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This chapter describes the role of ethnography within a technical design process, as understood from an engineering perspective. It pays particular attention to the distinction between research prototypes and manufactured products, arguing that there is often little resemblance between the academic study of technology users and the pragmatics of design for global markets. Software design depends on structured accounts of social affairs, and constructs these using methods appropriated from the social sciences. However, the designed artefact itself should also be read as a craft achievement that emerges into a socio-economic context.

From carefully selected narratives of others and him, Judah Schwartz is able to realize the main principles of design creation for various kinds of software. Issues involved in the discussion of designing educational software comprise of the proper selection of topic and pedagogical scheme, the extent and kind of control and accountability that should be contained within the software as opposed to the amount and sort of control and accountability in the part of the students and teachers who utilize the resource. Dilemmas regarding the entry of computers in education are not only resolved by overcoming the attachment to what is “traditional,” but also by trying new, interactive ways of teaching any subject matter. Arguments ended with the presentation of conflicts and opportunities posted by both straightforwardness and intricacy of software design.

Scientific modeling is a creative activity that can benefit from computational support. This chapter reports five challenges that arise in developing such aids, as illustrated by PROMETHEUS, a software environment that supports the construction and revision of explanatory models. These challenges include the paucity of relevant data, the need to incorporate prior knowledge, the importance of comprehensibility, an emphasis on explanation, and the practicality of user interaction. The responses to these challenges include the use of quantitative processes to encode models and background knowledge, as well as the combination of AND/OR search through a space of model structures with gradient descent to estimate parameters. This chapter reports our experiences with PROMETHEUS on three scientific modeling tasks and some lessons we have learned from those efforts. This chapter concludes by noting additional challenges that were not apparent at the outset of our work.

This chapter examines both the initiation and growth stages of open-source software (OSS) project development. It systematically reintroduces the hypotheses or research questions concerning the factors that determine OSS project success or abandonment and analyzes most of them using contingency tables built based on the responses to The Survey on Free/Libre and Open-Source Success, conducted in fall 2009. After explaining the contingency tables, the chapter considers the technological, community, and institutional attributes that influence success or abandonment. Technological attributes include software requirements, software design (modularity, granularity, complexity), product utility, competition, and collaborative infrastructure. Community attributes include the attributes and motivations of software developers, leadership, and social capital. The chapter also looks at OSS institutions across all project sizes.

This chapter examines key technical artifacts of e-Research, including e-Infrastructure and application software tools, from the perspective of the researchers who are trying to achieve their research goals using these technologies. It explores how traditional approaches to improving the usability of information and communication technology (ICT)-based systems can be reconceptualized to become of greater value in software development. The chapter also discusses one of the most important and frustrating areas of difficulty faced by researchers—the serious security weaknesses of online technologies and devices—and considers sustainable ways of building trust in e-Research systems. In addition, it assesses the implications for e-Research of the popular social networking approaches that typify Web 2.0, computer-supported cooperative work, software design and work practice in end-user development, multisited ethnography, and the Internet’s security vulnerability.

This chapter discusses technological attributes, which refer to a set of variables related to the open-source software (OSS) itself or the technological infrastructure required to coordinate an OSS team, and community attributes, which refer to a set of variables linked to the relationships among people involved in OSS development, along with the project’s financial and marketing aspects. It examines technological factors that could determine the success or abandonment of OSS commons, including software requirements, software design (modularity, granularity, complexity), product utility, competition, and collaborative infrastructure. The chapter also describes code repository and versioning systems, and bug tracking, and, finally, considers community attributes in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, such as user involvement, leadership, social capital, group heterogeneity, group size, financing, and marketing strategies.

This chapter begins with the brief discussion of a characteristic called the “otherness” side of software and broadly discusses the internationalization or i18n of the software industry across the globe. It states that through internationalization, the designing process of software can be localized to different regions and languages across the globe in a cost-effective manner and without software engineering changes. The chapter also examines how the contributions of software platforms like Microsoft, Ubuntu, Java, and others changed the architecture, development, and design phases of the software. The conclusion notes that security issues and other problem areas affect the universality of software.

Assumptions and predicaments in terms of software design following the pedagogy of previous sections are discussed in this chapter. Elaborated here is the usage of computers as comprehensive and enhanced learning instruments in Europe, United States, and Australia and to more countries in the future. The authors describe the dimensions of technology incorporation in the educational setting through discussing the connection of software growth and improvement of related instructional materials, the possible influences of advanced activities on classrooms and the levels and types of assistance and training that mentors need when they experience curriculum modifications. It is insisted that teachers should actively participate in the decision-making process of the advancement in educational technology to be able to gain initial impression and to absorb the responsibility of managing and the advantages of acquiring these developments.

Researchers found that mathematics is one of the most (if not the only) complicated subjects in school. As a response, scholars conducted the ETC Multiplicative Structures/Word Problems Project with the guidance of a representational perspective. The plan is executed in order to cite reflections that could guide medical practitioners and academe members to maintain or even improve the level of motivation of students to learn more about mathematics. Assumptions of the project are anchored on the curricular sphere and on the software design process, which determine the developmental stage and the goals of implementing either the mathematics of quantity or the arithmetic of pure number. In view of these, the chapter figures out an appropriate historical context for the reflections, gives sample demonstrations from previous researches, provides adequate theoretical foundation, incorporates essential details in trendy frameworks and employs strategies on how technology can aid mathematical difficulties.