Improving Feedback In ASSISTments: Pedagogical Agents and Game-Like Elements

The ASSISTments system helps students learn by administering online assessments and assisting students in understanding the material. The feedback in the system can be improved by examining the mechanisms used in video games and interactive tutoring systems. With the use of game-like rewards, personalized textual feedback, and a pedagogical agent, ASSISTments can be made more engaging for students. This document outlines our iterative design process which we used to create a proposal for an improved student experience

Tutors with Game Like Elements

The ASSISTments system helps students learn by administering online assessments and assisting students in understanding the material. The feedback in the system can be improved by examining the mechanisms used in video games and interactive tutoring systems. With the use of game-like rewards, personalized textual feedback, and a pedagogical agent, ASSISTments can be made more engaging for students. This document outlines our iterative design process which we used to create a proposal for an improved student experience

Apophenoesis & the Origins of Creativity: Virtual Pattern Recognition, Error, Paths to Consciousness & Augmenting the Evolution of Self

Erratum: the name Karl Conrad appears in the metadata abstract and on page 7 and page 19 of the file. This is an error and should read Klaus Conrad. LW (LDS) 20/10/20This research defines apophenoesis as a convergent practical tool that can enhance one’s creative process by introducing deviations from the familiar in such a way to allow new creative pathways to form and result in new innovations. With foundations in Roy Ascott’s technoetics, which is defined as a “convergent field of practice that seeks to explore consciousness and connectivity through digital, telematic, chemical or spiritual means, embracing both interactive and psychoactive technologies, and the creative use of moistmedia” (Ascott, 2008, p. 1), apophenoesis more specifically provides a framework to demonstrate the value of disruption within technoetic art while demonstrating the relationships between creativity and perception. I have conducted an auto-ethnomethodological approach to analyze my own creative practice, which culminated in the following apophenoetic artworks: Gesture's of Change (2013), Dabarithms (2014) and Poseidon's Pull: Revisited (2018). Each artwork represents the wide range of impact apophenoesis has had once integrated into the formation of artistic intent, establishment of the creative process, as well as the content experienced within the work of art by participants and observers. Since apophenoesis has a direct relationship to perception, it can be used both as a tool within the creative process as well as a mechanism within the content of the experience, thereby generating experiences of apophenoesis for participants within each technoetic artwork. In addition to Henri Bergson, who thoroughly models the relationship of perception to one’s reality, and Leonardo DaVinci, who used apophenoesis within his creative practice, a pivotal contributor to this research is the German psychiatrist, Karl Conrad, who discovered the phenomenon and called it apophanie during his clinical analysis of injured soldiers returning from war that exhibited what he then believed to be pre-schizophrenic characteristics. Conrad describes apophanie as phenomenon where one over-attributes significance in reference to patternless stimuli. This research highlights how Conrad’s discovery evolved into the establishment of the apophenoetic model and its relationship to interactive media art practice, culminating in the discovery that these characteristics can be used to define a new category of innovative practice entitled apophenoetic art. Rooted in technoetic arts, this practice-based research will reveal that the disruption introduced in applying apophenoesis to one’s creative practice is a fundamental tool to producing exponential boosts in creative productivity. Since Conrad’s clinical research found detailed evidence of how the mind mistakenly attributes significance via the senses through the perception of actual stimuli, his research regarding apophanie as being characteristic of an illness has been challenged. This introduces the consideration that the phenomenon may actually be a common, naturally occurring experience within the mind of healthy individuals, and often occurs subconsciously as a disruption in perception. How Conrad chose to define apophanie reveal his interest in fostering cross-disciplinary research. When apophenie is used in creative practice, it can be transformed into apophenoesis, or a method for accessing creativity and extending creative practice. Further analysis of apophenoesis reveals essential contributions to understanding the roots of creativity, inspiration, innovative thought, learning and how one’s mind and body work to access creativity

Artistic Expressions of Vegan Women with Disturbed Eating Behavior and Body Image Distress

This research explores the experience of women who are vegan, and have disturbed eating behaviors (DEB) and body image distress (BID). Four participants completed a series of three art-making sessions. Participants were invited to visually explore their experience as a vegan woman with DEB/BID. They made a mixed media collage with an emphasis on layering in each session. They engaged in discussion about their process, and the final art piece’s meaning. Between sessions, researcher response art pieces were created for each participant piece, with accompanying journal reflections to engage with the ideas they explored. All participant sessions were video and audio-recorded. Edited individual review videos were created for each participant. Participants attended a fourth session, during which they discussed the research process, their art, corresponding response art, and the video of their sessions. A final research summary video was created, and a final summary art piece was created. Qualitative analysis revealed Six Essential Ideas that characterized the women’s experience: re-claiming space, defining female, navigating food choices, vegan in context, identification and relationships with other animals and the environment, and disability as a vegan woman. A functional model of these six ideas, in relation to femaleness, veganism, and DEB/BID is presented to make meaning of the results. A set of theoretical models of the mechanisms between femaleness, veganism, and DEB/BID is proposed in response to the research question

Community Partnership Through Transformative Justice: the Healing Project at the Oregon State Penitentiary

In the Foreword to Gerard Robinson and Elizabeth English Smith’s Education for Liberation volume on educational initiatives in prison, Newt Gingrich and Van Jones note that educational programs “do something powerful: they give hope and dignity to the incarcerated.” The authors wholeheartedly agree and while they recognize the importance of higher education programs that confer degrees and therefore credentials out in the free world, they find that education can be broadly understood in prison in ways that greatly enhance the hope and dignity of the incarcerated. In this chapter, they explore the creation of a Japanese-style healing garden at the Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP), a maximum security, 2,000-person male prison in Salem, Oregon. This prisoner-led initiative was a resounding success, despite all the odds against it, because it was animated by a philosophy of transformative justice that both prison administration and prisoners could believe in, and it embraced the need for meaningful and inclusive community partnerships

Two machines similarly constructed : humanity between apes and clones.

