The enactive approach to architectural experience: A neurophysiological perspective on embodiment, motivation, and affordances

From the enactivist perspective, the way people perceptually experience the world, including architectural spaces, is governed by the dynamic sensorimotor activity of the human organism as a whole and is thereby influenced by the particular conditions of man’s embodiment

Share.TEC Final Project Report

This report provides an overview of Share.TEC, a three-year project co-funded by the EC that supports access to, exchange and re-use of digital resources and practitioner experiences within Teacher Education at European level. The document comprises a number of sections that can either be read consecutively, to gain the full picture of the project and its outcomes, or in combinations so as to grasp particular aspects, how these were approached and what results were achieved. Section 2 describes the project\u27s overall objectives in terms of both its technological ambitions and its wider mission as part of the overall educational landscape. Section 3 gives brief profiles of the partners who made up the Share.TEC consortium. In Section 4 the results and achievements of the project are reported. This includes a description of the portal and its features; the system architecture, tools and services; the models underpinning the Share.TEC system; and the approach taken to its multilingual dimension. Section 5 addresses the question of Share.TEC\u27s target users and their needs. It describes the strategies and means employed for incorporating the user perspective, and for ensuring that the project direction was in line with users\u27 concerns so that the resulting portal responds suitably to the actual requirements of the people it\u27s designed for. Section 6 examines the critical aspect of underlying content. In keeping with the Share.TEC mission, the focus is largely on aggregated metadata records that describe digital resources for TE and which are expressed in terms defined by the project for TE purposes. Section 7 reports the activities undertaken in the project and thus narrates the processes that unfolded through the project lifetime as the consortium pursued its objectives and generated its outcomes. Section 8 describes the effort to establish the Share.TEC portal within its natural ecosystem. It looks at the global strategy for maximising impact both at regional/national level and internationally, and analyses the conditions and prospects for continuity and growth. Readers interested in the technical/technological dimension of Share.TEC (the system, portal, models, metadata, etc.) are likely to find Sections 4, 5 and 6 to be the ones closest to their concerns. Conversely, those whose interests lie elsewhere could simply consult Section 4.1 to get an idea of the portal from the user\u27s viewpoint and go to Sections 2, 3, 7 and 8 for a vision of the project and how Share.TEC is positioned in the panorama of digital resources and Teacher Education

Socio-Informatics

Contents Editorial Thematic Focus: Socio-Informatics Introduction to the Thematic Focus “Socio-Informatics” / Claudia Müller Digitalisation in Small German Metal-Working Companies. Appropriation of Technology in a “Traditional” Industrial Domain / Bernhard Nett, Jennifer Bönsch Travelling by Taxi Brousse in Madagascar: An Investigation into Practices of Overland Transportation / Volker Wulf, Kaoru Misaki, Dave Randall, and Markus Rohde Mobile and Interactive Media in the Store? Design Case Study on Bluetooth Beacon Concepts for Food Retail / Christian Reuter, Inken Leopold Facebook and the Mass Media in Tunisia / Konstantin Aal, Marén Schorch, Esma Ben Hadj Elkilani, Volker Wulf Book Review Symposium Charles Goodwin Charles Goodwin’s Co-Operative Action: The Idea and the Argument / Erhard Schüttpelz, Christian Meyer Multi-Modal Interaction and Tool-Making: Goodwin’s Intuition / Christian Meyer, Erhard Schüttpelz Co-Operation is a Feature of Sociality, not an Attribute of People : “We inhabit each other’s actions.” (Goodwin, cover) / Jutta Wiesemann, Klaus Amann The Making of the World in Co-Operative Action. From Sentence Construction to Cultural Evolution / Jürgen Streeck On Goodwin and his Co-Operative Action / Jörg R. Bergman

Collaborative adaptive accessibility and human capabilities

This thesis discusses the challenges and opportunities facing the field of accessibility, particularly as computing becomes ubiquitous. It is argued that a new approach is needed that centres around adaptations (specific, atomic changes) to user interfaces and content in order to improve their accessibility for a wider range of people than targeted by present Assistive Technologies (ATs). Further, the approach must take into consideration the capabilities of people at the human level and facilitate collaboration, in planned and ad-hoc environments. There are two main areas of focus: (1) helping people experiencing minor-to-moderate, transient and potentially-overlapping impairments, as may be brought about by the ageing process and (2) supporting collaboration between people by reasoning about the consequences, from different users perspectives, of the adaptations they may require. A theoretical basis for describing these problems and a reasoning process for the semi-automatic application of adaptations is developed. Impairments caused by the environment in which a device is being used are considered. Adaptations are drawn from other research and industry artefacts. Mechanical testing is carried out on key areas of the reasoning process, demonstrating fitness for purpose. Several fundamental techniques to extend the reasoning process in order to take temporal factors (such as fluctuating user and device capabilities) into account are broadly described. These are proposed to be feasible, though inherently bring compromises (which are defined) in interaction stability and the needs of different actors (user, device, target level of accessibility). This technical work forms the basis of the contribution of one work-package of the Sustaining ICT use to promote autonomy (Sus-IT) project, under the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme of research in the UK. Test designs for larger-scale assessment of the system with real-world participants are given. The wider Sus-IT project provides social motivations and informed design decisions for this work and is carrying out longitudinal acceptance testing of the processes developed here

