KnowSe: Fostering user interaction context awareness

The CSCW area has recognized the concept of awareness as a critical issue to focus on (Schmidt et al., 2002) since “users who work together require adequate information about their environment” (Gross and Prinz, 2003). The environment of an individual encompasses her connections with other people, as well as with digital resources and actions (tasks or processes). If connections are not clear or hidden to the individual or to the group, the cost is a lack of awareness in the organization (McArthur and Bruza, 2003), which not only leads to inefficient cooperation but can even prevent it from being started. Unveiling the relations between persons, topics, tasks and processes to computer workers facilitates cooperative work by increasing the awareness of the personal social networks and the role of an individual in the organization, a project, or a group. These connections can be created and modeled manually but a better approach is to develop semi-automatic or even automatic tools to create and share them (McArthur and Bruza, 2003). Based on emails, McArthur and Bruza (2003) have computed such kind of connections, and suggest using more global corpora as well as taking into account dynamic ones

Understanding Individual Experiences of Chronic Illness with Semantic Space Models of Electronic Discussions

Electronic discussion groups provide a convenient forum for individuals to share their experiences of chronic illness. The language use of individual participants, and the way their language shifts over time, may provide implicit indications of important shifts in sense-of-self. This paper relates experience with application of the hyperspace analogue to language (HAL) model for automatic construction of a dimensional model from a corpus of text. HAL is applied to 17 months of discussion on a closed list of 20 women coping with chronic illness. The discussion group was moderated for a focus the phenomenon of "Transition' - how people can learn to incorporate the consequences of illness into their lives. The current phase of research focuses on identification of clusters of words that can represent key aspects of Transition. The HAL models for two participants have been analyzed by experts in Transition to form candidate clusters. These clusters are then used as a basis for contrasting the language usage of an individual participant over time as compared to the entire corpus. We have not yet found a reliable basis for identifying transitions in an individual based on their entries into a discussion forum, although the clusters may have some inherent value for introspection on individual experiences and Transition in general. We report challenges for interpretation of the HAL model related to the correlation of dimensions and the impact of group dynamics

How Push-To-Talk Makes Talk Less Pushy

This paper presents an exploratory study of college-age students using two-way, push-to-talk cellular radios. We describe the observed and reported use of cellular radio by the participants. We discuss how the half-duplex, lightweight cellular radio communication was associated with reduced interactional commitment, which meant the cellular radios could be used for a wide range of conversation styles. One such style, intermittent conversation, is characterized by response delays. Intermittent conversation is surprising in an audio medium, since it is typically associated with textual media such as instant messaging. We present design implications of our findings.Comment: 10 page

Alexander Dugin’s Heideggerianism

This paper argues for the central role of Martin Heidegger’s thought in Alexander Dugin’s political philosophy or political theory. Part one is a broad overview of the place of Heidegger in Dugin’s political theory. Part two outlines how Dugin uses Heidegger to elaborate a specifically Russian political theory. Part three shows how apparently unphilosophical political concepts from Dugin’s political theory have a Heideggerian meaning for him. Because of what he regards as a homology between the philosophical and the political, his readers must always be aware of the philosophical significance of his political concepts and vice versa. Tracing Heidegger’s central role helps clarify Dugin’s political thought

ONE FUNERAL AT A TIME! Why we hold on to old ideas

This article discusses how easily we lock ourselves into established theories, which are often promoted within our formal education. They can blind us to new developments, influencing our professional practice and progress by narrowing thinking. Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar is an example, since this paradigm has dominated teaching and learning for over 50 years. It has led to a focus on the form of language, rather than its content and use, restricting learning approaches and contributing to lower standards of UK Education when compared with other countries. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development (2016 & 17) attributes limited value for language as a reason for the UK being near the bottom of the global league.  Language development is presented within physical, mental, emotional and social aspects of communication. Competence across areas opens the mind to empathy, new experiences, continuous learning, humour, teamwork and cultural awareness. These elements together distinguish us from robots and are vital for our futures, as improved interaction of people is required for new job possibilities since machine technology is taking over routine work.

Policy conformance in the corporate blog space

This paper describes part of a solution to the interpretation of human-readable policy documents into semi-automatic conformance checking. Using a socio-cognitively motivated representation of shared knowledge, and applying appropriate inference mechanisms from a normative perspective, a mechanism to automatically detect potentially non-conforming blog entries is detailed. Candidate non-conforming blog entries are flagged for a human to make a judgement on whether they should be published. Analysis of data from a public corporate blog is analysed and results suggest the methodology has merit

Capturing characteristics of the conceptual ideation process of master crafts persons to inform design education: a comparative study of rural craft practitioners in Indonesia and in the UK

At the very early stage of idea generation, allegedly, a master craftsperson encounters cognitive dissonance to maintain beliefs/mindsets from various conceptual stimuli. We aim to capture the underlying form of cognition by examining the structure of thoughts collected from the subjective conceptualisation. A think-aloud protocol was employed to obtain verbalised thoughts of both Indonesian and UK master craftsmen. The keywords of verbalised thoughts were evaluated and extracted using a list of typical mindsets. The evaluated keywords were then analysed by means of a conceptual network to reproduce a model of the individual's mental state. This study discovered that Indonesian master craftsmen's conceptualisation is greatly influenced by the strong typical mindsets of object-attribute that emphasise rationale and mastery, which stimulates a pragmatic viewpoint. Furthermore, UK master craftsmen's conceptualisation greatly considers strong typical mindsets of object-attribute that emphasise wisdom and passionate, which indicates a rigorous mind. This paper reveals that both pragmatic and rigorous mindsets can create potential or barriers for creative cognitive resources

Improving The Quality of The Community Relations Knowledge Using Implicit Connections

Abstract-This paper presents a research that looks for discovering implicit community-based relations by identifying connection degrees and shared patterns between individuals. It introduces the Newsletter Tracking System (NTS) that gathers individuals' implicit information and supports a Connection Degree Model (CDM) that identifies the grain of connection between individuals. Also, based on that, it can foster the quality of community relations. Still, this paper describes the Nano-Tera.ch case study where this research was developed and evaluated with

Professors and students’ perceptions towards oral corrective feedback in an english language teaching program

El propósito de este estudio fue subrayar las percepciones que tienen los profesores y estudiantes de un programa de licenciatura en lengua inglesa hacia la retroalimentación correctiva en clases de lengua. El estudio fue llevado a cabo en una universidad pública de la ciudad de Pereira en Colombia en el cual participaron 7 profesores entre hombres y mujeres, como también 15 estudiantes del programa de diferentes sexos a los que se les aplicaron entrevistas individuales. Diferentes observaciones, entrevistas y cuestionarios virtuales fueron usados como métodos de recolección de datos con el propósito de obtener evidencias de los eventos de clase y las percepciones de los estudiantes y profesores. La pregunta que orientó esta investigación fue: ¿qué se puede decir acerca de las percepciones profesores y las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia la retroalimentación oral correctiva dada en cursos de lengua en un programa de Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa en Pereira?. Los resultados demostraron que los errores más comunes en el estudio fueron de sintaxis, léxico y pronunciación. Además se halló que los profesores evitan proveer retroalimentación oral en ciertas ocasiones; finalmente, los estudiantes percibieron las estrategias de retroalimentación explicita como directas y las implícitas como dadas con tacto y respeto. Como parte final, este estudió quiso demostrar la importancia que tiene la retroalimentación correctiva en la preparación académica de los futuros profesores de inglés con el propósito de ayudar a sus futuros aprendices a mejorar la competencia del habla dentro de un ambiente colaborativo y amigable