Context-Aware and Adaptable eLearning Systems

The full text file attached to this record contains a copy of the thesis without the authors publications attached. The list of publications that are attached to the complete thesis can be found on pages 6-7 in the thesis.This thesis proposed solutions to some shortcomings to current eLearning architectures. The proposed DeLC architecture supports context-aware and adaptable provision of eLearning services and electronic content. The architecture is fully distributed and integrates service-oriented development with agent technology. Central to this architecture is that a node is our unit of computation (known as eLearning node) which can have purely service-oriented architecture, agent-oriented architecture or mixed architecture. Three eLeaerning Nodes have been implemented in order to demonstrate the vitality of the DeLC concept. The Mobile eLearning Node uses a three-level communication network, called InfoStations network, supporting mobile service provision. The services, displayed on this node, are to be aware of its context, gather required learning material and adapted to the learner request. This is supported trough a multi-layered hybrid (service- and agent-oriented) architecture whose kernel is implemented as middleware. For testing of the middleware a simulation environment has been developed. In addition, the DeLC development approach is proposed. The second eLearning node has been implemented as Education Portal. The architecture of this node is poorly service-oriented and it adopts a client-server architecture. In the education portal, there are incorporated education services and system services, called engines. The electronic content is kept in Digital Libraries. Furthermore, in order to facilitate content creators in DeLC, the environment Selbo2 was developed. The environment allows for creating new content, editing available content, as well as generating educational units out of preexisting standardized elements. In the last two years, the portal is used in actual education at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Plovdiv. The third eLearning node, known as Agent Village, exhibits a purely agent-oriented architecture. The purpose of this node is to provide intelligent assistance to the services deployed on the Education Pportal. Currently, two kinds of assistants are implemented in the node - eTesting Assistants and Refactoring eLearning Environment (ReLE). A more complex architecture, known as Education Cluster, is presented in this thesis as well. The Education Cluster incorporates two eLearning nodes, namely the Education Portal and the Agent Village. eLearning services and intelligent agents interact in the cluster

Designing personalized video-based crossmedia informal learning environments beyond iTV

Tese de doutoramento, Informática (Engenharia Informática), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2014Video is a very rich medium, in cognitive and affective terms, to convey information and support learning and entertainment like no other medium, and TV is a privileged way to watch it. However, by being traditionally watched in a more experiential and passive cognitive mode, TV and video are limited in their capacity to fully support learning so important in the lifelong learning era where learning is taking place in a wide variety of contexts and locations that calls for flexible environments. TV and video are limited in their capacity to fully support learning but may induce viewers to engage in more reflective modes, that can be supported to some extent by their adequate design, in interactive contexts and augmented by other media and devices, in diverse situations. The inclusion of iTV that has been gaining increasing attention from researchers, and practitioners, in the last few years, as part of rich and flexible crossmedia environments brings new opportunities in this respect. This situation justifies our research main goal to efficiently and flexibly support users learning informal opportunities created in video-based crossmedia environments, taking into account the different cognitive modes, contexts of use and taking advantage of the diverse devices being used in order to have each device contributing with what it does best. In order to illustrate, explore and validate our research, the eiTV application was conceptualized, prototyped and evaluated. It is capable to create videobased crossmedia informal learning environments, created as additional information to the video being watched, initially via iTV. These environments are accessed from iTV, PC and mobile devices (the most commonly used in crossmedia scenarios), depending on the preferred or most adequate device in each context of use.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, SFRH/PROTEC/67727/2010, projeto UTA-Est/MAI/0010/2009

