How children’s navigation on digital platforms challenges child welfare assessments

When a child is placed in public care, digital platforms create an arena for the child and parents to stay updated on each other’s lives while living apart. However, contact through digital platforms can be unpredictable for some children, resulting in unintended adverse consequences and undermining the placement’s stability. In this context, it is not uncommon for children and parents to have contact through social media or other digital platforms, also known as ‘virtual visitation’. To ensure that restrictions on contact will provide the child with the necessary protection, knowing the child’s navigation and access to digital platforms may provide an understanding of potential contact forms and the need for protection. Based on an online questionnaire addressed to Child Welfare Services in Norway, this study reports on 196 child welfare workers’ views as to what extent children’s navigation on digital platforms is included as part of the professional assessment of the regulation of visitation rights between a child and his or her parents after a care order is issued. The findings indicate a minimal consideration of the child’s access to digital media and their navigation on social media when assessing the regulation of contact rights. The findings from this study highlight the need for a new understanding of the possible connection between virtual and physical visitations after a care order is issued. Protecting children involves professionals understanding and assessing new communication and socialization patterns in which children participate. It is not merely a question of learning how to use digital platforms; it is also a question of professional development and new ways of working with children in public care when meetings between people increasingly take place digitally.publishedVersio

Through a glass darkly: a case for the study of virtual space

This paper begins to examine the similarities and differences between virtual space and real space, as taken from anarchitectural (as opposed to a biological, psychological, geographic, philosophical or information theoretic)standpoint. It continues by introducing a number of criteria, suggested by the authors as being necessary for virtualspace to be used in a manner consistent with our experience of real space. Finally, it concludes by suggesting apedagogical framework for the benefits and associated learning outcomes of the study and examination of thisrelationship. This is accompanied by examples of recent student work, which set out to investigate this relationship

Through a glass darkly: a case for the study of virtual space

This paper begins to examine the similarities and differences between virtual space and real space, as taken from anarchitectural (as opposed to a biological, psychological, geographic, philosophical or information theoretic)standpoint. It continues by introducing a number of criteria, suggested by the authors as being necessary for virtualspace to be used in a manner consistent with our experience of real space. Finally, it concludes by suggesting apedagogical framework for the benefits and associated learning outcomes of the study and examination of thisrelationship. This is accompanied by examples of recent student work, which set out to investigate this relationship

Online Permaculture Resources: An Evaluation of a Selected Sample

As a newly-emerging, sustainable approach to landscape management, permaculture seeks to integrate knowledge from several disciplines into a holistic system with emphasis on ecological and social responsibility. Online resources on permaculture appear to represent a promising direction in the movement by supplementing existing printed sources, serving to update and diversify existing content, and increasing access to permaculture information and praxis among the general public. This study evaluated a sample of online resources on permaculture using a framework of parameters reflecting website usability and content quality. Best practice for website usability, as well as diversity of information and applicability, was addressed. The evaluation revealed, overall, good quality and usability in the majority of cases, and suggests a strong online presence among the existing permaculture community, and accessible support for those with an interest in joining the movement

Leveraging Personal Navigation Assistant Systems Using Automated Social Media Traffic Reporting

Modern urbanization is demanding smarter technologies to improve a variety of applications in intelligent transportation systems to relieve the increasing amount of vehicular traffic congestion and incidents. Existing incident detection techniques are limited to the use of sensors in the transportation network and hang on human-inputs. Despite of its data abundance, social media is not well-exploited in such context. In this paper, we develop an automated traffic alert system based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) that filters this flood of information and extract important traffic-related bullets. To this end, we employ the fine-tuning Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language embedding model to filter the related traffic information from social media. Then, we apply a question-answering model to extract necessary information characterizing the report event such as its exact location, occurrence time, and nature of the events. We demonstrate the adopted NLP approaches outperform other existing approach and, after effectively training them, we focus on real-world situation and show how the developed approach can, in real-time, extract traffic-related information and automatically convert them into alerts for navigation assistance applications such as navigation apps.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Technology Engineering Management Society International Conference (TEMSCON'20), Metro Detroit, Michigan (USA

Tourism and the smartphone app: capabilities, emerging practice and scope in the travel domain.

Based on its advanced computing capabilities and ubiquity, the smartphone has rapidly been adopted as a tourism travel tool.With a growing number of users and a wide varietyof applications emerging, the smartphone is fundamentally altering our current use and understanding of the transport network and tourism travel. Based on a review of smartphone apps, this article evaluates the current functionalities used in the domestic tourism travel domain and highlights where the next major developments lie. Then, at a more conceptual level, the article analyses how the smartphone mediates tourism travel and the role it might play in more collaborative and dynamic travel decisions to facilitate sustainable travel. Some emerging research challenges are discussed

Culture or social interaction? A study of influential factors on weblog design

The importance of blogs and social networking as medium of interactions had gain substantial popularity in mainstream media. Such popularity is due to blogs timely publication, ease of use and wide availability. Blogs hypertext and hyperlinks spread information and influence through an underlying social network. Taking into consideration that past studies on web design have focused on cultural traits on design elements, this paper aims to analyse the patterns on blog design from the perspectives of social influence and interactions. Examining design patterns from five networks of blogs using content analysis method, the results show that design of blogs in an online network shares similar elements and the pattern is different from one network to the other

On the evolution of hyperlinking

Across time, the hyperlink object has supported different applications and studies. This is one perspective on the evolution of the hyperlinking concept, its context and related behaviors. Through a spectrum of hyperlinking applications and practices, the article contrasts the status quo with its related, broader, conceptual roots; it also bridges to some theorized and prototyped hyperlink variations, namely "stigmergic hyperlinks", to make the case that the ubiquitousness of some objects and certain usage patterns can obfuscate opportunities to (re)think them. In trying to contribute an answer to "what has the common hyperlink (such an apparently simple object) done to society, and what has society done to it?", the article identifies situations that have become so embedded in the daily routine, that it is now hard to think of hyperlinking alternatives.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio