Coding without sight: Teaching object-oriented java programming to a blind student

In this paper, I describe my experience of teaching object-oriented Java programming to a blind student. This includes the particular environment setup used (a screen reader, JAWS, and an advanced Windows-based text editor, Textpad) and alterations made to the course to accommodate the blind student's special needs. I also discuss how a number of difficulties encountered by the blind student, such as compiling Java applications using the command-line interface and javac, a Java compiler, was addressed and provide some practical recommendations based on my experience

The history of chatbots: the journey from psychological experiment to educational object

Chatbots represent a strong and distinctive theme in the current literature on technology in education. What is lacking, however, is an analysis of them in terms of historical development or deeper historical-discursive classification. This paper focuses on the history of chatbots and places it in the context of a critical reflection on studies focusing on chatbots as educational objects between 2006-2021. It offers an analysis of each study and places them in the context of the development of the field as a whole. The study identifies three vital discourses that can be identified in the development of chatbots from a historical perspective - Turing-oriented, Searle-oriented and educational interaction-oriented

“Ok Google, vorrei parlare con la poetessa Saffo" intelligenza artificiale, assistenti virtuali e didattica della letteratura

In the era of automation conversational interfaces have come to play a pervasive role in many sectors. From chatbots that support online shopping experiences, tovirtual assistants used for therapy to dialogue systems that enable transactions within any messaging service. Some of these interfaces, ever-present and only a touch of a finger away, simplify daily tasks and engage the user thanks to human-like traits and personalities: the average user is growing increasingly familiar with the voices of Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana. Conversational interfaces can also redefine the way we experience education. They can support teachers, guide students through the learning process and constitute a bridge to technological innovations that are still struggling to find their right place in school curricula. A virtual assistant can transform the approach to the study of literature, replacing the traditional fruition of texts with a narrative journey that is personalized and never the same. Conversation with a canonical writer or with a literary character is a versatile means of building and processing knowledge, an opportunity to establish a relationship with the past marked by unexpected empathic implications. This paper introduces a series of methodologies and teaching strategies that can enable this process. These include cognitive apprenticeship, discovery learning and digital authentic learning. The reader will also approach the field of AI to learn how to create an alter ego of Sappho using Dialogflow. Le interfacce conversazionali hanno acquisito un ruolo pervasivo in molti settori. Sono i chatbot che supportano nell’acquisto di un prodotto, gli assistenti virtuali utilizzati a scopo terapeutico o i sistemi di dialogo che consentono di effettuaretransazioni all’interno di un qualsiasi servizio di messaggistica. Alcune, sempre a portata di mano, rendono le attività quotidiane più semplici e coinvolgono l’utente grazie alla propria personalità e a connotati antropomorfi : le voci di Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant e Cortana sono ormai familiari. Le interfacce conversazionali si rivelano in grado di ridefinire anche l’esperienza educativa. Offrono supporto al docente, accompagnano lo studente nel processo di apprendimento e consentono di confrontarsi con innovazioni tecnologiche che ancora faticano a trovare il giusto spazio nel curricolo scolastico. Un assistente virtuale può cambiare il modo di approcciarsi allo studio della letteratura, trasformando la tradizionale fruizione dei contenuti disciplinari in un itinerario narrativo sempre diverso e personalizzato. La conversazione con un autore del canone letterario o con il personaggio di un’opera è un mezzo versatile per costruire ed elaborare la conoscenza, un’occasione per stabilire una relazione con il passato connotata da inaspettati risvolti empatici. In queste pagine il lettore avrà modo di conoscere una serie di metodologie e strategie didattiche utili per abilitare tale processo, tra le quali l’apprendistato cognitivo, l’apprendimento per scoperta e il digital authentic learning. Imparerà, inoltre, a realizzare un alter ego della poetessa Saffo muovendo i primi passi nel campo dell’AI grazie alla piattaforma Dialogflow

Tracking @stemxcomet: Teaching Programming to Blind Students via 3D Printing, Crisis Management, and Twitter

ABSTRACT Introductory programming activities for students often include graphical user interfaces or other visual media that are inaccessible to students with visual impairments. Digital fabrication techniques such as 3D printing offer an opportunity for students to write programs that produce tactile objects, providing an accessible way of exploring program output. This paper describes the planning and execution of a four-day computer science education workshop in which blind and visually impaired students wrote Ruby programs to analyze data from Twitter regarding a fictional ecological crisis. Students then wrote code to produce accessible tactile visualizations of that data. This paper describes outcomes from our workshop and suggests future directions for integrating data analysis and 3D printing into programming instruction for blind students

Facilitating or Enabling Value Creation? Reconfiguring value creation in financial services

