System upgrade: realising the vision for UK education

A report summarising the findings of the TEL programme in the wider context of technology-enhanced learning and offering recommendations for future strategy in the area was launched on 13th June at the House of Lords to a group of policymakers, technologists and practitioners chaired by Lord Knight. The report – a major outcome of the programme – is written by TEL director Professor Richard Noss and a team of experts in various fields of technology-enhanced learning. The report features the programme’s 12 recommendations for using technology-enhanced learning to upgrade UK education

Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits From Internet Access at U.S. Libraries

Examines the use of free computer and Internet access in public libraries, by income level, age, race/ethnicity, and online activity. Explores libraries' role as a community resource for social media, education, employment, e-government, and other areas

Immigrant Youth and Digital Disparty in California

This study addresses three key research questions regarding immigrant youth and the digital divide:What are the patterns of home technology use among native-born and immigrant families and youth?What are the causes and consequences of the digital divide for immigrant families and youth?How does technology at CTCs in California benefit immigrant families and youth

IMPACT, Spring 2011

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/impact/1007/thumbnail.jp

Goal-based structuring in a recommender systems

Recommender systems help people to find information that is interesting to them. However, current recommendation techniques only address the user's short-term and long-term interests, not their immediate interests. This paper describes a method to structure information (with or without using recommendations) taking into account the users' immediate interests: a goal-based structuring method. Goal-based structuring is based on the fact that people experience certain gratifications from using information, which should match with their goals. An experiment using an electronic TV guide shows that structuring information using a goal-based structure makes it easier for users to find interesting information, especially if the goals are used explicitly; this is independent of whether recommendations are used or not. It also shows that goal-based structuring has more influence on how easy it is for users to find interesting information than recommendations

Employment Assistance Program Focus Group Report

The September 11th Fund, working with the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, created the Employment Assistance Program to help dislocated workers regain employment and wages lost in the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. The project consisted of eight focus groups conducted at a professional focus group facility in Manhattan between June 25 through July 9, 2003. This publication reports on the findings of those focus groups

Leveraging Technology toward Family Supports for and Development of Middle Schoolers

This Practitioner Perspective discusses how sharing a learning space with their parents, college students, and other adult members in a community-based technology program influenced middle school students’ familial support, their own technology knowledge and social capital, sense of membership in a learning community, and identity development. The program’s structure used technology as a starting point to develop skills, but also to aid Latino immigrant families to navigate their children’s schooling experiences

Icanlearn: A Mobile Application For Creating Flashcards And Social Stories\u3csup\u3etm\u3c/sup\u3e For Children With Autistm

The number of children being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is on the rise, presenting new challenges for their parents and teachers to overcome. At the same time, mobile computing has been seeping its way into every aspect of our lives in the form of smartphones and tablet computers. It seems only natural to harness the unique medium these devices provide and use it in treatment and intervention for children with autism. This thesis discusses and evaluates iCanLearn, an iOS flashcard app with enough versatility to construct Social StoriesTM. iCanLearn provides an engaging, individualized learning experience to children with autism on a single device, but the most powerful way to use iCanLearn is by connecting two or more devices together in a teacher-learner relationship. The evaluation results are presented at the end of the thesis

The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged