Designing and testing visual representations of draft essays for higher education students

This paper reports the findings of an empirical investigation, which set out to test a set of rainbow essay exercises. The rainbow diagrams are pictorial representations of formal graphs that are derived automatically from student essays. They were designed to allow students to discover how key concepts in a well written essay are connected together. The students would then be able to compare a rainbow diagram of their own essay with a good essay and make changes to it before submission to their tutor. However a trail was undertaken with academics, teaching and learning staff, doctoral students at the Open University of Catalonia and the Open University UK, before implementation into the web application known as Open Essayist. All the participants from each University completed the exercise correctly. This was a surprising finding as we expected participants to experience some difficulties, as previous visual representations we piloted. All the participants remarked that they had learnt a lot about the structure of good essays and more importantly how clear the role of the conclusion played in a well-constructed essay. This type of representation made this explicit and they would be able to see quickly if a second draft had improved. The users also mentioned that the rainbow diagram representations could be used as a generic essay feedback tool. It could be used across subject domains, a hypothesis worthy of further investigation

Sistema de descubrimiento de bibliografía científica

Desenvolupament d'un sistema de recomanació de bibliografia científica trobada a Internet. L'aplicació desenvolupada en llenguatje python llegeix i entén documents en format pdf i dóna una recomanació de silimitud semantica entre els documents

Cognitive Activity Support Tools: Design of the Visual Interface

This dissertation is broadly concerned with interactive computational tools that support the performance of complex cognitive activities, examples of which are analytical reasoning, decision making, problem solving, sense making, forecasting, and learning. Examples of tools that support such activities are visualization-based tools in the areas of: education, information visualization, personal information management, statistics, and health informatics. Such tools enable access to information and data and, through interaction, enable a human-information discourse. In a more specific sense, this dissertation is concerned with the design of the visual interface of these tools. This dissertation presents a large and comprehensive theoretical framework to support research and design. Issues treated herein include interaction design and patterns of interaction for cognitive and epistemic support; analysis of the essential properties of interactive visual representations and their influences on cognitive and perceptual processes; an analysis of the structural components of interaction and how different operational forms of interaction components affect the performance of cognitive activities; an examination of how the information-processing load should be distributed between humans and tools during the performance of complex cognitive activities; and a categorization of common visualizations according to their structure and function, and a discussion of the cognitive utility of each category. This dissertation also includes a chapter that describes the design of a cognitive activity support tool, as guided by the theoretical contributions that comprise the rest of the dissertation. Those that may find this dissertation useful include researchers and practitioners in the areas of data and information visualization, visual analytics, medical and health informatics, data science, journalism, educational technology, and digital games

Mining, Modeling, and Leveraging Multidimensional Web Metrics to Support Scholarly Communities

The significant proliferation of scholarly output and the emergence of multidisciplinary research areas are rendering the research environment increasingly complex. In addition, an increasing number of researchers are using academic social networks to discover and store scholarly content. The spread of scientific discourse and research activities across the web, especially on social media platforms, suggests that far-reaching changes are taking place in scholarly communication and the geography of science. This dissertation provides integrated techniques and methods designed to address the information overload problem facing scholarly environments and to enhance the research process. There are four main contributions in this dissertation. First, this study identifies, quantifies, and analyzes international researchers’ dynamic scholarly information behaviors, activities, and needs, especially after the emergence of social media platforms. The findings based on qualitative and quantitative analysis report new scholarly patterns and reveals differences between researchers according to academic status and discipline. Second, this study mines massive scholarly datasets, models diverse multidimensional non-traditional web-based indicators (altmetrics), and evaluates and predicts scholarly and societal impact at various levels. The results address some of the limitations of traditional citation-based metrics and broaden the understanding and utilization of altmetrics. Third, this study recommends scholarly venues semantically related to researchers’ current interests. The results provide important up-to-the-minute signals that represent a closer reflection of research interests than post-publication usage-based metrics. Finally, this study develops a new scholarly framework by supporting the construction of online scholarly communities and bibliographies through reputation-based social collaboration, through the introduction of a collaborative, self-promoting system for users to advance their participation through analysis of the quality, timeliness and quantity of contributions. The framework improves the precision and quality of social reference management systems. By analyzing and modeling digital footprints, this dissertation provides a basis for tracking and documenting the impact of scholarship using new models that are more akin to reading breaking news than to watching a historical documentary made several years after the events it describes