“Two Machines Similarly Constructed”: Humanity Between Apes and Clones explores the development of scientific taxonomies of difference and the proliferation and evolution of the definition of the “human.” A focus on Enlightenment naturalists’ texts and images of apes reveals how these scientists defined the human “difference” and lends to Michel Foucault’s archaeology of the invention of “man.” This establishes the concept of a classifying discourse and argues that a narrative of human exceptionalism pervaded subsequent ideas of progress and civilization. Analyses of two texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, develop a discussion of how the authors present non-humans and clones that complicate the definition of the “human” and incorporate resistance to the classifying discourse’s singular way of understanding the natural order. An investigation of the development of Homo sapiens’s “difference” locates examples of classifying humans and non-humans; this project examines how authors and scientists resist strict exclusions and classifications in a larger, more all-encompassing consideration of the “human condition.

Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman / Posthuman

The thesis’ study of life expansion proposes a framework for artistic, design-based approaches concerned with prolonging human life and sustaining personal identity. To delineate the topic: life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology. Life expansion is located in the domain of human enhancement, distinctly linked to technological interfaces with biology. The thesis identifies human-computer interaction and the potential of emerging and speculative technologies as seeding the promulgation of human enhancement that approach life expansion. In doing so, the thesis constructs an inquiry into historical and current attempts to append human physiology and intervene with its mortality. By encountering emerging and speculative technologies for prolonging life and sustaining personal identity as possible media for artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement, a new axis is sought that identifies the transhuman and posthuman as conceptual paradigms for life expansion. The thesis asks: What are the required conditions that enable artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement that explicitly pursue extending human life? This question centers on the potential of the study’s proposed enhancement technologies in their relationship to life, death, and the human condition. Notably, the thesis investigates artistic approaches, as distinct from those of the natural sciences, and the borders that need to be mediated between them. The study navigates between the domains of life extension, art and design, technology, and philosophy in forming the framework for a theory of life expansion. The critical approach seeks to uncover invisible borders between these interconnecting forces by bringing to light issues of sustaining life and personal identity, ethical concerns, including morphological freedom and extinction risk. Such issues relate to the thesis’ interest in life expansion and the use emerging and speculative technologies. 4 The study takes on a triad approach in its investigation: qualitative interviews with experts of the emerging and speculative technologies; field studies encountering research centers of such technologies; and an artistic, autopoietic process that explores the heuristics of life expansion. This investigation forms an integrative view of the human use of technology and its melioristic aim. The outcome of the research is a theoretical framework for further research in artistic approaches to life expansion

Networked Alternatives: Digital Curation and Artistic Production on Artist-run Platforms

This dissertation explores how artists creatively engaged with digital and networked technologies care for their artworks and related studio or personal archival materials. As digital and new media artworks frequently face preservation concerns and require regular maintenance shortly after the point of creation, artists often become the first stewards of their own work. Central to these artistic engagements, artists leverage digital and networked technologies to circulate artworks in exhibition and display contexts outside of museums and commercial galleries, including online platforms and hybrid gallery spaces that I refer to as ‘networked alternatives.’ I position these networked alternatives in longer histories of artists’ experiments with digital and networked technologies as well as artists’ efforts to effect their own exhibition contexts alternative to arts institutions and markets. Along with the artists, the curators of these spaces play crucial roles in the digital curation of these artworks and archival materials. The curators not only work with artists to mitigate technical issues in the process of staging networked exhibitions but also undertake largely volunteer labor to ensure the long-term viability of artworks featured in these exhibitions. As artists and curators care for these artworks and archives throughout the lifecycle of these materials, they seek out information and learn new skills contributing to situated knowledges needed to perform digital curation labor. From the creation of new artworks to the ongoing care of older works, these artists develop digital curation repertoires that become fundamental to their broader artistic efforts. Processes and practices for managing data across complex information systems are integral to activities involved in creating, exhibiting, and experiencing digital and new media artworks. I analyze these digital curation information needs and practices through the theoretical framework of information worlds, examining the various other individuals, organizations, technologies, communities, and sociopolitical factors that impact these information needs and practices. These artists and curators in turn shape the art worlds and various other social worlds constituting their information worlds; the digital curation repertoires of these individuals both drive and reflect broader changes in how art is created, disseminated, and experienced across these social worlds.Doctor of Philosoph

The Possibilities of the Video Game Exhibition

This paper is an examination of video games as an artistic medium, and of their current presentation in art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as an attempt to come up with better modes of presentation for them within a museum space. Using a general understanding of video game theory and aesthetics, it might be possible to begin to look at solutions to the issues posed by current methods of presentation and interpretation, and to examine whether video games’ complicated aesthetic and artistic importance can be better highlighted by a new mode of display that would allow for a better framework for institutional representation and viewer appreciation