Not driving alone: Commuting in the Twenty-first century

This paper investigates recent commuting trends in American workers. Unlike most studies of commuting that rely on Census data, this study utilizes the unique American Time Use Survey to detail the complex commuting patterns of modern-day workers. The data confirm what has been suspected, that incidence of driving alone has decreased substantially in recent years while carpooling has rebounded. The results from the multi-nominal logistic estimation of workers' commuting choices yield support for both the traditional economic determinants as well as for the newer, socio-economic factors. In addition to the cost savings, many commuters appear to value the social aspect of carpooling. Surprisingly, there is little evidence that the need for autonomy plays much of a factor in explaining workerÕs choice of the journey to work. The estimated short-run elasticity of carpooling with respect to real gas prices appears to be quite high and largely accounts for the significant decline in the incidence of driving alone.Ride sharing, carpooling, commuting, gasoline process, social capital

Using whole body technologies to map the mobility of older adults

In this paper we describe the preliminary findings of two-year study that attempted to map the mobility of our oldest citizens using activity monitoring and location-aware technologies. We recruited a group of 100 adults aged between 72 and 92 years old, drawn from a 25 year longitudinal cohort, and collected lifestyle, nutrition, health and social engagement data. We also fitted a subset of the group with accelerometers and location-based tracking devices and asked them to wear these for a week in order that we could generate accurate, live mobility data and assess these data against self-reports. We are now using this data to describe the relationship between mobility, activity and physical and mental well-being, but in this preliminary paper, we outline some of the main challenges we encountered when trying to use these ‘whole body’ technologies to determine mobility

Exploring narrative presentation for large multimodal lifelog collections through card sorting

Using lifelogging tools, personal digital artifacts are collected continuously and passively throughout each day. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our life history provides novel opportunities for the creation of digital life narratives. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections create barriers to achieving this. Nine participants engaged in a card-sorting activity designed to explore practices of content reduction and presentation for narrative composition. We found the visual modalities to be most fluent in communicating experience with other modalities serving to support them and that the users employed the salient themes of the story to organise, arrange and facilitate filtering of the content

Wimps, dorks, and reluctant readers: Redefining literacy in multimodal middle grade diary books

Since the release of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the multimodal, middle-grade diary book has gained popularity. The series features “handwritten,” journal entries and drawings and has elicited many imitators, the most prominent of which is Rachel Renee Russell’s Dork Diaries. While the diary form is not new to children’s literature, these series reinvent the established conventions through drawings and supplementary online environments. Both series are routinely identified as for reluctant readers; however, their diversity of form actually leads to complex reader engagement. My purpose is to refute the idea that the books are useful only as precursors to “better” books. I will do this by exploring the popularity of these books, by examining the types of reading the books ask for, and by showing how they encourage innovative writing experiences. Ultimately, the series demonstrate how texts for child readers are changing to fit a dynamic literacy landscape

Taking video cameras into the classroom.

Research into the communication and interactions in classrooms need to take the multimodal nature of classrooms into account. Video cameras can capture the dynamics of teaching and learning, but the use of videos for research purposes needs to be well thought through in order to accommodate the challenges this tool holds. This article refers to three research projects where videos were used to generate data. It is argued that videos allow the researcher to hone in on the micro-details and, in contrast to other data generation tools, allows researchers who were not present at the time to view what has been witnessed. A video recording is a data source but not data by itself and the information that is discerned from a video is framed and shaped by the research paradigm and the questions asked

Digitalized story making in the classroom : a social semiotic perspective on gender, multimodality and learning

The article takes the case of pupils in a fifth-year primary school class (10-11 years old) who use text and pictures in their creative writing on the classroom computers. The study confirms what the research literature indicates, that girls show more interest than boys in writing and storytelling, while boys show greater interest than girls in using computer technology. Social semiotics is used as a theoretical basis for analysing the connection between these differences and relating them to what girls and boys learn. In a social semiotic perspective, learning can be related to the experience of the difference between what we intend to express and what we actually manage to express or mean. In the article, it is argued that social semiotics provides a theoretical basis for asserting that the girls in this case learn more than the boys because they associate themselves with the signs they use through more choices than the boys. The girls, we could say, put their own mark on the signs by coding or creating them themselves while the boys tend more to choose ready-made signs. Ready-made signs require fewer choices than the signs we make or code ourselves. Fewer choices means less experience of the difference between what we wish to mean and what we actually mean, and hence less learning. A pedagogical consequence of this is that boys may be better served by having online work with multimodality of expression organised in such a way that it combines as far as possible the use of ready-made signs with signs they code or create themselves