An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

Shifting themes, shifting roles: the development of research blogs

The study described in this paper investigated the use of research blogs by postgraduate students over a four-year period. An initial, one-year, pilot focused on the research blogs of three first-year doctoral students (Ferguson, Clough, & Hosein, 2007). Analysis indicated that blogs were used to promote a community where students were encouraged to reflect and share ideas, skills and stories of research life. The blogs also acted as memory repositories and encouraged collaboration. The main study followed the students’ blogs for another three years, as they completed their doctorates and took jobs as early-career researchers. It investigated changes in the use and content of research blogs during this period. All three students continued to make use of their blogs for reflection over this period, and the blogs’ use as a memory repository became increasingly important, especially during the period of writing up research. Once the students had made the transition to early-career researcher, the nature of their blog use changed and began to fragment. This was due, in part, to issues of confidentiality, and data protection associated with their employment. While they continued to use their original research blogs to promote community and collaboration, the constraints of their work meant that new posts were often posted in closed blogs, or were marked as protected. At the same time, they were required or encouraged to make use of project-related blogs as part of a planned communication strategy by their employers. The findings of this longitudinal study clarify the changing expectations and needs of learners, employers and society in relation to researchers’ blogs, and identify skills, awareness and knowledge needed to support the use of blogging by research students

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