GeoCoin:supporting ideation and collaborative design with location-based smart contracts

Design and HCI researchers are increasingly working with complex digital infrastructures, such as cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. These technologies will have a profound impact on digital systems and their audiences. However, given their emergent nature and technical complexity, involving non-specialists in the design of applications that employ these technologies is challenging. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and present GeoCoin, a location-based platform for embodied learning and speculative ideating with smart contracts. In collaborative workshops with GeoCoin, participants engaged with location-based smart contracts, using the platform to explore digital `debit' and `credit' zones in the city. These exercises led to the design of diverse distributed-ledger applications, for time-limited financial unions, participatory budgeting, and humanitarian aid. These results contribute to the HCI community by demonstrating how an experiential prototype can support understanding of the complexities behind new digital infrastructures and facilitate participant engagement in ideation and design processes

Mobile learning scenarios in language teaching: perceptions of vocational and professional education students

Mobile devices play a significant role in society, in general, and a very limited one at the different levels of education. Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices allows learning to occur anywhere, (and at) anytime. These powerful technological devices can enhance the teaching and learning processes by helping to promote collaborative and individual learning and broadening the boundaries of the classroom to different contexts of learning. Many students have mobile devices and their applications can provide access to learning outside the classroom, for greater flexibility and more dynamic learning. In this sense, the articulation of technological and methodological efforts allowed us to create learning scenarios supported by the devices that students take to the classroom (BYOD), and use them to motivate and involve students in meaningful learning. These devices offer the advantage of integrating various technologies in the curricular contents, such as in foreign and mother language courses, representing a set of possibilities of ubiquity that can have great impact on the learning process. Thus, we developed strategies with vocational and educational students’ methodologies, such as augmented reality, project-based learning, game-based learning, collaborative learning and gamification. In this text, we present the results of two mobile learning studies in teaching French as a foreign language (to 18-23 year-old-students) and Portuguese language, as a mother tongue (to 15-19 year-old-students), in vocational education, implemented as a mediation tool in education to promote the construction of learning and development of significant skills of collaborative work. From the data collection, through a questionnaire, with open and closed questions, we highlight the favorable perception of the students to the integration of mobile devices in learning, and the recognition of the benefits of the teaching strategies used throughout the year, in the increase of curricular learning.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Gamifying situated learning in organisations

Gamification is an emerging area in research and practice that has sparked considerable interest in management studies. The attention to gamification is amplified by the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies and augmented reality which touches on how people work and learn socially. Consequently, gamified tools’ affordances affect situated learning in working environments through their implications on human relations in practice. However, the dynamics between gamification and situated learning have not been considered in the literature. Thus, drawing on the synthesis of gamification and situated learning literatures, we offer a model of gamifying situated learning in organisations. Thereby, our discussion explains the role of gamified affordances and their socio-material characteristics, which blend with situated learning as people indwell on such tools in their work. Moreover, gamified tools can afford the technological support of community-building and networking in organisations. Such gamified communities and networks, in turn, can be seen to existing within a gamified altered reality as part of which the physical distance and proximity of situated learning activities become inevitably bridged and joined together

Is Information Systems Research Concerned with Societal Grand Challenges?

“Grand challenges” can provide an important orientation regarding whether research deals with societally relevant problems. Yet, many IS scholars have claimed that IS research is often dealing with issues that are of rather little relevance to societal grand challenges. In this “research-in-progress” study, we examine to which degree IS research is concerned with societal grand challenges. We approach this question by thus far analyzing 329 papers published in the leading AIS ‘Basket of Eight’ (AIS 8) IS journals in the year 2020. Using coding analysis rooted in justification theory to clarify why IS research was performed, we map the justifications given in those papers against the grand challenges as set out in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals. The findings indicate that IS research seems to be contributing to some societal challenges (e.g., industrial innovation, economic growth or health), while neglecting many others (e.g., societal equality, environmental sustainability and challenges in developing countries)

English Is It! (ELT Training Series) Vol. 18

The Research group From English Acquisition to English Learning and Teaching is registered at the Institute of Professional Development Teaching (IDP-ICE), at the University of Barcelona. The group, founded and led by Lourdes Montoro (September 2013 - June 2021), has involved 28 teachers and professionals. 7 of them have been members of the group, and, together with 21 guest authors, have presented their work in the publication which she also created, and coordinated to fulfill the objectives of the pedagogical project which she had devised: English Is It! (ELT Training Series) (Vols. 1-18)..

From Digital Community Engagement to Smoking Cessation: Insights from the Reddit r/StopSmoking Thread

Despite decades of prevention, tobacco addiction is still a widespread health concern responsible for around 8 million deaths per year. Existing digital solutions such as social media are becoming increasingly popular and represent a novel approach for people to find community support. However, little is known about how they affect smoking behavior. This paper tackles this issue by investigating attitudes, motivations and behaviors of 169 users of one such digital community, namely the Reddit r/StopSmoking thread. We present a model based on the transtheoretical model as well as the uses and gratification approach that investigates the support of digital communities in the smoking cessation process. Our findings suggest that engagement in online smoking cessation communities has a positive link to smokers\u27 behavior in their process of change. Providing help, seeking help, seeking information, seeking status and seeking entertainment being identified as motivational factors to engage in such online communities

The Future of Gamification

Presents survey findings on technology stakeholders' and critics' expectations for trends in the use of competitive "game mechanics" as interactive design elements and implications for education, health, work, and other activities. Excerpts comments