Information access tasks and evaluation for personal lifelogs

Emerging personal lifelog (PL) collections contain permanent digital records of information associated with individuals’ daily lives. This can include materials such as emails received and sent, web content and other documents with which they have interacted, photographs, videos and music experienced passively or created, logs of phone calls and text messages, and also personal and contextual data such as location (e.g. via GPS sensors), persons and objects present (e.g. via Bluetooth) and physiological state (e.g. via biometric sensors). PLs can be collected by individuals over very extended periods, potentially running to many years. Such archives have many potential applications including helping individuals recover partial forgotten information, sharing experiences with friends or family, telling the story of one’s life, clinical applications for the memory impaired, and fundamental psychological investigations of memory. The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is currently engaged in the collection and exploration of applications of large PLs. We are collecting rich archives of daily life including textual and visual materials, and contextual context data. An important part of this work is to consider how the effectiveness of our ideas can be measured in terms of metrics and experimental design. While these studies have considerable similarity with traditional evaluation activities in areas such as information retrieval and summarization, the characteristics of PLs mean that new challenges and questions emerge. We are currently exploring the issues through a series of pilot studies and questionnaires. Our initial results indicate that there are many research questions to be explored and that the relationships between personal memory, context and content for these tasks is complex and fascinating

A Pedagogy for Original Synners

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the UnexpectedThis essay begins by speculating about the learning environment of the class of 2020. It takes place entirely in a virtual world, populated by simulated avatars, managed through the pedagogy of gaming. Based on this projected version of a future-now-in-formation, the authors consider the implications of the current paradigm shift that is happening at the edges of institutions of higher education. From the development of programs in multimedia literacy to the focus on the creation of hybrid learning spaces (that combine the use of virtual worlds, social networking applications, and classroom activities), the scene of learning as well as the subjects of education are changing. The figure of the Original Synner is a projection of the student-of-the-future whose foundational literacy is grounded in their ability to synthesize information from multiple information streams

Re-designing an MA module to foster agency, engagement and production in online social software

This article describes the process of re-designing a module on the MA in Media, Culture and Communication at the Institute of Education (IOE), University of London. This process took place as part of the “Pedagogic Research to Embedded E-Learning” (PREEL) project at the IOE and involved moving a module largely concerned with offline production of teaching resources into online engagement with Internet culture. Course participants were encouraged to think about issues around production in social software in ways which were relevant to their professional and personal activity online. The early stages of the re-design process were recorded in a course tutor blog and there were further attempts to reflect on the process using two evaluations, one in the middle of a pilot version of the course and the other at the end. The article concludes with a series of lessons learned which can be taken forward during the revalidation process

The evaluation of next generation learning technologies: the case of mobile learning

Mobile learning is at a leading edge of learning technologies and is at present characterised by pilots and trials that allow mobile technologies to be tested in a variety of learning contexts. The sustained deployment of mobile learning will depend on these pilots and trials, especially their evaluation methodology and reporting. The paper examines a sample of current evaluation practice, based on evidence drawn from conference proceedings, published case studies, and other accounts from the literature and draws on the authors' work in collecting case studies of mobile learning from a range of recent projects. The issues discussed include the apparent objectives of the documented pilots or trials, the nature of the evaluations, instruments and techniques used, and the presentation of findings. The paper reflects on the quality of evaluation in mobile learning pilots and trials, in the broader context of evolving practices in the evaluation of educational technologies

Using Augmented Reality as a Medium to Assist Teaching in Higher Education

In this paper we describe the use of a high-level augmented reality (AR) interface for the construction of collaborative educational applications that can be used in practice to enhance current teaching methods. A combination of multimedia information including spatial three-dimensional models, images, textual information, video, animations and sound, can be superimposed in a student-friendly manner into the learning environment. In several case studies different learning scenarios have been carefully designed based on human-computer interaction principles so that meaningful virtual information is presented in an interactive and compelling way. Collaboration between the participants is achieved through use of a tangible AR interface that uses marker cards as well as an immersive AR environment which is based on software user interfaces (UIs) and hardware devices. The interactive AR interface has been piloted in the classroom at two UK universities in departments of Informatics and Information Science