Evaluating empowerment and control of HE e-learning in a secure environment

With the increased spread of HE distance learning into a wide variety of contexts it is important for us to understand the factors involved in its successful deployment for students. E-learning has a great potential to support effective and empowering HE distance learning (Wilson, 2007; Adams, 2005; Hughes, 2005). However, within two secure environments, prisons and health service, the factors involved are complex. This paper reviews HE e-learning technology perceptions within these two contrasting contexts from 225 students' and stakeholders' perspectives. Previous research has detailed literature limitations on obtaining students' perspectives of e-learning (Conole et al, 2006). These limitations are compounded when other stakeholder perceptions are not integrated (Sun et al, 2007; Adams et al, 2005; Millen at al, 2002). This paper developed and applied an e-learning framework for student and stakeholder perceptions. This social psychological framework, is based on previous practice based e-learning studies and is used here to synthesise two large-scale case studies. The framework focuses on three concepts learner Access (e.g. learning design, technology design, physical access), Awareness (e.g. of resources, their usage and support for e-learning tasks) and Acceptability (e.g. trust, privacy, aesthetics, engagement). Students' and stakeholders' perceptions identified high levels of students' empowerment through e-learning whilst still requiring a further pedagogical tailoring and an awareness of support. However, serious problems within these contexts have identified blocks to e-learning through stakeholders perceptions and fears of acceptability (i.e. issues of risk and trust). Ultimately, through understanding competing perceptions and needs within these complex environments we can support the effective technological development, pedagogical design and deployment of e-learning systems

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference

End-user Empowerment in the Digital Age

End-user empowerment (or human empowerment) may be seen as an important aspect of a human-centric approach towards the digital economy. Despite the role of end-users has been recognized as a key element in information systems and end-user computing, empowering end-users may be seen as a next evolutionary step. This minitrack aims at advancing the understanding of what end-user empowerment really is, what the main challenges to develop end-user empowering systems are, and how end-user empowerment may be achieved in specific domains

A Human-centric Perspective on Digital Consenting: The Case of GAFAM

According to different legal frameworks such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an end-user's consent constitutes one of the well-known legal bases for personal data processing. However, research has indicated that the majority of end-users have difficulty in understanding what they are consenting to in the digital world. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that marginalized people are confronted with even more difficulties when dealing with their own digital privacy. In this research, we use an enactivist perspective from cognitive science to develop a basic human-centric framework for digital consenting. We argue that the action of consenting is a sociocognitive action and includes cognitive, collective, and contextual aspects. Based on the developed theoretical framework, we present our qualitative evaluation of the consent-obtaining mechanisms implemented and used by the five big tech companies, i.e. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM). The evaluation shows that these companies have failed in their efforts to empower end-users by considering the human-centric aspects of the action of consenting. We use this approach to argue that their consent-obtaining mechanisms violate principles of fairness, accountability and transparency. We then suggest that our approach may raise doubts about the lawfulness of the obtained consent—particularly considering the basic requirements of lawful consent within the legal framework of the GDPR

On participatory service provision at the network edge with community home gateways

Edge computing is considered as a technology to enable new types of services which operate at the network edge. There are important use cases in ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) for edge computing driven by huge business potentials. Most of today's edge computing platforms, however, consist of proprietary gateways, which are either closed or fairly restricted to deploy any third-party services. In this paper we discuss a participatory edge computing system running on home gateways to serve as an open environment to deploy local services. We present first motivating use cases and review existing approaches and design considerations for the proposed system. Then we show our platform which materializes the principles of an open and participatory edge environment, to lower the entry barriers for service deployment at the network edge. By using containers, our platform can flexibly enable third-party services, and may serve as an infrastructure to support several application domains of ambient intelligence.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Conversations on a probable future: interview with Beatrice Fazi

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