A Pedagogical Application Framework for Synchronous Collaboration

Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s

A Pedagogical Application Framework for Synchronous Collaboration

Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s

Anotações partilhadas usando quadros interactivos

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaA evolução do ensino encontra-se fortemente correlacionada com as necessidades da sociedade. Em todas as vertentes desta relação, o ensino tem procurado adaptar-se aos novos tempos e o caso da tecnologia não é excepção. A utilização de tecnologia num contexto de ensino é fomentada pela necessidade de trocar informação de forma simples e concisa. O trabalho desenvolvido integra uma interface colaborativa de anotação de vídeo, utilizando uma abordagem de partilha de informação. É necessário pensar para além da comunicação professor/aluno e desta forma a aplicação desenvolvida tem como objectivo trazer para os alunos a possibilidade de partilharem informação validada pelo professor, como acontece hoje em dia com a troca de apontamentos. O professor mantém o seu papel clássico de mediador recorrendo a um quadro interactivo que será o centro do sistema, mantendo a tradicional forma de partilhar conhecimento com os alunos e aumentando o leque das soluções tecnológicas disponíveis. No essencial, o projecto centra-se numa solução intuitiva para anotações em vídeo, facilmente operável através de um dispositivo táctil de toque único, em particular nos quadros interactivos. As anotações permitem a contextualização do vídeo, através das mesmas um determinado vídeo pode ganhar interpretações diferentes perante uma comunidade de utilizadores. Para além da vertente usual das anotações, definidas estaticamente numa posição absoluta no vídeo, este trabalho aborda a utilização de anotações dinâmicas, que permitem que uma dada anotação siga um objecto escolhido pelo utilizador

Development of an Integrated Telerehabilitation Information Management System to Support Remote Wheelchair Prescription

Information technology (IT) is central in providing Telerehabilitation (TR), which enables people with disabilities access to limited number of qualified practitioners with specialty expertise, especially at rural areas. Prior to 2008, most TR utilized non-integrated IT systems to provide its basic infrastructure. Using this approach, data management has to be done manually over multiple non-integrated systems, increasing the possibility of outdated or missing data. An integrated system that is open, flexible, extensible, and cost-effective was designed and developed as a solution to mitigate this problem. The work described in this dissertation elaborates the process of developing such system, called the Versatile and Integrated System for Telerehabilitation (VISYTER). VISYTER was intended to become a platform that is capable of delivering any TR, and was first used to support Remote Wheelchair Prescription (RWP), a TR effort to support clinicians in rural Pennsylvania to prescribe wheeled mobility and seating devices. The development process of VISYTER consisted of three main phases: identification and verification of requirements, validation, and evaluation. The requirement identification and verification phase involved a group of expert clinicians from RWP with the purpose of identifying the requirement of the system to support RWP: a system that can provide real-time teleconsultation and documentation support for prescribing a wheeled mobility intervention. Validation studies were conducted with help from ten individuals, including physicians, clinicians, and suppliers participated to validate VISYTER in their workplaces. All participants agreed that VISYTER can be used to properly support both the teleconsultation and documentation phase of RWP. Afterward, the usability of VISYTER was evaluated through a comparison study with a commonly utilized videoconferencing system in TR, POLYCOM. Twenty-six clinicians participated in a counterbalanced experimental study to measure the difference in usability for completing client assessment tasks using both systems. The study found VISYTER to be more efficient and less prone to error when compared to POLYCOM. Based on these findings, the study concluded that an integrated system could improve the usability TR delivery when compared to non-integrated systems approach