Towards a Phenomenological Theory of the Visceral in the Interactive Arts

This is a digitised version of a thesis that was deposited in the University Library. If you are the author and you have a query about this item please contact PEARL Admin ([email protected])Metadata merged with duplicate record (http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/2319) on 20.12.2016 by CS (TIS).This thesis explores the ways in which certain forms of interactive art may and do elicit visceral responses. The term "visceral" refers to the cardiovascular, respiratory, uro-genital and especially excretory systems that affect mind and body on a continuum of awareness. The "visceral" is mentioned in the field of interactive arts, but it remains systematically unexplored and undefined. Further, interactive artworks predominantly focus on the exteroceptive (stimuli from outside) rather than the interoceptive (stimuli arising within the body, especially the viscera) senses. The existentialist phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty forms the basis for explorations of the visceral dimension of mind/body. New approaches to understanding interactive art, design and the mind/body include: attunements to the world; intertwinings of mind/body, technology and world; and of being in the world. Each artwork within utilizes a variation of the phenomenological methods derived from Merl eau-Ponty's; these are discussed primarily in Chapters One and Three. Because subjective, first-person, experiences are a major aspect of a phenomenological approach, the academic writing is interspersed with subjective experiences of the author and others. This thesis balances facets of knowledge from diverse disciplines that account for visceral phenomena and subjective experience. Along with the textual exegesis, one major work of design and two major works of art were created. These are documented on the compact disc (CDROM) bound within. As an essential component of each artwork, new technological systems were created or co-created by the author. User surveys comprise Appendices Two, Three and Four, and are also online at: www. sfu. ca/-dgromala/thesis. To access the URL: login as , and use the password . Numerous talks, exhibitions and publications that directly relate to the thesis work is in Appendix One. This work begins with an introduction to Merleau-Ponty's ideas of flesh and reversibility. Chapter Two is the review of the literature, while Chapter Three is an explication of the hypothesis, an overview of the field, and a framing of the problem. Discussions of each artwork are in Chapter Four (The Meditation Chamber), Chapter Five (BioMorphic Typography) and Chapter Six (The MeatBook). Chapter Seven forms the conclusion. References to the documentation on the CD are found throughout the thesis, and italicized paragraphs provide an artistic context for each chapter

Your window-on-the-world: interactive television, the BBC and the second shift aesthetics of public service broadcasting

The impetus for this project was to consider how the digitalisation of television stood as an important moment to re-evaluate key concepts and debates within television studies. To this end, my focus is on public service broadcasting and television studies' textual tradition. I examine how linear models of the television text are challenged, usurped and at times reinforced by interactive television's emergent non-linear, personalisable forms. In so doing, I am concerned to analyse interactive television's textual structures in relation to the BBC's position as a public service broadcaster in the digital television age. Across these two concerns I aim to historicise the moment of digitalisation, drawing on longer positionings of television's technological and cultural form as a 'window-on-the-world'. An introduction is followed by section 1 of the thesis that includes a review of key literature in the field, focusing particularly on work on the 'text' of television studies. The chapters in section 1 mix this review with an historical argument that understand the current digital television era as one of 'excess', placing television at the boundaries of new and old media concerns that can be usefully understood through the presence of a dialectic between television's position as window-on-the-world and its emergent position as 'portal'. Section 1 demonstrates how this dialectic is called up by the prominence of discourses of 'choice' in new media practices and textualities and, more importantly, the debates about public service broadcasting's role in the digital age. As I go on to show in section 2, this dialectic evidences a tension between the 'imaginative journeys' television's window offers and the way in which these are then 'rationalised'. The second half of the thesis maps out emergent textual forms of interactive television by analysing the way choice and mobility are structured, providing a series of case studies in non-fiction television genres. Chapter 4 demonstrates the persistence of key discourses subsumed within the window-on-the-world metaphor in the formation and 'everydaying' of interactive television, elucidating key institutional and gendered tensions in the way these discourses are mobilised in the digital age. In turn, Chapter 5 connects the kinds of mobility promised by interactive television's window to longer historical practices of public institutions regulating spectator movement. Chapter 6 examines how television's window has been explicitly remediated by interactive television, placing it within the 'database' ontologies of computing. Finally Chapter 7 demonstrates the way in which television's window increasingly comes to function as a portal through which to access digital media spaces, such as the Internet. Across the chapters I am concerned to connect the textual and discursive form of each case study to the academic debates and public service concerns of the various applications' generic identity. Although I am interested in the challenges television's digitalisation poses to both public service broadcasting and traditional television studies approaches to the text, a more important motivation has been to re-affirm the role of both in the digital television landscape. Thus through close textual analysis that connects aesthetics with production and regulation, the thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of television studies and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, as an 'old media' becomes a 'new' one