Towards a Taxonomy for Neighborhood Volunteering Management Platforms

The management and organization of volunteering in the social sector have been strongly influenced by technological progress over the last two decades. New proposals for IT-based volunteering management platforms that draw on many elements of social media are appearing with increasing frequency. In this article, we analyzed the current state of the art and use a methodological approach to develop a taxonomy for classifying existing and emerging developments in the field. The taxonomy is intended to assist practitioners in selecting appropriate systems for their respective purposes as well as support researchers in identifying research gaps. The resulting research artifact has undergone an initial evaluation and can support maintaining a better overview in a growing subject area

Full Issue: Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence, Volume 2, Issue 1

The full Spring 2018 issue (Volume 2, Issue 1) of the Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

Digital Technologies for Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language: a collective monograph

Колективна монографія розкриває різні аспекти використання цифрових технологій у навчанні англійської мови як іноземної/другої мови (цифровий сторітелінг, мобільні застосунки, інтерактивне навчання і онлайн-ігри, тощо) та надає освітянам і дослідникам ресурс для збагачення їхньої професійної діяльності. Окрема увага приділена цифровим інструментам для впровадження соціально-емоційного навчання та інклюзивної освіти на уроках англійської мови. Для вчителів англійської мови, методистів, викладачів вищих закладів освіти, науковців, здобувачів вищої освіти

Proceedings of the 1st Annual CUNY Games Festival

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 17-18, 2014, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Topics in Game Design - Teaching with Virtual and Augmented Realities - Writing with Games - Breaking the Magic Circle: Games & Real Life - Interactive Game Design (What\u27s Your Game Plan? - Designing Ethical Games - Games and Gender - Gaming English Language and Literature - Game, Narrative, Literacy - Teaching with Games - Games, Storytelling, and Narrative - Games and STEM - Learning by Design - Students as Game Designers - Experiencing Reality in Popular Games - Making Educational Game

Gamification for Innovators and Entrepreneurs

This book provides a research-based overview of the use of games to facilitate learning in innovation/entrepreneurship and draws on work in several European institutions and well-known companies. Also, it provides a review of experiences in using games, a typology and a model for introducing games into course design. Examples include games specifically designed and developed within the project plus signpost links to an online library of games

Gamification for Innovators and Entrepreneurs

This book provides a research-based overview of the use of games to facilitate learning in innovation/entrepreneurship and draws on work in several European institutions and well-known companies. Also, it provides a review of experiences in using games, a typology and a model for introducing games into course design. Examples include games specifically designed and developed within the project plus signpost links to an online library of games

Design and Instantiation of an Interactive Multidimensional Ontology for Game Design Elements – a Design and Behavioral Approach

While games and play are commonly perceived as leisure tools, focus on the strategic implementation of isolated gameful elements outside of games has risen in recent years under the term gamification. Given their ease of implementation and impact in competitive games, a small set of game design elements, namely points, badges, and leaderboards, initially dominated research and practice. However, these elements reflect only a small group of components that game designers use to achieve positive outcomes in their systems. Current research has shifted towards focusing on the game design process instead of the isolated implementation of single elements under the term gameful design. But the problem of a tendency toward a monocultural selection of prominent design elements persists in-game and gameful design, preventing the method from reaching its full potential. This dissertation addresses this problem by designing and developing a digital, interactive game design element ontology that scholars and practitioners can use to make more informed and inspired decisions in creating gameful solutions to their problems. The first part of this work is concerned with the collation and development of the digital ontology. First, two datasets were collated from game design and gamification literature (game design elements and playing motivations). Next, four explorative studies were conducted to add user-relevant metadata and connect their items into an ontological structure. The first two studies use card sorting to assess game theory frameworks regarding their suitability as foundational categories for the game design element dataset and to gain an overview of different viewpoints from which categorizations can be derived. The second set of studies builds on an explorative method of matching dataset entries via their descriptive keywords to arrive at a connected graph. The first of these studies connects items of the playing motivations dataset with themselves, while the second connects them with an additional dataset of human needs. The first part closes with the documentation of the design and development of the tool Kubun, reporting on the outcome of its evaluation via iterative expert interviews and a field study. The results suggest that the tool serves its preset goals of affording intuitive browsing for dedicated searches and serendipitous findings. While the first part of this work reports on the top-down development process of the ontology and related navigation tool, the second part presents an in-depth research of specific learning-oriented game design elements to complement the overall research goal through a complementary bottom-up approach. Therein, two studies on learning-oriented game design elements are reported regarding their effect on performance, long-term learning outcome, and knowledge transfer. The studies are conducted with a game dedicated to teaching correct waste sorting. The first study focuses on a reward-based game design element in terms of its motivatory effect on perfect play. The second study evaluates two learning-enhancing game design elements, repeat, and look-up, in terms of their contribution to a long-term learning outcome. The comprehensive insights gained through the in-depth research manifest in the design of a module dedicated to reporting research outcomes in the ontology. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the studies’ varying limitations and an outlook on pathways for future research

An Empty Promise? Digital Democracy in the Smart City

The digital transformation affects every part of our societies and everyday lives, including the processes and structures of our democracies. On the one hand, information and communication technologies have the potential to lower the threshold for political communication and participation. On the other hand, they can be used for large-scale data collection and surveillance, posing a risk to the public sphere. This thesis investigates the impact of digitization on the legitimacy of democracy. It first develops a novel framework based on the theories of participatory and deliberative democracy, drawing on recent work on deliberative systems. On this basis, digital democracy is examined as a system, consisting of different engagement spaces and actors within the smart city. The smart city is a particularly fruitful testbed for digital democracy as it is based on the promise of applying a high density of digital technologies to facilitate civic participation as well as better service delivery and governance. Through an in-depth case study of the smart city of Amsterdam, this thesis not only reveals the legitimacy dilemmas of digital democracy in the smart city, but also illustrates the limits of applying participatorydeliberative systems theory on a digital democracy ecosystem. The analysis demonstrates design conflicts between different online engagement platforms within the digital democracy system, as well as conflicting objectives among the actors behind them. The findings do not support the claim that digitization negatively impacts democracy’s legitimacy in the smart city of Amsterdam through marketization, large-scale data collection, and surveillance, as some authors warn. However, a significant positive impact of digitization on democratic legitimacy, through higher levels of inclusiveness, empowerment, or civic influence, is also not confirmed. The findings show that digital technologies’ promise of facilitating large-scale citizen participation and deliberation in the smart city does not live up to the normative ideal. The results from Amsterdam are exposed to smart city and digital democracy experts across the globe to test their generalizability, demonstrating that, despite its shortcomings, Amsterdam’s extensive digital democracy system is far advanced in international comparison. What may appear a contradiction in fact illustrates that we are still in the early stages of development, with potential to enhance the legitimacy of digital democracy, both in the smart city of Amsterdam and beyond