Ubiquitous User Modeling

More and more interactions take place between humans and mobile or connected IT-systems in daily life. This offers a great opportunity, especially to user modeling, to reach better adaptation with ongoing evaluation of user behavior. This work develops a complete framework to realize the newly defined concept of ubiquitous user modeling. The developed tools cover methods for the uniform exchange and the semantic integration of partial user models. They also account for the extended needs for privacy and the right of every human for introspection and control of their collected data. The SITUATIONALSTATEMENTS and the exchange language USERML have been developed on the syntactical level, while the general user model ontology GUMO and the UBISWORLD ontology have been developed on the semantical level. A multilevel conflict resolution method, which handles the problem of contradictory statements, has been implemented together with a web-based user model service, such that the road capability and the scalability can be proven with this approach.Immer häufiger auftretende Interaktionen im täglichen Leben zwischen Menschen und vernetzten oder mobilen IT-Systemen bieten insbesondere für die Benutzermodellierung eine große Chance, durch ständige Evaluation des Benutzerverhaltens verbesserte Adaptionsleistungen zu erzielen. Die vorliegende Arbeit entwickelt ein komplettes Rahmensystem, um dieses neu definierte Konzept der ubiquitären Benutzermodellierung zu realisieren. Die erarbeiteten Werkzeuge umfassen Methoden zum einheitlichen Austausch und zur semantischen Integration von partiellen Benutzermodellen. Sie berücksichtigen aber auch die erhöhten Anforderungen an die Privatsphäre, sowie das Recht der Menschen auf Introspektion und Kontrolle über die erhobenen Daten. Auf syntaktischer Ebene werden die situationsbeschreibenden Aussagen sowie die Austauschsprache UserML entworfen. Auf semantischer Ebene werden die allgemeine Benutzermodell-Ontologie GUMO und die UBISWELT-Ontologie entwickelt. Ein mehrstufiger Konfliktlösungsmechanismus, der das Problem sich widersprechender Aussagen bearbeitet, wird zusammen mit einem webbasierten Benutzermodell-Service implementiert, sodass die Praxistauglichkeit und die Skalierbarkeit dieses Ansatzes an mehreren Beispielen gezeigt werden kann

Simplifying Authoring of Adaptive Hypermedia Structures in an eLearning Context

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.In an eLearning context, Adaptive Hypermedia Systems have been developed to improve learning success by increasing learner satisfaction, learning speed, and educational effectiveness. However, creating adaptive eLearning content and structures is still a time consuming and complicated task, in particular if individual lecturers are the intended authors. The way of thinking that is needed to create adaptive structures as well as the workflows is one that lecturers are unaccustomed to. The aim of this research project is to develop a concept that helps authors create adaptive eLearning content and structures, which focuses on its applicability for lecturers as intended authors. The research is targeted at the sequencing of content, which is one of the main aspects of adaptive eLearning. To achieve this aim the problem has been viewed from the author’s side. First, in terms of complexity of thoughts and threads, explanations about content structures have been found in storytelling theory. It also provides insights into how authors work, how story worlds are created, story lines intertwined, and how they are all merged together into one content. This helps us understand how non technical authors create content that is understandable and interesting for recipients. Second, the linear structure of learning content has been investigated to extract all the information that can be used for sequencing purposes. This investigation led to an approach that combines existing models to ease the authoring process for adaptive learning content by relating linear content from different authors and therefore defining interdependencies that delinearise the content structure. The technical feasibility of the authoring methods for adaptive learning content has been proven by the implementation of the essential parts in a research prototype and by authoring content from real life lectures with the prototype’s editor. The content and its adaptive structure obtained by using the concept of this research have been tested with the prototype’s player and monitor. Additionally, authoring aspects of the concept have been shown along with practical examples and workflows. Lastly, the interviewees who took part in expert interviews have agreed that the concept significantly reduces authoring complexity and potentially increases the amount of lecturers that are able to create adaptive content. The concept represents the common and traditional authoring process for linear content to a large extent. Compared to existing approaches the additional work needed is limited, and authors do not need to delve into adaptive structures or other authors’ content structures and didactic approaches