Technology-enhanced learning as a site for interdisciplinary research

This briefing on Interdisciplinary Research is the fifth publication of its kind emerging from the Technology Enhanced Learning Research programme (TEL). TEL is a £12m programme running from 2007-2012 with eight large interdisciplinary projects aiming to combine technological and pedagogical expertise to improve outcomes for learners. The programme is funded jointly by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. TEL also commissions analyses of key theoretical, practical and policy issues across and beyond the eight projects, and in the wider TEL field

Improving Knowledge Acquisition in Collaborative Knowledge Construction Tool with Virtual Catalyst

Noctua is a web tool to assist in Knowledge Acquisition and Collaborative Knowledge Construction processes. Noctua has an innovation: a Virtual Catalyst designed to facilitate the task of eliciting and validating knowledge. The Virtual Catalyst queries participants, proposing new knowledge, seeking confirmation to the knowledge already elicited, and showing conflicting opinions. The Virtual Catalyst takes into account participants' profiles in order to automatically ask them questions related to each one's field of knowledge or interest. This paper presents Noctua and its Virtual Catalyst. The tool was submitted to experimentation and the analysis of the results showed that the primary goal of increasing the rate of knowledge construction was achieved (up to 144 % in the rate of knowledge creation), and also showed some unexpected beneficial outcomes

Dagstuhl News January - December 2008

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Where can teens find health information? A survey of web portals designed for teen health information seekers

The Web is an important source for health information for most teens with access to the Web (Gray et al, 2005a; Kaiser, 2001). While teens are likely to turn to the Web for health information, research has indicated that their skills in locating, evaluating and using health information are weak (Hansen et al, 2003; Skinner et al, 2003, Gray et al, 2005b). This behaviour suggests that the targeted approach to finding health information that is offered by web portals would be useful to teens. A web portal is the entry point for information on the Web. It is the front end, and often the filter, that users must pass through in order to link to actual content. Unlike general search engines such as Google, content that is linked to a portal has usually been pre-selected and even created by the organization that hosts the portal, assuring some level of quality control. The underlying architecture of the portal is structured and thus offers an organized approach to exploring a specific health topic. This paper reports on an environmental scan of the Web, the purpose of which was to identify and describe portals to general health information, in English and French, designed specifically for teens. It answers two key questions. First of all, what portals exist? And secondly, what are their characteristics? The portals were analyzed through the lens of four attributes: Usability, interactivity, reliability and findability. Usability is a term that incorporates concepts of navigation, layout and design, clarity of concept and purpose, underlying architecture, in-site assistance and, for web content with text, readability. Interactivity relates to the type of interactions and level of engagement required by the user to access health information on a portal. Interaction can come in the form of a game, a quiz, a creative experience, or a communication tool such as an instant messaging board, a forum or blog. Reliability reflects the traditional values of accuracy, currency, credibility and bias, and in the web-based world, durabililty. Findability is simply the ease with which a portal can be discovered by a searcher using the search engine that is most commonly associated with the Web by young people - Google - and using terms related to teen health. Findability is an important consideration since the majority of teens begin their search for health information using search engines (CIBER, 2008; Hansen et al, 2003). The content linked to by the portals was not evaluated, nor was the portals’ efficacy as a health intervention. Teens looking for health information on the Web in English have a wide range of choices available but French-language portals are much rarer and harder to find. A majority of the portals found and reviewed originated from hospitals, associations specializing in a particular disease, and governmental agencies, suggesting that portals for teens on health related topics are generally reliable. However, only a handful of the portals reviewed were easy to find, suggesting that valuable resources for teens remain buried in the Web

Reflections from Participants

The Road Ahead: Public Dialogue on Science and Technology brings together some of the UK’s leading thinkers and practitioners in science and society to ask where we have got to, how we have got here, why we are doing what we are doing and what we should do next. The collection of essays aims to provide policy makers and dialogue deliverers with insights into how dialogue could be used in the future to strengthen the links between science and society. It is introduced by Professor Kathy Sykes, one of the UK’s best known science communicators, who is also the head of the Sciencewise-ERC Steering Group, and Jack Stilgoe, a DEMOS associate, who compiled the collection

