A vignette model for distributed teaching and learning

Computer software and telecommunication technologies are being assimilated into the education sector. At a slower pace, educational methodologies have been evolving and gradually adopted by educators. The widespread and rapid assimilation of technology may be outstripping the uptake of better pedagogical strategies. Non‐pedagogical development of content could lead to the development of legacy systems that constrain future developments. Problems have arisen with computer‐based learning (CBL) materials, such as the lack of uptake of monolithic programmes that cannot be easily changed to keep pace with natural progress or the different requirements of different teachers and institutions. Also, hypertext/hypermedia learning environments have limitations in that following predefined paths is no more interactive than page turning. These considerations require a flexible and dynamic approach for the benefit of both the teacher and student. Courses may be constructed from vignettes to meet a desired purpose and to avoid the problems of adoption for the reasons that programmes cannot easily be changed or are not designed to meet particular needs. Vignettes are small, first‐principle, first‐person, heuristic activities (which are mimetic) from which courses can be constructed Vignettes use an object‐orientated approach to the development of computer‐based learning materials. Vignettes are objects that can be manipulated via a property sheet, which enables changing the object's inherent character or behaviour. A vignette object can interact with other vignette objects to create more complex educational interactions or models. The vignette approach leads to a development concept that is horizontally distributed across disciplines rather than vertically limited to single subjects

Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student, and Faculty Collaboration

Over the last two decades, teaching, learning, and research in higher education have developed a growing digital presence. Digital development in the humanities has been slow relative to most other areas in academia, and with some exceptions, art and art history have enjoyed slow digital growth within the humanities. Within this environment, the article here presents one collaborative model for digital art history, rare in its exclusive focus on undergraduate “junior scholars”. Undergraduate senior-level art history and studio art students at Providence College collaborate annually with art history and studio art faculty to publish their senior theses in print format as the Art Journal. In the last few years, students, faculty, and digital library staff have enhanced this collaboration to include the publishing from process to product of the Art Journal as a complementary digital Art Journal. They collaborate in creating digital art history and digital studio art in order to bring exponentially greater meaning, significance and visibility to the students’ senior culminating works through real-world digital publishing, including quality control, copyright issues, and ideas related to persistent access and ongoing global visibility for the scholarly and creative works, and for the student scholars. These students function as real-world collaborative scholarly partners in publishing their culminating academic and artistic work globally, and persistently accessible in Providence College’s digital repositories. This case study evidences engagement in meaningful digital knowledge creation focused on the intellectual and creative output of student-scholars and student-artists (art historians and studio artists) as a model for other student-faculty-digital library professional collaborations. Note: Full text document is a pre-print version of article due to publisher rights. Publisher\u27s version available at the following citation: Bailey, D. Russell. Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student and Faculty Collaboration . The International Journal of New Media, Technology, and the Arts. Volume 10. Issue 2. 2015. pp. 1-10. Ninth International Conference on the Arts in Society website: http://artsinsociety.com/the-conference-201

Assessing quality of experience of IPTV and video on demand services in real-life environments

The ever growing bandwidth in access networks, in combination with IPTV and video on demand (VoD) offerings, opens up unlimited possibilities to the users. The operators can no longer compete solely on the number of channels or content and increasingly make high definition channels and quality of experience (QoE) a service differentiator. Currently, the most reliable way of assessing and measuring QoE is conducting subjective experiments, where human observers evaluate a series of short video sequences, using one of the international standardized subjective quality assessment methodologies. Unfortunately, since these subjective experiments need to be conducted in controlled environments and pose limitations on the sequences and overall experiment duration they cannot be used for real-life QoE assessment of IPTV and VoD services. In this article, we propose a novel subjective quality assessment methodology based on full-length movies. Our methodology enables audiovisual quality assessment in the same environments and under the same conditions users typically watch television. Using our new methodology we conducted subjective experiments and compared the outcome with the results from a subjective test conducted using a standardized method. Our findings indicate significant differences in terms of impairment visibility and tolerance and highlight the importance of real-life QoE assessment

Copy Music

A review of Margie Borschke’s 'This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music' (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

The Place of the User in Copyright Law

Copyright doctrine . . . is characterized by the absence of the user. As copyright moves into the digital age, this absence has begun to matter profoundly. As I will show, the absence of the user has consequences that reach far beyond debates about the legality of private copying, or about the proper scope of user-oriented exemptions such as the fair use and first sale doctrines. The user\u27s absence produces a domino effect that ripples through the structure of copyright law, shaping both its unquestioned rules and its thorniest dilemmas. The resulting imbalance - empty space where one cornerstone of a well-balanced copyright edifice should be - makes for bad theory, bad policy, and bad law

Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understanding of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers

It\u27s Time for a Good Hard Look in the Mirror: The Corporate Law Example

This Article asserts that the move from the industrial age to the information age represents a fundamental change to our society on such a widespread basis that the legal order must reexamine the premises about how our society functions, assessing whether foundational elements of U.S. Common Law remain valid. This Article first confronts briefly the continuing acceptance of certain foundational premises in contract and intellectual property law, illustrating that such premises are no longer supported by the realities of modern society. With fundamental change challenging multiple areas of law in the information age, this problem is worthy of widespread inquiry by legal scholars in various fields. This Article then turns to a detailed analysis of the premises supporting shareholder primacy in corporate law, demonstrating that the historic justifications for allocations of ownership, control and duties no longer support these premises. Based on the relative needs of today’s businesses vis-à-vis the contributions of various other constituencies, this Article asserts that employees should also have certain duties owed to them. This Article concludes with a novel model for creating such a stake in the form of a springing right to profit sharing

Exhibition as mass communication: critical studies of multi-modal communicative environments

Generally, the literature on mass communication research ignores exhibition; that is, it does not investigate and provide any theories about the communicative function of trade show exhibits, museum exhibitions, and international expositions, particularly in their most advanced forms as multimedia spatial formations. This paper considers the reasons for the lacunae particularly in critical approaches to historical, cultural and philosophical perspectives on exhibition. It also identifies fields of research that the academic community are encouraged to explore