noteEd - A web-based lecture capture system

Electronic capture and playback of lectures has long been the aim of many academic projects. Synote is an application developed under MACFoB (Multimedia Annotation and Community Folksonomy Building) project to synchronise the playback of lecture materials. However, Synote provides no functionality to capture such multimedia. This project involves the creation of a system called noteEd, which will capture a range of multimedia from lectures and make them available to Synote. This report describes the evolution of the noteEd project throughout the design and implementation of the proposed system. The performance of the system was checked in a user acceptance test with the customer, which is discussed after screenshots of our solution. Finally, the project management is presented containing a final project evaluation

Measuring the Affordances of Studying in a Virtual World

There has been much interest at the University of Hertfordshire in the teaching and learning in virtual worlds such as Second Life. The School of Computer Science has established a virtual campus within this system where a broad range of learning and teaching activities take place. These include presenting textual, audio and video learning and teaching materials, delivering virtual lectures, providing simulations and group working areas. Recently there has been a great deal of controversy over such initiatives, for example at my own university lecturers are divided as to the efficacy of such an approach. Some see the initiative as an interesting addition to the range of teaching and learning strategies available, likely to motivate learners. Others see it as a trivial attempt to jump on the latest band wagon, with little pedagogical benefit or justification. My own past research in this area, over several years has related to an estimation of the cognitive load imposed by desktop virtual environments and how this affected learning. Several important variables have been identified in several years of research and their effects measured. In the study presented here, a group of 80 final year computer science students used the Second Life virtual environment in order to support their practical project work. Groups of four learners used the university virtual campus especially modified for this purpose to hold meetings and to manage their software development projects. This study reports on how the group areas were established and used by the learners, the types of activities that took place and the effectiveness of the approach in this context. Quantitative and qualitative research was undertaken and it was found that there were benefits to be had by the use of such virtual environments. Recommendations are made as to the affordances of the Second Life virtual environment for teaching and learning in this context and also discussed are the potential problems inherent in this initiative related to individual differences and the cognitive burden imposed on learners.Peer reviewe

Evaluating the development of wearable devices, personal data assistants and the use of other mobile devices in further and higher education institutions

This report presents technical evaluation and case studies of the use of wearable and mobile computing mobile devices in further and higher education. The first section provides technical evaluation of the current state of the art in wearable and mobile technologies and reviews several innovative wearable products that have been developed in recent years. The second section examines three scenarios for further and higher education where wearable and mobile devices are currently being used. The three scenarios include: (i) the delivery of lectures over mobile devices, (ii) the augmentation of the physical campus with a virtual and mobile component, and (iii) the use of PDAs and mobile devices in field studies. The first scenario explores the use of web lectures including an evaluation of IBM's Web Lecture Services and 3Com's learning assistant. The second scenario explores models for a campus without walls evaluating the Handsprings to Learning projects at East Carolina University and ActiveCampus at the University of California San Diego . The third scenario explores the use of wearable and mobile devices for field trips examining San Francisco Exploratorium's tool for capturing museum visits and the Cybertracker field computer. The third section of the report explores the uses and purposes for wearable and mobile devices in tertiary education, identifying key trends and issues to be considered when piloting the use of these devices in educational contexts

The patterning of finance/security : a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps

Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps

The Virtual University and Avatar Technology: E-learning Through Future Technology