Scholarly Collaboration In Engineering Education: From Big-Data Scientometrics To User-Centered Software Design

Engineering education research has grown into a flourishing community with an-ever increasing number of publications and scholars. However, recent studies show that a significant amount of engineering education knowledge retains a clear disciplinary orientation. If the gaps in scholarly collaboration continue to be prevalent within the entire community, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain community memory. This will eventually inhibit the propagation of innovations and slow the movement of research findings into practice. This dissertation studies scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. It provides a clear characterization of collaboration problems and proposes potential solutions. The dissertation is composed of four studies. First, the dissertation recognizes gaps in scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. To achieve this goal, a bibliometric analysis based on 24,172 academic articles was performed to describe the anatomy of collaboration patterns. Second, the dissertation reviewed existing technologies that enhance communication and collaboration in engineering and science. This review elaborated and compared features in 12 popular social research network sites to examine how these features support scholarly communication and collaboration. Third, this dissertation attempted to understand engineering education scholars‟ behaviors and needs related to scholarly collaboration. A grounded theory study was conducted to investigate engineering education scholars‟ behaviors in developing collaboration and their technology usage. Finally, a user-centered software design was proposed as a technological solution that addressed community collaboration needs. Results show that the engineering education research community is at its early stage of forming a small world network relying primarily on a small number of key scholars in the community. Scholars‟ disciplinary background, research areas, and geographical locations are factors that affect scholarly collaboration. To facilitate scholarly communication and collaboration, social research network sites started to be adopted by scholars in various disciplines. However, engineering education scholars still prefer face-to-face interactions, emails, and phone calls for connecting and collaborating with other scholars. Instead of connecting to other scholars online, the present study shows that scholars develop new connections and maintain existing connections mainly by attending academic conferences. Some of these connections may eventually develop into collaborative relationships. Therefore, one way to increase scholarly collaboration in engineering education is to help scholars better network with others during conferences. A new mobile/web application is designed in this dissertation to meet this user need. The diffusion of innovation theory and the small world network model suggest that a well-connected community has real advantages in disseminating information quickly and broadly among its members. It allows research innovations to produce greater impacts and to reach a broader range of audiences. It can also close the gap between scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds. This dissertation contributes to enhancing community awareness of the overall collaboration status in engineering education research. It informs policy making on how to improve collaboration and helps individual scientists recognize potential collaboration opportunities. It also guides the future development of communication and collaboration tools used in engineering education research

Cyberspace As/And Space

The appropriate role of place- and space-based metaphors for the Internet and its constituent nodes and networks is hotly contested. This essay seeks to provoke critical reflection on the implications of place- and space-based theories of cyberspace for the ongoing production of networked space more generally. It argues, first, that adherents of the cyberspace metaphor have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which theories of cyberspace as space themselves function as acts of social construction. Specifically, the leading theories all have deployed the metaphoric construct of cyberspace to situate cyberspace, explicitly or implicitly, as separate space. This denies all of the ways in which cyberspace operates as both extension and evolution of everyday spatial practice. Next, it argues that critics of the cyberspace metaphor have confused two senses of space and two senses of metaphor. The cyberspace metaphor does not refer to abstract, Cartesian space, but instead expresses an experienced spatiality mediated by embodied human cognition. Cyberspace in this sense is relative, mutable, and constituted via the interactions among practice, conceptualization, and representation. The insights drawn from this exercise suggest a very different way of understanding both the spatiality of cyberspace and its architectural and regulatory challenges. In particular, they suggest closer attention to three ongoing shifts: the emergence of a new sense of social space, which the author calls networked space; the interpenetration of embodied, formerly bounded space by networked space; and the ways in which these developments alter, instantiate, and disrupt geographies of power

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N