Innovating Pedagogy 2015: Open University Innovation Report 4

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Educational Technology as Seen Through the Eyes of the Readers

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain visualization of educational technology. The interactive visualization is based on readership patterns in the online reference management system Mendeley. It comprises of 13 topic areas, spanning psychological, pedagogical, and methodological foundations, learning methods and technologies, and social and technological developments. The visualization was evaluated with (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualizations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualization is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualizations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualization and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.Comment: Forthcoming article in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learnin

Integrated context-aware and cloud-based adaptive home screens for android phones

This is the post-print version of this Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagThe home screen in Android phones is a highly customizable user interface where the users can add and remove widgets and icons for launching applications. This customization is currently done on the mobile device itself and will only create static content. Our work takes the concept of Android home screen [3] one step further and adds flexibility to the user interface by making it context-aware and integrated with the cloud. Overall results indicated that the users have a strong positive bias towards the application and that the adaptation helped them to tailor the device to their needs by using the different context aware mechanisms