FinTech on lyhennelmä sanoista Financial Technology ja finanssiteknologian odotettiin disruptoivan rahoitusalaa. Rahoitusalan muutos ei kuitenkaan johdu pelkästään startupeista, vaan se alkoi jo vuoden 2008 finanssikriisistä. Digitalisaation ja sääntelyn muutosten seurauksena perinteiset finanssipalvelujen tarjoajat – pankit ja vakuutusyhtiöt – ovat joutuneet uudistamaan liiketoimintamallejaan. Samaan aikaan uudet tulokkaat, FinTech-startupit ovat kasvattaneet markkinaosuuttaan etenkin maksamisessa ja sijoittamisessa. Aiempi FinTechin tutkimus on keskittynyt pääasiassa FinTech-startup- yrityksiin ja -innovaatioihin, mutta toimialan laajuisia muutoksia arvonluonnissa ei ole vielä tunnistettu. Tämän väitöskirjan tarkoituksena on tutkia ja analysoida, miten arvonluonti viritetään uudelleen finanssipalveluissa. Tämä tutkimus perustuu neljään kvalitatiiviseen artikkeliin, joissa ilmiötä tarkastellaan eri näkökulmista. Finanssipalvelujen arvonluontia ja liiketoimintamalleja tutkiessa huomataan, että digitalisaatio ja sääntely muuttavat prosessien ja resurssien omistajuutta arvonluonnin perustana. Artikkeli I tavoitteena oli ymmärtää, mitä tekoälyteknologian käyttö tarkoittaa arvonluonnissa vakuutuspalveluissa. Artikkeli II tutki muutoksia markkinatulokkaan ja vakiintuneen toimijan näkökulmasta. Artikkeli III analysoi palveluinnovaatioita markkinatulokkaan näkökulmasta ja esittää viitekehyksen innovaatioiden luomiseen. Lopuksi Artikkeli IV keskittyi seuraamaan, kuinka perinteiset rahoituspalveluntarjoajat reagoivat FinTech ilmiöön löytääkseen strategisen edun. Keskeisenä tuloksena tämä tutkimus esittelee uuden viitekehyksen arvonluonnin uudelleen virittämiselle. Lisäksi tässä väitöskirjassa ehdotetaan termiä ”Value enabler” (arvonluonnin mahdollistaja) käytettäväksi uudella tavalla. Se kuvaa “näkymättömiä”-palveluntarjoajia, jotka käyttävät rajapintoja (API) jakamaan prosessejaan ja resurssejaan kumppaneille, jotka sitten yhdistämällä nämä resurssit ja prosessit tukevat asiakkaan arvonluontiprosessia.FinTech, abbreviated from Financial Technology, is a phenomenon which was expected to disrupt financial services. However, the turmoil in the industry is not only to do with startups, having started already with the 2008 financial crisis. The digitalization and regulatory changes that followed forced incumbent financial service providers – including banks and insurance companies – to revise their business models, meaning the technology they create and what they get from their partners. At the same time, new market entrants, known as FinTech start-ups, are increasing their market share especially in payments and investments. Previous research on FinTech has focused mainly on startups and innovation, meaning that industry-wide changes in value creation are yet to be discovered. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore and analyze how value creation is reconfigured in financial services. The research builds on four qualitative studies reported in articles that discuss the phenomenon from different perspectives. The aim in Article I enhances the understanding of how Artificial Intelligence technology is used as a means of value creation in insurance services. Article II considers the changes from the perspectives of a market entrant and an incumbent. Article III analyzes service innovation from the market entrant’s perspective, and builds a framework of the innovation stack. Finally, Article IV follows how incumbent financial service providers reacted to the FinTech phenomenon to find a strategic fit. According to the conclusions drawn from these articles, digitalization and regulation transform the ownership of processes and resources as the foundation of value creation. As a result, a new framework for the reconfiguration of value creation is introduced in this dissertation. A new concept, namely the Value Enabler, is suggested. This refers to incognito service providers using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to share their processes and resources among their partners, which then in combination with their own resources and processes facilitate the customer’s value-creation process. Managerial implications are presented and avenues for future research are mapped on the basis of the research results

Designing and Evaluating Accessible E-Learning for Students with Visual Impairments in K-12 Computing Education

This dissertation explores the pathways for making K-12 computing education more accessible for blind or visually impaired (BVI) learners. As computer science (CS) expands into K-12 education, more concerted efforts are required to ensure all students have equitable access to opportunities to pursue a career in computing. To determine their viability with BVI learners, I conducted three studies to assess current accessibility in CS curricula, materials, and learning environments. Study one was interviews with visually impaired developers; study two was interviews with K-12 teachers of visually impaired students; study three was a remote observation within a computer science course. My exploration revealed that most of CS education lacks the necessary accommodations for BVI students to learn at an equitable pace with sighted students. However, electronic learning (e-learning) was a theme that showed to provide the most accessible learning experience for BVI students, although even there, usability and accessibility challenges were present in online learning platforms. My dissertation engaged in a human-centered approach across three studies towards designing, developing, and evaluating an online learning management system (LMS) with the critical design elements to improve navigation and interaction with BVI users. Study one was a survey exploring the perception of readiness for taking online courses between sighted and visually impaired students. The findings from the survey fueled study two, which employed participatory design with storytelling with K-12 teachers and BVI students to learn more about their experiences using LMSs and how they imagine such systems to be more accessible. The findings led to developing the accessible learning content management system (ALCMS), a web-based platform for managing courses, course content, and course roster, evaluated in study three with high school students, both sighted and visually impaired, to determine its usability and accessibility. This research contributes with recommendations for including features and design elements to improve accessibility in existing LMSs and building new ones

