Internet and Users. Who is the Reader?

Internet has turned into a fundamental component of everyday life, as it plays a major role in advancing the globalization process. Globalization was fostered by the idea of creating equalaccess opportunities for all and facilitating communication worldwide. Using internet as the core platform, billions of people try to access and benefit from this opportunity through search engines, service providers, websites and social media. However, given the profound difference between internet and user’s languages, users end up on relying on search engines and tools to translate their ideas into a computer-readable language and derive information from them. In order to provide the best possible services, search engines and social media need to accumulate comprehensive data on each user’s identity. The challenge is that once they are fed with convenient information on each user, they tend to personalize the idea they grasp of him or her based on their given regulations and policies, which in the mid- and long-term results in managing users’ access to information.. By applying the reader-response theory, this paper seeks to focus on the challenges stemming from the adoption of users’ personalized profiles by Google, Facebook and Amazon as the most common part of users’ performance in internet. It also explores how the reading differences of the users and the tools result not only in personalized versions of users, but also engender an unrecognized virtual in-betweenness of users’ own perception of themselves and the tools’ perception of users

Tourism and the smartphone app: capabilities, emerging practice and scope in the travel domain.

Based on its advanced computing capabilities and ubiquity, the smartphone has rapidly been adopted as a tourism travel tool.With a growing number of users and a wide varietyof applications emerging, the smartphone is fundamentally altering our current use and understanding of the transport network and tourism travel. Based on a review of smartphone apps, this article evaluates the current functionalities used in the domestic tourism travel domain and highlights where the next major developments lie. Then, at a more conceptual level, the article analyses how the smartphone mediates tourism travel and the role it might play in more collaborative and dynamic travel decisions to facilitate sustainable travel. Some emerging research challenges are discussed

Mapping and Developing Service Design Research in the UK.

This report is the outcome of the Service Design Research UK (SDR UK) Network with Lancaster University as primary investigator and London College of Communication, UAL as co-investigator. This project was funded as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Network grant. Service Design Research UK (SDR UK), funded by an AHRC Network Grant, aims to create a UK research network in an emerging field in Design that is Service Design. This field has a recent history and a growing, but still small and dispersed, research community that strongly needs support and visibility to consolidate its knowledge base and enhance its potential impact. Services represent a significant part of the UK economy and can have a transformational role in our society as they affect the way we organize, move, work, study or take care of our health and family. Design introduces a more human centred and creative approach to service innovation; this is critical to delivering more effective and novel solutions that have the potential to tackle contemporary challenges. Service Design Research UK reviewed and consolidated the emergence of Service Design within the estalished field of Design

Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions: supplementary materials

These supplementary materials accompany the report ‘Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions’, which is the first report from research commissioned by Becta into Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4. This report describes findings from the commissioned literature review of the then current landscape concerning learner use of Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for teachers, schools, local authorities and policy makers