E-learning gains increasingly importance in academic education. Beyond present distance learning technologies a new opportunity emerges by the use of advanced avatar technology. Virtual robots acting in an environment of a virtual campus offer opportunities of advanced learning experiences. Human Machine Interaction (HMI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bridge time zones and ease professional constraints of mature students. Undergraduate students may use such technology to build up topics of their studies beyond taught lectures. Objectives of the paper are to research the options, extent and limitations of avatar technology for academic studies in under- and postgraduate courses and to discuss students' potential acceptance or rejection of interaction with AI. The research method is a case study based on Sir Tony Dyson's avatar technology iBot2000. Sir Tony is a worldwide acknowledged robot specialist, creator of Star Wars' R2D2, who developed in recent years the iBot2000 technology, intelligent avatars adaptable to different environments with the availability to speak up to eight different languages and capable to provide logic answers to questions asked. This technology underwent many prototypes with the latest specific goal to offer blended E-learning entering the field of the virtual 3-D university extending Web2.0 to Web3.0 (Dyson. 2009). Sir Tony included his vast experiences gained in his personal (teaching) work with children for which he received his knighthood. The data was mainly collected through interviews with Sir Tony Dyson, which helps discover the inventor’s view on why such technology is of advantage for academic studies. Based on interviews with Sir Tony, this research critically analyses the options, richness and restrictions, which avatar (iBot2000) technology may add to academic studies. The conclusion will discuss the opportunities, which avatar technology may be able to bring to learning and teaching activities, and the foreseeable limitations – the amount of resources required and the complexity to build a fully integrated virtual 3-D campus. Key Words: virtual learning, avatar technology, iBot2000, virtual universit

How to go online: considerations of designing an online course - technical options, didactical methods and the students

This paper addresses the task of designing an online course. Which considerations have to be made? Many factors have to be regarded: technical options, the didactical design, the institution, the subject of the courses and the students. This task becomes even more difficult when we get aware that these factors are very much independent and that the decision in one field cannot be made without considering the others aspects. The didactical design of an online course has to be implemented based on technical option in order to shape and support the teaching and learning process. Different internet media can be uses such as web pages, email, discussion boards and chats as well as specialized software packages. These media types are characterized by certain functionalities which are appropriate for certain learning methods. What are the factors which influence this choice? Besides the aspect of synchronization the technical equipment at the learners' place and their media competence is essential. Additionally CD ROMs can be used as a media for data transmission as well as a supportive function for the learning process. The didactical design of a CD ROM can support different learning methods and provide additional learning material which can be used according to the students' demands. In this paper some examples are given as how to implement different didactical elements with different technical features. The learning process does not have to take place on the level of the individual learner but should integrate social interaction in different social forms. learning can take place on different levels such the individual learner, small groups, and plenary settings. But:: group learning processes have to be properly planned and pre-structured in the didactical design of online courses and need sufficient technical support in order to work properly

Efficient Video Indexing on the Web: A System that Leverages User Interactions with a Video Player

In this paper, we propose a user-based video indexing method, that automatically generates thumbnails of the most important scenes of an online video stream, by analyzing users' interactions with a web video player. As a test bench to verify our idea we have extended the YouTube video player into the VideoSkip system. In addition, VideoSkip uses a web-database (Google Application Engine) to keep a record of some important parameters, such as the timing of basic user actions (play, pause, skip). Moreover, we implemented an algorithm that selects representative thumbnails. Finally, we populated the system with data from an experiment with nine users. We found that the VideoSkip system indexes video content by leveraging implicit users interactions, such as pause and thirty seconds skip. Our early findings point toward improvements of the web video player and its thumbnail generation technique. The VideSkip system could compliment content-based algorithms, in order to achieve efficient video-indexing in difficult videos, such as lectures or sports.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, UCMedia 2010: 2nd International ICST Conference on User Centric Medi

Investigating an open methodology for designing domain-specific language collections

With this research and design paper, we are proposing that Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Access (OA) publications give increasing access to high quality online educational and research content for the development of powerful domain-specific language collections that can be further enhanced linguistically with the Flexible Language Acquisition System (FLAX, http://flax.nzdl.org). FLAX uses the Greenstone digital library system, which is a widely used open-source software that enables end users to build collections of documents and metadata directly onto the Web (Witten, Bainbridge, & Nichols, 2010). FLAX offers a powerful suite of interactive text-mining tools, using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence designs, to enable novice collections builders to link selected language content to large pre-processed linguistic databases. An open methodology trialed at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the OER Research Hub at the UK Open University demonstrates how applying open corpus-based designs and technologies can enhance open educational practices among language teachers and subject academics for the preparation and delivery of courses in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)