11,165 research outputs found
How can I produce a digital video artefact to facilitate greater understanding among youth workers of their own learning-to-learn competence?
In Ireland, youth work is delivered largely in marginalised communities and through non-formal and informal learning methods. Youth workers operate in small isolated organisations without many of the resources and structures to improve practice that is afforded to larger formal educational establishments. Fundamental to youth work practice is the ability to identify and construct learning experiences for young people in non-traditional learning environments. It is therefore necessary for youth workers to develop a clear understanding of their own learning capacity in order to facilitate learning experiences for young people.
In the course of this research, I attempted to use technology to enhance and support the awareness among youth workers of their own learning capacity by creating a digital video artifact that explores the concept â learning-to-learn. This study presents my understanding of the learning-to-learn competence as, I sought to improve my practice as a youth service manager and youth work trainer.
This study was conducted using an action research approach. I designed and evaluated the digital media artifact â âLennyâs Questâ in collaboration with staff and trainer colleagues in the course of two cycles of action research, and my research was critiqued and validated throughout this process
Supplementary guidance for schools on inspecting skills, September 2010
This guidance is intended to support the key tasks of inspectors in making judgements regarding: whether all pupils have the communication, numeracy and ICT skills needed to access the whole curriculum; and how well the wider curriculum itself develops pupilsâ skills
Animating the evolution of software
The use and development of open source software has increased significantly in the last decade. The high frequency of changes and releases across a distributed environment requires good project management tools in order to control the process adequately. However, even with these tools in place, the nature of the development and the fact that developers will often work on many other projects simultaneously, means that the developers are unlikely to have a clear picture of the current state of the project at any time. Furthermore, the poor documentation associated with many projects has a detrimental effect when encouraging new developers to contribute to the software. A typical version control repository contains a mine of information that is not always obvious and not easy to comprehend in its raw form. However, presenting this historical data in a suitable format by using software visualisation techniques allows the evolution of the software over a number of releases to be shown. This allows the changes that have been made to the software to be identified clearly, thus ensuring that the effect of those changes will also be emphasised. This then enables both managers and developers to gain a more detailed view of the current state of the project. The visualisation of evolving software introduces a number of new issues. This thesis investigates some of these issues in detail, and recommends a number of solutions in order to alleviate the problems that may otherwise arise. The solutions are then demonstrated in the definition of two new visualisations. These use historical data contained within version control repositories to show the evolution of the software at a number of levels of granularity. Additionally, animation is used as an integral part of both visualisations - not only to show the evolution by representing the progression of time, but also to highlight the changes that have occurred. Previously, the use of animation within software visualisation has been primarily restricted to small-scale, hand generated visualisations. However, this thesis shows the viability of using animation within software visualisation with automated visualisations on a large scale. In addition, evaluation of the visualisations has shown that they are suitable for showing the changes that have occurred in the software over a period of time, and subsequently how the software has evolved. These visualisations are therefore suitable for use by developers and managers involved with open source software. In addition, they also provide a basis for future research in evolutionary visualisations, software evolution and open source development
AN EXAMINATION OF THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER-BASED ANIMATIONS AND VISUALIZATION SEQUENCE ON LEARNERS' UNDERSTANDING OF HADLEY CELLS IN ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION
Research examining animation use for student learning has been conducted in the last two decades across a multitude of instructional environments and content areas. The extensive construction and implementation of animations in learning resulted from the availability of powerful computing systems and the perceived advantages the novel medium offered to deliver dynamic representations of complex systems beyond the human perceptual scale. Animations replaced or supplemented text and static diagrams of system functioning and were predicted to significantly improve learners' conceptual understanding of target systems. However, subsequent research has not consistently discovered affordances to understanding, and in some cases, has actually shown that animation use is detrimental to system understanding especially for content area novices (Lowe 2004; Mayer et al. 2005).
This study sought to determine whether animation inclusion in an authentic learning context improved student understanding for an introductory earth science concept, Hadley Cell circulation. In addition, the study sought to determine whether the timing of animation examination improved conceptual understanding. A quasi-experimental pretest posttest design administered in an undergraduate science lecture and laboratory course compared four different learning conditions: text and static diagrams with no animation use, animation use prior to the examination of text and static diagrams, animation use following the examination of text and static diagrams, and animation use during the examination of text and static diagrams. Additionally, procedural data for a sample of three students in each condition were recorded and analyzed through the lens of self regulated learning (SRL) behaviors. The aim was to determine whether qualitative differences existed between cognitive processes employed. Results indicated that animation use did not improve understanding across all conditions. However learners able to employ animations while reading and examining the static diagrams and to a lesser extent, after reading the system description, showed evidence of higher levels of system understanding on posttest assessments. Procedural data found few differences between groups with one exception---learners given access to animations during the learning episode chose to examine and coordinate the representations more frequently. These results indicated a new finding from the use of animation, a sequence effect to improve understanding of Hadley Cells in atmospheric circulation
Effects of Computer Simulation and Animation (CSA) on Studentsâ Problem Solving in Engineering Dynamics: What and How
The application of Computer Simulation and Animation (CSA) in the instruction of engineering dynamics has shown a significant growth in the recent years. The two foremost methods to evaluate the effectiveness of CSA tools, including student feedback and surveys and measuring student change in performance, suggest that CSA modules improve student learning in engineering dynamics. However, neither method fully demonstrates the quality of studentsâ cognitive changes.
