ENABLING GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED, INTERGENERATIONAL, CO-OPERATIVE DESIGN

As more children's technologies are designed to be used with a global audience, new technologies need to be created to include more children's voices in the design process. However, working with those who that are geographically distributed as design partners is difficult because existing technologies do not support this process, do not enable distributed design, or are not child-friendly. In this dissertation, I take a research-through-design approach to develop an online environment that enables geographically distributed, intergenerational co-operative design. I began my research with participant-observations of in-person, co-located intergeneration co-operative design sessions that used Cooperative Inquiry techniques at the University of Maryland. I then analyzed those observations, determined a framework that occurs during in-person design sessions and developed a prototype online design environment based on that scaffolding. With the initial prototype deployed to a geographic distributed, intergenerational co-design team, I employed Cooperative Inquiry to design new children's technologies with children. I iteratively developed the prototype environment over eight weeks to better support geographically distributed co-design. Adults and children participated in these design sessions and there was no significant difference between the children and adults in the number of design sessions in which they chose to participate. After the design research on the prototype was complete, I interviewed the child participants who were in the online intergenerational design team to better understand their experiences. During the interviews, I found that the child participants had strong expectations of social interaction within the online design environment and were frustrated by the lack of seeing other participants online at the same time. In order to alleviate this problem, five of the participants involved their families in some way in the design process and created small, remote intergenerational design teams to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the online environment. I compared Online Kidsteam with in-person Kidsteam to evaluate if the online environment was successful in supporting geographically-distributed, intergeneration co-design. I found that although it was not the same in terms of the social aspects of in-person Kidsteam, it was successful in its ability to include more people in the design process

An approach to strategic capacity planning using information visualization

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; in conjunction with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-89).by Robert J. Kelly.S.M.M.B.A

Visualization and management of large biological imaging datasets

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 83).The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) image browser enables biologists to quickly analyze, manipulate and modify large imaging datasets. The browser includes a variety of features that facilitate image classification, annotation, visualization, and organization. The browser displays image metadata using a variety of techniques, including visual cues, context-sensitive overlays, and color-coding. The application explicitly supports visualization of screening datasets, but also supports multidimensional images, as well as standalone images. When integrated with the rest of the applications of the OME client software, the browser allows users to view images in greater resolution, analyze multiple dimensions, and in future releases will support analysis routines.by Jeffrey C. Mellen.M.Eng

March 29, 2001

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

The development and evaluation of software to foster professional development in educational assessment

This dissertation sought to answer the question: Is it possible to build a software tool that will allow teachers to write better multiple-choice questions? The thesis proceeded from the finding that the quality of teaching is very influential in the amount that students learn. A basic premise of this research, then, is that improving teachers will improve learning. With this foundation, the next question became what area of teaching to improve. The literature on educational assessment indicated that teachers lack competence at effective assessment, particularly in the area of multiple-choice question generation. It is likely that improvement in this area would yield large gains in educational achievement by students. Several areas of literature including teacher professional development, modification of health-related behaviors, and the information systems theories of captology and structuration theory were synthesized to develop a general model for designing systems to foster teacher professional development. This model was then applied to design and build a tool, QuesGen a web-based system to help teachers write better multiple-choice questions. The tool was evaluated. Quantitative and qualitative results are presented, their implications discussed, and future steps are laid out

GVSU Press Releases, 1972

A compilation of press releases for the year 1972 submitted by University Communications (formerly News & Information Services) to news agencies concerning the people, places, and events related to Grand Valley State University