An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Curriculum Development in Indonesian Education

Pendidikan Indonesia telah belangsung selama berabad-abad mengikuti perkembangan sejarah, elonomi, politik masyarakat Indonesia. Pendidikan Indonesia sejalan dengan tumbuh kembangnya kerajaan-kerajaan di Nusantara dan juga masuknya agama-agama besar di Indonesia seperti Hindu, Budha maupun Islam. Namun perkembangan pendidikan modern di Indonesia diawali dengan masuknya kolonial bangsa barat ke Indonesia. Setelah Indonesia merdeka, pemerintah terus menerus melakukan pembangunan pendidikan secara nasional di seluruh wilayah NKRI. Pembangunan pendidikan tidak bias terlepas dari pengembangan kurikulum karrena kurikulum adalah inti dari proses pembelajaran. Kurikulum disususn dan dikembangkan sesuai kebutuhan siswa, sekolah, masyarakat serta tuntutan jaman

Biased Embeddings from Wild Data: Measuring, Understanding and Removing

Many modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems make use of data embeddings, particularly in the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP). These embeddings are learnt from data that has been gathered "from the wild" and have been found to contain unwanted biases. In this paper we make three contributions towards measuring, understanding and removing this problem. We present a rigorous way to measure some of these biases, based on the use of word lists created for social psychology applications; we observe how gender bias in occupations reflects actual gender bias in the same occupations in the real world; and finally we demonstrate how a simple projection can significantly reduce the effects of embedding bias. All this is part of an ongoing effort to understand how trust can be built into AI systems.Comment: Author's original versio

Images and Models of Thought

One really extraordinary ability of the mind is its capacity to match objects and form plausible hypotheses from just a few elements that we see through our eyes. We recognize a feather even if it is mostly covered by a book sitting on top of it. Even if we cannot see the whole shape, we recognize it as pertaining to a category, a set of objects called “feathers”. If by imagination we mean the ability to represent things for ourselves that are not present in the act of sensing, we should realize that the hypothesis of the feather is an imaginative construction of the mind, a mental representation, a model referred to by the sensory input

Educating the creative workforce: New directions for 21st Century schooling

This article sets out reasons for arguing that creativity is not garnish to the roast of industry or of education—i.e. the reasoning behind Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's insistence that creativity is not only about elites but involves everyone. This article investigates three key domains—scholarship, commerce and learning—to argue the importance of moving creativity from the margins of formal education to its centre. First, the article elaborates the scholarly work being done to bring definitional clarity to the concept of creativity, moving it from the realm of mystery, serendipity and individual genius to a definitional field that is more amenable to analysis. It then provides evidence about the extent to which creative capacity is being understood to be a powerful economic driver, not simply the province of the arts and the hobbyist. Finally, it examines new learning theory and its implications for formal education, noting both the possibilities and pitfalls in preparing young people for creative workforce futures

Selection of touch gestures for children’s applications: repeated experiment to increase reliability

This paper discusses the selection of touch gestures for children’s applications. This research investigates the gestures that children aged between 2 to 4 years old can manage on the iPad device. Two experiments were conducted for this research. The first experiment was carried out in United Kingdom. The second experiment was carried out in Malaysia. The two similar experiments were carried out to increase the reliability and refine the result. This study shows that children aged 4 years have no problem using the 7 common gestures found in iPad applications. Some children aged 3 years have problem with two of the gestures. A high percentage of children aged 2 years struggled with the free rotate, drag & drop, pinch and spread gestures. This paper also discusses the Additional Criteria for the use of Gestures, Interface Design Components and Research on Children using iPad and Applications

Generating innovations through analogies: An empirical investigation of knowledge brokers

In this paper we explore how knowledge brokers - specialised design and engineering companies offering services to clients in diverse industries - use analogies for product development. Our research is based on interviews with project leaders of 13 knowledge brokering companies. The interviews focused on product development projects in which analogies were used. First, we categorize these cases according to the motivation to use analogies (efficiency vs. innovativeness). Second, we describe and analyse the process of using analogies. Our results show that analogies are frequently and very pragmatically applied throughout the whole development process. We also found that individual characteristics of the persons participating in such projects are the crucial factor that influences the outcome of the project. --product development,knowledge brokers,analogy

Television and children: developmentally harmful or educationally beneficial?

Includes bibliographical references

Investigating the learning transfer of genre features and conceptual knowledge from an academic literacy course to business studies: Exploring the potential of dynamic assessment

Academic literacy courses aim to enable higher education students to participate in their chosen academic fields as fully as possible. However, the extent to which these students transfer the academic skills taught in these courses to their chosen disciplines is still under-researched. This article reports on a study that investigated the potential of dynamic assessment (an assessment approach that blends instruction into assessment) in the transfer of genre features and conceptual knowledge among undergraduate business studies students in a UK public university. The data includes three students’ written assignments (N = nine), interviews (N = three) and business studies tutor (N = three) feedback. Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory of learning and a genre theory based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, the data were analysed. The findings suggest that dynamic assessment may contribute to the transfer of genre features and conceptual knowledge to a new assessment context. Implications of this for academic literacy instruction and assessment design are presented

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.