. This paper introduces briefly some of the new opportunities made possible by Web 2.0 or the social Internet, focusing on those offered by the use of wikis as learning spaces. A wiki allows documents to be created, edited and shared on a group basis; it has a very easy and efficient markup language, using a simple Web browser. One of the most important characteristics of wiki technology is the ease with which pages are created and edited. The facility for wiki content to be edited by its users means that its pages and structure form a dynamic entity, in permanent evolution, where users can insert new ideas, supplement previously existing information and correct errors and typos in a document at any time, up to the agreed final version. This paper explores wikis as a collaborative learning and knowledge-building space and its potential for supporting Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs). In the academic years (2007/8 and 2008/9), students of the Business Intelligence module at the Master’s programme of studies on Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence at Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, have been actively involved in the creation of BIWiki – a wiki for Business Intelligence in the Portuguese language. Based on usage patterns and feedback from students participating in this experience, some conclusions are drawn regarding the potential of this technology to support the emergence of VCoPs; some provisional suggestions will be made regarding the use of wikis to support information sharing, knowledge creation and transfer and collaborative learning in Higher Ed Description: Paper presented at the 10th European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM 2009), Università Degli Studi Di Padova, Vicenza, Italy, 3-4 Sep, 2009. URL: http://www.academic-conferences.org/eckm/eckm2009/eckm09-home.ht Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4051 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4084 Title: Co-Authorship of scientists in the energy field: an exploratory study of the ETDE World Energy Database (ETDEWEB) using Social Network Analysis Authors: Monteiro, Vasco; Neto, Miguel de Castro; Cardoso, Aurora; Correia, Ana Maria R Abstract: This paper presents a preliminary exploratory study, using a social network analysis (SNA) approach to examine the structure of co-authorship collaboration within the research community in the energy field from 1995 to 2008. The domain of the study is Portuguese scientists, working either in Portugal or abroad; by foreign scientists working in Portugal or by scientists who have co-authored with either of these groups. The study uses the most common measures of macro (whole network) and micro (actor-centered) structures of this collaboration. The data used to design the social network was obtained from the Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDE)’s Energy Database, which is the largest collection of energy research and technology literature in the world created under the umbrella of the International Energy Agency/Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (IEA/OECD Description: Paper presented at the 5th European Conference Economics and Management of Energy in Industry, Vilamoura, Algarve. Apr. 14-17, 2009, 11p. URL: http:// www.cenertec.pt/ecemei/ Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4084 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4063 Title: Spatial neighborhood matrix computation: Inverse distance weighted versus binary contiguity Authors: Negreiros, J Abstract: A particular GIS aspect is the existence of the spatial neighborhood weighted matrix (W) needed for their assessment and commonly setup by the binary or inverse distance weight (IDW)contiguity. This article recommends that if the former approach fulfills W specification quite well, the distance decay contiguity of IDW, by itself, is blinded to its natural neighbors because the exponent of 1/dexp already underlies the considered number of neighbors. In a more wise approach, IDW should be used mutually with the binary one. Description: Paper presented at Geo-Spatial Crossroad GI_Forum, Salzburg, Austria. Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10362/4063 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z