This study examined the quality of effects of application of CSA modules on
student learning and problem solving in particle dynamics. It also compared CSA
modules with textbook-style problem-solving regarding the changes they cause in
studentsâ cognitive process. A qualitative methodology was adopted to design and
implement a study to explore the changes in participantsâ learning and problem-solving behavior caused by using a CSA module. Collected data were coded and analyzed using the categories of cognitive process based on the Revised Bloomâs Taxonomy.
An analysis of the results revealed that the most significant effects were observed
in understanding, analyzing, and evaluating. The high frequency of âinferenceâ behavior after working with modules indicated a significant increase in participantsâ understanding activity after working with computer modules. Comparing behavior changes of computer-simulation group students with those who worked with a textbook-style example demonstrated that the CSA modules ignited more analytical behavior among students than did textbook-style examples. This study illustrated that improvement in learning due to the application of CSA is not limited to conceptual understanding; CSA modules enhance studentsâ skills in applying, organizing, and evaluating as well. The interactive characteristics of CSA play a major role in stimulating studentsâ analytical reasoning and critical thinking in engineering dynamics
Visualisation of Long in Time Dynamic Networks on Large Touch Displays
Any dataset containing information about relationships between entities can be modelled as a network. This network can be static, where the entities/relationships do not change over time, or dynamic, where the entities/relationships change over time. Network data that changes over time, dynamic network data, is a powerful resource when studying many important phenomena, across wide-ranging ïŹelds from travel networks to epidemiology.However, it is very difïŹcult to analyse this data, especially if it covers a long period of time (e.g, one month) with respect to its temporal resolution (e.g. seconds). In this thesis, we address the problem of visualising long in time dynamic networks: networks that may not be particularly large in terms of the number of entities or relationships, but are long in terms of the length of time they cover when compared to their temporal resolution.We ïŹrst introduce Dynamic Network Plaid, a system for the visualisation and analysis of long in time dynamic networks. We design and build for an 84" touch-screen vertically-mounted display as existing work reports positive results for the use of these in a visualisation context, and that they are useful for collaboration. The Plaid integrates multiple views and we prioritise the visualisation of interaction provenance. In this system we also introduce a novel method of time exploration called âinteractive timeslicingâ. This allows the selection and comparison of points that are far apart in time, a feature not offered by existing visualisation systems. The Plaid is validated through an expert user evaluation with three public health researchers.To conïŹrm observations of the expert user evaluation, we then carry out a formal laboratory study with a large touch-screen display to verify our novel method of time navigation against existing animation and small multiples approaches. From this study, we ïŹnd that interactive timeslicing outperforms animation and small multiples for complex tasks requiring a compari-son between multiple points that are far apart in time. We also ïŹnd that small multiples is best suited to comparisons of multiple sequential points in time across a time interval.To generalise the results of this experiment, we later run a second formal laboratory study in the same format as the ïŹrst, but this time using standard-sized displays with indirect mouse input. The second study reafïŹrms the results of the ïŹrst, showing that our novel method of time navigation can facilitate the visual comparison of points that are distant in time in a way that existing approaches, small multiples and animation, cannot. The study demonstrates that our previous results generalise across display size and interaction type (touch vs mouse).In this thesis we introduce novel representations and time interaction techniques to improve the visualisation of long in time dynamic networks, and experimentally show that our novel method of time interaction outperforms other popular methods for some task types
Dynamic Influence Networks for Rule-based Models
We introduce the Dynamic Influence Network (DIN), a novel visual analytics
technique for representing and analyzing rule-based models of protein-protein
interaction networks. Rule-based modeling has proved instrumental in developing
biological models that are concise, comprehensible, easily extensible, and that
mitigate the combinatorial complexity of multi-state and multi-component
biological molecules. Our technique visualizes the dynamics of these rules as
they evolve over time. Using the data produced by KaSim, an open source
stochastic simulator of rule-based models written in the Kappa language, DINs
provide a node-link diagram that represents the influence that each rule has on
the other rules. That is, rather than representing individual biological
components or types, we instead represent the rules about them (as nodes) and
the current influence of these rules (as links). Using our interactive DIN-Viz
software tool, researchers are able to query this dynamic network to find
meaningful patterns about biological processes, and to identify salient aspects
of complex rule-based models. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we
investigate a simulation of a circadian clock model that illustrates the
oscillatory behavior of the KaiC protein phosphorylation cycle.Comment: Accepted to TVCG, in pres
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