Mobile connections : curator's statement.

The Mobile Connections exhibition at the Futuresonic 2004 festival explored how mobile and locative media reconfigure social, cultural and information space. It looked beyond computing in its current form, towards the social and cultural possibilities opened by a new generation of networked, location-aware media. It sought an art of mobile communications: asking, are there any forms of expression that are intrinsic or unique to mobile and locative media

Boston Unplugged: Mapping a Wireless Future

Reviews a variety of models that would allow Boston to provide free or low-cost high-speed Internet access citywide. Outlines the benefits and mechanics of citywide WiFi, and lists factors to consider in designing, developing, and deploying a system

Trendswatch 2013: Back to the Future

TrendsWatch 2013 highlights six trends that CFM's staff and advisors believe are highly significant to museums and their communities, based on our scanning and analysis over the past year. For each trend, we provide a brief summary, list examples of how the trend is playing out in the world, comment on the trend's significance to society and to museums specifically, and suggest ways that museums might respond. We also provide links to additional readings. TrendsWatch provides valuable background and context for your museum's planning and implementation

Disconnected and unplugged: experiences of technology induced anxieties and tensions while traveling

The purpose of this study is to explore the experience of being disconnected while traveling for technologically savvy travelers. This paper will explore how new technologies ‘separate’ travelers from the physical and embodied travel experience, and how experiences and tensions caused by being disconnected or unplugged are negotiated. For this study, travelers’ experiences were elicited through a series of online interviews conducted primarily through email and Facebook. Pearce and Gretzel (2012)’s technology-induced tensions and recent literature on internet/technology addiction provide a conceptual framework for the analysis

Smart Finite State Devices: A Modeling Framework for Demand Response Technologies

We introduce and analyze Markov Decision Process (MDP) machines to model individual devices which are expected to participate in future demand-response markets on distribution grids. We differentiate devices into the following four types: (a) optional loads that can be shed, e.g. light dimming; (b) deferrable loads that can be delayed, e.g. dishwashers; (c) controllable loads with inertia, e.g. thermostatically-controlled loads, whose task is to maintain an auxiliary characteristic (temperature) within pre-defined margins; and (d) storage devices that can alternate between charging and generating. Our analysis of the devices seeks to find their optimal price-taking control strategy under a given stochastic model of the distribution market.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted IEEE CDC 201

Tinkering, Play-Based Learning and Children’s Funds of Knowledge in the Post-Digital : Responding to the Problem of Technology Integration in ECEC

This thesis addresses the well documented and ongoing problem of integrating digital technologies in Early Childhood Education and Care [ECEC] pedagogy, a problem which has been complicated in recent times by young children’s immersion in the digital as mode of social practice, a phenomenon increasingly referred to as the ‘post-digital’. Current understandings of the post-digital are sometimes described as messy, where it is claimed that borders between the digital and non-digital have now become so blurred that it is difficult to distinguish between where children’s digital and non-digital activities begin and end (Apperley et al., 2016; Jandrić et al., 2019; Pettersen, Arnseth, et al., 2022). The aim of this research was to examine the capacity of tinkering with unplugged technologies as a form of play-based learning to support children’s lived experiences in the post-digital in response to the problem of digital technology integration. This aim recognises that play-based learning is a significant pedagogy in ECEC and that tinkering affords opportunities for such play. The term unplugged technologies in this thesis refers to formerly working digital artefacts which no longer function such as decommissioned computer keyboards, computer mice, computer cases, as well as video gaming controllers. Unplugged technologies offer opportunities for children to engage with technologies that educators may view as more appropriate for learning because they can be hands-on rather than relying only on working digital technologies for learning. This thesis employed Actor-Network Theory [ANT] (Latour, 2005) as a model of social constructivism to work within an ontology that considers the material, non-material and humans equal in terms of capacity to exert agency. This theoretical perspective enabled the constitutive actants of the problem of digital integration to be examined through a methodology of participatory co-design where three educators collaborated with myself-as-researcher to design and implement stages of play-based learning in the form of tinkering with unplugged technologies. The findings suggest that educators identified a number of Learning Outcomes as per Australian national and state curricula arising from children’s tinkering with unplugged technologies. Through data analysis informed by ANT (Latour, 2005), children’s Learning Outcomes were traced to a range of actants which jointly co-constituted manifestations of children’s lived experiences in the post-digital. Manifestations were represented by children creating their own versions of technologies in the form of ‘iPad’, ‘computer’ and ‘gamer’. Manifestations of children’s lived experiences in the post-digital were examined in terms of their composite actants to illustrate how a variety of actants operate within a network of activity to shape a response to the problem of integration of digital learning opportunities into ECEC. Two actants were found to be more influential than others in the three manifestations of children’s lived experiences in the post-digital, these being play-based learning and children’s own funds of knowledge. Understanding the various actants in tinkering networks with unplugged technologies can alert educators to entry points for technology integration in ECEC, thereby providing a more helpful and stable starting point for educators than descriptions of children’s post-digital play as entangled and messy

Herding cats: observing live coding in the wild

After a momentous decade of live coding activities, this paper seeks to explore the practice with the aim of situating it in the history of contemporary arts and music. The article introduces several key points of investigation in live coding research and discusses some examples of how live coding practitioners engage with these points in their system design and performances. In the light of the extremely diverse manifestations of live coding activities, the problem of defining the practice is discussed, and the question raised whether live coding will actually be necessary as an independent category

Democracy Unplugged: Social Media, Regime Change, and Governmental Response in the Arab Spring

Article published in the Michigan State International Law Review