Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

Swarm-based wayfinding support in open and distance learning

Please refer to the original source: Tattersall, C. Manderveld, J., Van den Berg, B., Van Es, R., Janssen, J., & Koper, R. (2005). Swarm-based wayfinding support in open and distance learning. In Alkhalifa, E.M. (Ed). Cognitively Informed Systems: Utilizing Practical Approaches to Enrich Information Presentation and Transfer. Information Science Publishing, USA. (pp. 166-183). [http://www.silvertair.com/CIS/Contents.htm] OR Tattersall, C. Manderveld, J., Van den Berg, B., Van Es, R., Janssen, J., & Koper, R. (2008). Swarm-based Wayfinding Support in Open and Distance Learning. In Sugumaran, V. (Ed). Intelligent Information Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications. Information Science Reference, Hershey New York. (pp 846-857).Open and Distance Learning (ODL) gives learners freedom of time, place and pace of study, putting learner self-direction centre-stage. However, increased responsibility should not come at the price of over-burdening or abandonment of learners as they progress along their learning journey. This paper introduces an approach to wayfinding support for distance learners based on self-organisation theory. It describes an architecture which supports the recording, processing and presentation of collective learner behaviour designed to create a feedback loop informing learners of successful paths towards the attainment of learning goals. The approach is presented as an alternative to methods of achieving adaptation in hypermedia-based learning environments which involve learner modelling

Swamp : walking the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain ; and with the exegesis, A walk in the anthropocene: homesickness and the walker-writer

This project is comprised of a creative work and accompanying exegesis. The creative work is a collection of poetry which examines the history and ecology of the wetlands and river systems of the Swan Coastal Plain, and which utilises the practice of walking as a research methodology. For the creative practitioner walking reintroduces the body as a fundamental definer of experience, placing the investigation centrally in the corporeal self, using the physical senses as investigative tools of enquiry. As Rebecca Solnit comments in her history of walking, ‘exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains’ (Solnit, 2000, p. 13). The context for my poetic walking project Swamp, is a local and global environment undergoing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity, mainly due to the destruction of habitat and changes in climatic conditions (Reid, Partha Dasgupta, Robert M. May, A.H. Zakri, & Henk Simons, 2005, pp. 438-442). The loss of species and ecosystems that have been a part of our earth home results in the human experience of ‘homesickness’ — a longing for the home places that we have known and which have diminished or disappeared. Before the arrival of the British colonists in 1829, the Swan River and adjacent wetlands were an integral part of the seasonal food source for the original inhabitants, the Noongar (Bekle, 1981). In addition wetland places were, and are, deeply embedded in the spiritual and cultural life of the Noongar people of the Swan Coastal Plain (O\u27Connor, Quartermaine, & Bodney, 1989). In less than two hundred years since the establishment of the Swan River Colony (Western Australia), the lakes and rivers of the Swan Coastal Plain have undergone extreme changes, often resulting in complete draining and in-filling of wetland areas as the city and its suburbs spread beyond the original town limits. This re–engineering of the landscape has had a dramatic and detrimental impact upon biodiversity, water quality and the sense of place experienced by residents. Swamp is a project that has three main facets: a) a body of original poetry which interprets the historical relationship between the British, European, and Chinese newcomers to Noongar country, and the wetlands lakes of the Swan Coastal Plain. The poetry contained in this thesis is copyright to the author, Anandashila Saraswati (Nandi Chinna). b)An essay which contextualises the project within the sphere of walking art, psychogeography, and the philosophical idea of ‘Homesickness’. c) A website, www.swampwalking.com.au, which displays photographs documenting the walks I have carried out over the three year period of the project from February 2009 to February 2012. The exegetical part of this project looks at the notion of ‘homesickness’ as a philosophical condition that can be seen as a motivating force in the practice of writing on walking. I use Debord’s theory of the dérive as a starting point for my walking methodology and examine nostalgia within the Situationist International (Debord, 1958) and subsequent psychogeographical movements. I also investigate the role of homesickness in the work of other writers who walk and who write about their walking practice. Finally I discuss homesickness in the epoch of the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Schwägerl, 2011), the era in which the earth’s biosphere is characterised by human interventions which have changed the meteorological, geological and biological elements of our earth home. In the Anthropocene, the wilderness view of nature needs to be re-evaluated. I posit that walking is a way of reconnecting with the physical landscape and building relationships with small wilds that exist in our home places, and that writing about the walking allows these relationships and encounters to ripple out to readers, contributing to and enabling the development of an ethic of care for ecosystems and beings other than human

Camas, Spring 1996

Writing Contest Winners -- A Textual Omission? / Todd Osmundson -- New Ground / Deb Peabody -- Old Booger\u27s Cove / Duke Richey -- Gypsy River / Leslie Budewitz -- Surrendering to Montana / Janisse Ray -- Notes on a Photograph / James Bertolino -- The Dare / Katie Deuel -- Oklahoma / Derek Martin -- The Dreamer / James Bertolino -- Mount Jumbo: A Preservation Manifesto / Tommy Youngblood-Petersen -- Kootenai: Turning Thirty / Deb Peabody -- What Water Says / James Bertolino -- Summer House / Susan Watrous -- Olympic Peninsula / James Bertolin

Terapolva - Utopian Dreams and Urban Realities in an Ecovillage in Buenos Aires

Terapolva is a settlement geographically located within the inner city borders of Buenos Aires. Characterized as an ecovillage, its members seek away from an urban lifestyle and opt for a life in closer contact with nature. Its main practice is reciclaje (recycling) where vegetables that are to be trashed by stores in the closest urban barrio are given new purpose by being rinsed and cooked to serve the community s members and visitors. Terapolva s ideological worldview is based on The three R s : Recycle, Reutilize and Reduce. Terapolva s organizational structure draws on anarchistic principles where visible borders and officially regulated commitment is absent. Members, who call themselves aldeanos (villagers), are in theory free to come and go as they please, and the community has no legal claim to the terrain it occupies – which in fact belongs to the University College and the government of Buenos Aires. Next to Terapolva s main territory lies a state owned bioreserve with an overgrown river and a rich wildlife. Aldeanos claim themselves to be protectors of the zone, seeking to maintain the flora and fauna by removing contaminating material and keeping the area free of trash. My main question throughout this thesis is: How is community identity and individual needs connected to Terapolva s aim to be an ecovillage, and how can the place be seen as a generator of meaning and livelihood for its inhabitants? I seek to understand how a community that has a very high frequency of changing members and which lacks clear borders and regulations still manages to maintain a unity and to reproduce itself. Ideologically Terapolva is though to be an ecovillage, and there is an overall notion that Terapolva is a place very much distinguished from the rest of Buenos Aires. I investigate what kind of mechanisms exist in the creation and maintaining of boundaries, where differentiation between inside and outside are confirmed both by aldeanos themselves and groups in its near surroundings. Since the open structure and anarchistic organization allow members to operate based on voluntarism I ask how the community s common ideals and goals are kept alive and how these are reflected, or not, in the actions of the individuals and their strategies for satisfying daily needs