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An empirical study of the “prototype walkthrough”: a studio-based activity for HCI education

For over a century, studio-based instruction has served as an effective pedagogical model in architecture and fine arts education. Because of its design orientation, human-computer interaction (HCI) education is an excellent venue for studio-based instruction. In an HCI course, we have been exploring a studio-based learning activity called the prototype walkthrough, in which a student project team simulates its evolving user interface prototype while a student audience member acts as a test user. The audience is encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback. We have observed that prototype walkthroughs create excellent conditions for learning about user interface design. In order to better understand the educational value of the activity, we performed a content analysis of a video corpus of 16 prototype walkthroughs held in two HCI courses. We found that the prototype walkthrough discussions were dominated by relevant design issues. Moreover, mirroring the justification behavior of the expert instructor, students justified over 80 percent of their design statements and critiques, with nearly one-quarter of those justifications having a theoretical or empirical basis. Our findings suggest that PWs provide valuable opportunities for students to actively learn HCI design by participating in authentic practice, and provide insight into how such opportunities can be best promoted

Computing infrastructure issues in distributed communications systems : a survey of operating system transport system architectures

The performance of distributed applications (such as file transfer, remote login, tele-conferencing, full-motion video, and scientific visualization) is influenced by several factors that interact in complex ways. In particular, application performance is significantly affected both by communication infrastructure factors and computing infrastructure factors. Several communication infrastructure factors include channel speed, bit-error rate, and congestion at intermediate switching nodes. Computing infrastructure factors include (among other things) both protocol processing activities (such as connection management, flow control, error detection, and retransmission) and general operating system factors (such as memory latency, CPU speed, interrupt and context switching overhead, process architecture, and message buffering). Due to a several orders of magnitude increase in network channel speed and an increase in application diversity, performance bottlenecks are shifting from the network factors to the transport system factors.This paper defines an abstraction called an "Operating System Transport System Architecture" (OSTSA) that is used to classify the major components and services in the computing infrastructure. End-to-end network protocols such as TCP, TP4, VMTP, XTP, and Delta-t typically run on general-purpose computers, where they utilize various operating system resources such as processors, virtual memory, and network controllers. The OSTSA provides services that integrate these resources to support distributed applications running on local and wide area networks.A taxonomy is presented to evaluate OSTSAs in terms of their support for protocol processing activities. We use this taxonomy to compare and contrast five general-purpose commercial and experimental operating systems including System V UNIX, BSD UNIX, the x-kernel, Choices, and Xinu

An explicit model for learning to structure and analyze decisions by judges

Legal practitioners and legal scientists need to have knowledge of the general rules that apply in the legal system. This involves both knowledge of the legislation and knowledge of the decisions by judges that function as general rules of law. Law students preparing themselves for the legal profession need to acquire these kinds of knowledge. A student has to have knowledge about where to look for decisions, understand the structure of decisions and learn to determine what makes a decision relevant to the body of applicable rules in the legal system. Legal education primarily aims at acquiring insight in the legal sources, their history and background. This basic knowledge is of great importance; legal problem solving is hardly possible without an understanding of the legal knowledge. To illustrate the use of this knowledge in practice, teachers work through decisions as examples. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn by explanation or by imitation alone. A more effective way to obtain expertise is by actually performing the task, i.e. students should do the exercises, while the teacher provides feedback on their solutions. For effective learning, also the solution process should be monitored and provided with feedback. Furthermore it is desirable for students to be able to ask for help at any time during the process. They should also be able to practice over and over again. An ideal situation would have a teacher available for every student, monitoring the student while practicing and providing support where and whenever necessary. However, this being not practically feasible, the second best option is to offer the student electronic support. CASE (Case Analysis and Structuring Environment) is an environment where a law student can practice with finding decisions, with structuring its text and with analysing the decision in order to be able to determine in what way it adds to the body of applicable rules in the legal system. CASE is developed using a principled and structured design approach. A short description of this approach is followed by an analysis of the learning task, the difficulties law students experience and the remedies proposed on the basis of both the task analysis and the stated difficulties. This is followed by a description of architecture, functionality, platform and implementation of CASE and a description of a session with CASE and future work

Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

GIS Application to Support Land Administration Services in Ghana: Institutional Factors and Software Developments

In June 1999, the Ghanaian Government launched a new land policy document that sought to address some fundamental problems associated with land administration and management in the country. The document identified the weak land administration system as a particular problem and recommended the introduction of computer-aided information systems in the ‘lands sector’. In 2001, the Government made further proposals to prepare and implement a Land Administration Programme (LAP) to provide a better platform for evolving an efficient land administration that would translate the ‘National Land Policy’ into action. Thus, an up-to-date land information system (LIS), supporting efficient management of land records, is to be constructed, which provides a context for the research reported in this paper. We document two aspects of our research on the adoption of GIS by the Lands Commission Secretariat (LCS) which form part of a pilot project in GIS diffusion. Part one of the paper mainly outlines the empirical results arising from fieldwork undertaken during 2001 to determine the information and GIS requirements of the LCS in relation to their routine administrative processes and to identify the critical factors that are required to ensure that any new GIS applications are successfully embraced. Part two explains the prototype software system developed using ArcView 3.2 and Access that provides the LCS with a means to automate some of the routine administrative tasks that they are required to fulfil. The software has been modified and upgraded following an initial evaluation by LCS employees also conducted as part of the fieldwork in Accra

Characterizing Search Behavior in Productivity Software

Complex software applications expose hundreds of commands to users through intricate menu hierarchies. One of the most popular productivity software suites, Microsoft Office, has recently developed functionality that allows users to issue free-form text queries to a search system to quickly find commands they want to execute, retrieve help documentation or access web results in a unified interface. In this paper, we analyze millions of search sessions originating from within Microsoft Office applications, collected over one month of activity, in an effort to characterize search behavior in productivity software. Our research brings together previous efforts in analyzing command usage in large-scale applications and efforts in understanding search behavior in environments other than the web. Our findings show that users engage primarily in command search, and that re-accessing commands through search is a frequent behavior. Our work represents the first large-scale analysis of search over command spaces and is an important first step in understanding how search systems integrated with productivity software can be successfully developed

Measuring children's search behaviour on a large scale

Children often experience problems during information-seeking using traditional search interfaces and search technologies, that are designed for adults. This is because children engage with the world in fundamentally different ways than adults. To design search technologies that support children in effective and enjoyable information-seeking, more research is needed to examine children’s specific skills and needs concerning information-seeking. Therefore, we developed an application that can monitor children’s search behaviour on a large scale. In this paper, we present the steps taken to develop this application. The basis of the application is UsaProxy, an existing system that is used to monitor the user’s usage of websites. We have increased the accuracy of UsaProxy and have developed an application that is able to extract useful information from UsaProxy’s log files