"The dearest of our possessions": applying Floridi's information privacy concept in models of information behavior and information literacy

This conceptual paper argues for the value of an approach to privacy in the digital information environment informed by Luciano Floridi's philosophy of information and information ethics. This approach involves achieving informational privacy, through the features of anonymity and obscurity, through an optimal balance of ontological frictions. This approach may be used to modify models for information behavior and for information literacy, giving them a fuller and more effective coverage of privacy issues in the infosphere. For information behavior, the Information Seeking and Communication Model, and the Information Grounds conception, are most appropriate for this purpose. For information literacy, the metaliteracy model, using a modification a privacy literacy framework, is most suitable

Mobile recommender apps with privacy management for accessible and usable technologies

The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing survey of the use of computers and mobile devices, interest in recommender apps and knowledge and concerns about privacy issues amongst English and Italian speaking disabled people. Participants were found to be regular users of computers and mobile devices for a range of applications. They were interested in recommender apps for household items, computer software and apps that met their accessibility and other requirements. They showed greater concerns about controlling access to personal data of different types than this data being retained by the computer or mobile device. They were also willing to make tradeoffs to improve device performance

Spatial groundings for meaningful symbols

The increasing availability of ontologies raises the need to establish relationships and make inferences across heterogeneous knowledge models. The approach proposed and supported by knowledge representation standards consists in establishing formal symbolic descriptions of a conceptualisation, which, it has been argued, lack grounding and are not expressive enough to allow to identify relations across separate ontologies. Ontology mapping approaches address this issue by exploiting structural or linguistic similarities between symbolic entities, which is costly, error-prone, and in most cases lack cognitive soundness. We argue that knowledge representation paradigms should have a better support for similarity and propose two distinct approaches to achieve it. We first present a representational approach which allows to ground symbolic ontologies by using Conceptual Spaces (CS), allowing for automated computation of similarities between instances across ontologies. An alternative approach is presented, which considers symbolic entities as contextual interpretations of processes in spacetime or Differences. By becoming a process of interpretation, symbols acquire the same status as other processes in the world and can be described (tagged) as well, which allows the bottom-up production of meaning

Framing student engagement in higher education

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Studies in Higher Education on 2011, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2011.598505Publishe