Representation, Recognition and Collaboration with Digital Ink

Pen input for computing devices is now widespread, providing a promising interaction mechanism for many purposes. Nevertheless, the diverse nature of digital ink and varied application domains still present many challenges. First, the sampling rate and resolution of pen-based devices keep improving, making input data more costly to process and store. At the same time, existing applications typically record digital ink either in proprietary formats, which are restricted to single platforms and consequently lack portability, or simply as images, which lose important information. Moreover, in certain domains such as mathematics, current systems are now achieving good recognition rates on individual symbols, in general recognition of complete expressions remains a problem due to the absence of an effective method that can reliably identify the spatial relationships among symbols. Last, but not least, existing digital ink collaboration tools are platform-dependent and typically allow only one input method to be used at a time. Together with the absence of recognition, this has placed significant limitations on what can be done. In this thesis, we investigate these issues and make contributions to each. We first present an algorithm that can accurately approximate a digital ink curve by selecting a certain subset of points from the original trace. This allows a compact representation of digital ink for efficient processing and storage. We then describe an algorithm that can automatically identify certain important features in handwritten symbols. Identifying the features can help us solve a number of problems such as improving two-dimensional mathematical recognition. Last, we present a framework for multi-user online collaboration in a pen-based and graphical environment. This framework is portable across multiple platforms and allows multimodal interactions in collaborative sessions. To demonstrate our ideas, we present InkChat, a whiteboard application, which can be used to conduct collaborative sessions on a shared canvas. It allows participants to use voice and digital ink independently and simultaneously, which has been found useful in remote collaboration

Evaluation of a Telerehabilitation Consultation Model for Remote Wheelchair Prescription

The purpose of this project was to determine the effectiveness of a telerehabilitation (TR) consultation model to prescribe and procure an appropriate wheeled mobility and seating (WMS) device at a remotely located site. The availability of practitioners with specific expertise in this area was limited particularly in Westerns Pennsylvania. A telerehabilitation service delivery model was developed for a series of studies based on a current model implemented at the Center for Assistive Technology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (CAT-UPMC). In a multi-center non-randomized clinical trial, 96 participants were evaluated: 50 In-Person (IP) at the CAT-UPMC and 46 TR participants at remote sites. The performance-based Functioning Everyday with a Wheelchair-Capacity (FEW-C) tool demonstrated excellent inter-rater reliability coefficients (ICC 2,k = 0.91) and good internal consistency measured by Cronbach's alphas with correlations ranging between 0.82 to 0.91 among the 46 TR participants. Results indicated that using a TR consultation model, a significant improvement in mean differences was observed for the each of the self-report Functioning Everyday with a Wheelchair (FEW) items and for the average FEW scores at the remotely sites. Effect size calculations indicated that nine of the ten items on the FEW as well as the total FEW had very large effect sizes using Cohen's d, indicating the effectiveness of not only the new WMS device but the TR assessment as well. A significant relationship was found between the self-report FEW and performance-based FEW-C tools at baseline measured by Spearman rho's correlations. A significant difference was found for participants previous WMS device evaluation and prescription process compared to their current TR WMS device evaluation and prescription scores as well as patient satisfaction regarding the impact of the technology. The findings based on confidence intervals of post FEW scores indicated that TR was non-inferior to the standard IP care at CAT-UPMC. Telerehabilitation services resulted in decreased travel for participants, improved access to specialized services, education benefits for generalist practitioners, and service stabilization at the remote sites. A TR consultation model offers new alternative and effective opportunities to provide rehabilitation services in clinical settings, especially in rural or underserved locations

Accelerating transition to virtual research organisation in social science (AVROSS) : final report

This report is the fourth deliverable of the AVROSS study (Accelerating Transition to Virtual Research Organisation in Social Science, AVROSS). The study aims were to identify the requirements and options for accelerating the transition from traditional research to virtual research organisations through e-Infrastructures. The reason for this focus is that it is clear that "soft" sciences have both much to gain and a key role to play in promoting e-Infrastructure uptake across the disciplines, but to date have not been the fastest adopters of advanced grid-based e-Infrastructure. Our recommendations to EU policy-makers can be expected to point the way to changing this situation, promoting e-Infrastructure in Europe in these disciplines, with clear requirements to developers and expected impact in several other disciplines with related requirements, such as e-Health