Evaluating the usability and security of a video CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is a variation of the Turing test, in which a challenge is used to distinguish humans from computers (`bots\u27) on the internet. They are commonly used to prevent the abuse of online services. CAPTCHAs discriminate using hard articial intelligence problems: the most common type requires a user to transcribe distorted characters displayed within a noisy image. Unfortunately, many users and them frustrating and break rates as high as 60% have been reported (for Microsoft\u27s Hotmail). We present a new CAPTCHA in which users provide three words (`tags\u27) that describe a video. A challenge is passed if a user\u27s tag belongs to a set of automatically generated ground-truth tags. In an experiment, we were able to increase human pass rates for our video CAPTCHAs from 69.7% to 90.2% (184 participants over 20 videos). Under the same conditions, the pass rate for an attack submitting the three most frequent tags (estimated over 86,368 videos) remained nearly constant (5% over the 20 videos, roughly 12.9% over a separate sample of 5146 videos). Challenge videos were taken from YouTube.com. For each video, 90 tags were added from related videos to the ground-truth set; security was maintained by pruning all tags with a frequency 0.6%. Tag stemming and approximate matching were also used to increase human pass rates. Only 20.1% of participants preferred text-based CAPTCHAs, while 58.2% preferred our video-based alternative. Finally, we demonstrate how our technique for extending the ground truth tags allows for different usability/security trade-offs, and discuss how it can be applied to other types of CAPTCHAs

Design And Evaluation of A Conversational Agent for Mental Health Support: Forming Human-Agent Sociotechnical And Therapeutic Relationships

Many people with mental health disorders face significant challenges getting the help they need, including the costs of obtaining psychological counseling or psychiatry services, as well as fear of being stigmatized. As a way of addressing these barriers, text-based conversational agents (chatbots) have gained traction as a new form of e-therapy. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing techniques, this technology offers more natural interactions and a “judgment-free zone” for clients concerned about stigma. However, literature on psychotherapeutic chatbots is sparse in both the psychology and human computer interaction (HCI) fields. While recent studies indicate that chatbots provide an affordable and effective therapy delivery method, this research has not thoroughly explained the underlying mechanisms for increasing acceptance of chatbots and making them more engaging. Don Norman (1994) has argued the main difficulties of utilizing intelligent agents are social—not technical—and particularly center around people’s perceptions of agents. In exploring the use of chatbots in psychotherapy, we must investigate how this technology is conceptually understood, and the thoughts and feelings they evoke when people interact with them. This dissertation focuses on two types of relationships critical to the success of utilizing chatbots for mental health interventions: sociotechnical relationships and therapeutic relationships. A sociotechnical relationship concerns technology adoption, usability, and the compatibility between humans and chatbots. A therapeutic relationship encompasses people’s feelings and attitudes toward a chatbot therapist. Therefore, this dissertation asks: What are the optimal design principles for a conversational agent that facilitates the development of both sociotechnical and therapeutic relationships to help people manage their mental health? To investigate this question, I designed an original conversational system with eight gendered and racially heterogeneous personas, and one neutral robot-like persona. Using a mixed-method approach (online experiment and interviews), I evaluated factors related to the adoption and use of conversational agents for psychotherapeutic purposes. I also unpacked the human-agent relational dynamics and evaluated how anthropomorphism and perceived racial similarity impact people’s perceptions of and interactions with the chatbot. These findings contributed to the wider understanding of conversational AI application in mental health support and provided actionable design recommendations

Torino: A Tangible Programming Language Inclusive of Children with Visual Disabilities

© 2018, Copyright © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Across the world, policy initiatives are being developed to engage children with computer programming and computational thinking. Diversity and inclusion has been a strong force in this agenda, but children with disabilities have largely been omitted from the conversation. Currently, there are no age appropriate tools for teaching programming concepts and computational thinking to primary school children with visual disabilities. We address this gap through presenting the design and implementation of Torino, a tangible programming language for teaching programming concepts to children age 7–11 regardless of level of vision. In this paper, we: (1) describe the design process done in conjunction with children with visual disabilities; (2) articulate the design decisions made; and (3) report insights generated from an evaluation with 10 children with mixed visual abilities that considers how children are able to trace (read) and create (write) programs with Torino. We discuss key design trade-offs: (1) readability versus extensibility; and (2) size versus liveness. We conclude by reflecting upon how an inclusive design approach shaped the final result