Designing electronic collaborative learning environments

Electronic collaborative learning environments for learning and working are in vogue. Designers design them according to their own constructivist interpretations of what collaborative learning is and what it should achieve. Educators employ them with different educational approaches and in diverse situations to achieve different ends. Students use them, sometimes very enthusiastically, but often in a perfunctory way. Finally, researchers study them and—as is usually the case when apples and oranges are compared—find no conclusive evidence as to whether or not they work, where they do or do not work, when they do or do not work and, most importantly, why, they do or do not work. This contribution presents an affordance framework for such collaborative learning environments; an interaction design procedure for designing, developing, and implementing them; and an educational affordance approach to the use of tasks in those environments. It also presents the results of three projects dealing with these three issues

The Effects of Social and Spatial Presence on Engagement in a 3D Virtual Reality Environment: An Empirical Investigation

Virtual reality (VR) provides opportunities for businesses to innovatively engage customers. Based on presence theory, a research model was developed to test the influence of two major components of presence, social presence and spatial presence, on users’ perceptions of hedonic value, utilitarian value, and engagement. An experiment was conducted on two conditions of a VR application (low vs. high social presence) to test the hypotheses in the research model. The results reveal that social presence and spatial presence can improve hedonic value of VR. However, inconsistent with previous studies, our findings reveal a negative relationship between spatial presence and engagement. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as future research directions are subsequently discussed

The Structural Model of Social Well-being in workplace based on Bright-side Personality, Dark Triad and Collectivism Culture,Considering the Mediating Role of Social Influence

Introduction: Social well-being is one of three employee well-being dimensions and the missed piece of subjective well-being literature. The purpose of current research was modeling the social well-being in workplace, based on person-situation model and social exchange theory. This mediated-moderated structural model is developed considering the interactive role of bright and dark triad and collectivism organizational culture, besides mediation role of social influence tactics.Method: Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for analyzing this second-order hierarchical latent variable model. Participants were 292 employees of Iran National oil Company in the summer of 1398.Results: Fitness indices indicates the good fitness of social-wellbeing model (SRMR<0.08, NFI>0.9). Results showed that bright side of personality and collectivism organizational culture affect social well-being directly. In addition, findings showed that dark triad influences on social well-being is fully mediated by social influence tactics; so that Machiavellianism and narcissism increase the social well-being levels by influencing soft influence tactics utilization; Whereas psychopathy leads to applying hard influence tactics and cause social well-being reduction. Moderating effect of collectivism organizational culture on bright side of personality and social well-being was confirmed as well.Conclusion: Overall findings indicate that personality factors are important determinants of social well-being, but understanding the social well-being construct in workplace requires including the whole image of bright and dark side of personality, as well as organization cultural factors

The Influences Of Atmospheric Cues On Consumer Behavioral Intentions: An Affordance Perspective

Online social shopping emerges from the idea of using social networking features to benefit traditional e-commerce activities. Technology-driven shopping environments not only support shopping task completion and self-entertainment, more importantly, these new shopping environments become alternate outlets for consumers to interact with others. This dissertation aims to understand the effects of atmospheric cues on consumers\u27 behavioral intentions in online social shopping environments. This dissertation study proposes and validates a research model that predicts consumers\u27 diverse behavioral intentions (approach and avoidance) toward using online shopping environments due to website atmospheric cues. This research model is constructed based on theoretical perspectives including stimulus-organism-response framework, the technology acceptance model, the theory of affordances, and activity theory. The empirical study used a three-factorial between-subject field experiment approach to validate the research model and hypotheses. A total of 360 valid responses were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each of the subjects was randomly assigned to one of the eight experimental conditions. Data was analyzed using three-way MANOVA and PLS-SEM techniques. Analysis results largely supported the research model. Three path coefficients surprisingly had different signs from their correlation coefficients, and further mediation analysis indicated that: perceived usefulness fully mediated the effects of perceived utilitarian affordances, perceived sociability of use fully mediated the effects of perceived social affordances, and that perceived usefulness and perceived fun fully mediated the effects of perceived sociability of use on behavioral intentions. This dissertation theoretically contributes to online social shopping research by building a well-grounded research model that integrates several theories from different disciplines. The instrument for measuring perceived affordances provides an operationalized solution to understand interaction mechanism between technology-driven environments and users. Practically, investigating the effects of atmospheric cues and decomposing process-based and outcome-based evaluations suggest different aspects that online merchants can work on to improve consumer experiences

Psychological factors affecting equine performance

For optimal individual performance within any equestrian discipline horses must be in peak physical condition and have the correct psychological state. This review discusses the psychological factors that affect the performance of the horse and, in turn, identifies areas within the competition horse industry where current behavioral research and established behavioral modification techniques could be applied to further enhance the performance of animals. In particular, the role of affective processes underpinning temperament, mood and emotional reaction in determining discipline-specific performance is discussed. A comparison is then made between the training and the competition environment and the review completes with a discussion on how behavioral modification techniques and general husbandry can be used advantageously from a performance perspective

Robotic Psychology. What Do We Know about Human-Robot Interaction and What Do We Still Need to Learn?

“Robotization”, the integration of robots in human life will change human life drastically. In many situations, such as in the service sector, robots will become an integrative part of our lives. Thus, it is vital to learn from extant research on human-robot interaction (HRI). This article introduces robotic psychology that aims to bridge the gap between humans and robots by providing insights into particularities of HRI. It presents a conceptualization of robotic psychology and provides an overview of research on service-focused human-robot interaction. Theoretical concepts, relevant to understand HRI with are reviewed. Major achievements, shortcomings, and propositions for future research will be discussed

Identity performance in a TESOL classroom

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

The evolution of human-dog communication mechanisms during the domestication process

Two theory tried to explain the divergences between the dogs and their ancestral progenitors: the “Domestication hypothesis”, which claims that the origin of most of the dog's behaviors is linked to the genetic processes involved in the domestication, and the “Two-stage hypothesis”, which emphasizes the role of behaviors acquired through individual experiences. This research project has had the purpose of examining the ontogenetic mechanisms that underlie dog-human relationship and communication in the most ancient domestic species. The first aim was to assess if the water rescue training affects the human-dog attachment bond using an adapted version of the “Strange Situation Test”. The second aim was to clarify if following human gestures could be influenced by living in a low socialization regime. The third aim was to evaluate how much the dogs weigh the information given by human (familiar and unfamiliar) posture and voice when they were asked to perform transitive and intransitive actions, and how much this was related to the domestication process. The fourth aim was that of assess whether emotional chemosignals contained in human sweat could affect dogs’ physiology and behavior. Finally, an overview on dog’s sex differences in personality traits as well as cognitive and perceptual processes have been made to explore whether such dissimilarities were affected by the domestication process or the sex-specific differences existing in wild animals have been maintained. All the results presented in this doctoral dissertation converge in emphasising the heavy role of the ontogenetic processes in acquiring socio-cognitive skills, cognitive processes and perception in dogs