2,888 research outputs found
Breaking Virtual Barriers : Investigating Virtual Reality for Enhanced Educational Engagement
Virtual reality (VR) is an innovative technology that has regained popularity in recent years. In the field of education, VR has been introduced as a tool to enhance learning experiences. This thesis presents an exploration of how VR is used from the context of educators and learners. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveying and interviewing educators, and conducting empirical studies to examine engagement, usability, and user behaviour within VR. The results revealed educators are interested in using VR for a wide range of scenarios, including thought exercises, virtual field trips, and simulations. However, they face several barriers to incorporating VR into their practice, such as cost, lack of training, and technical challenges. A subsequent study found that virtual reality can no longer be assumed to be more engaging than desktop equivalents. This empirical study showed that engagement levels were similar in both VR and non-VR environments, suggesting that the novelty effect of VR may be less pronounced than previously assumed. A study against a VR mind mapping artifact, VERITAS, demonstrated that complex interactions are possible on low-cost VR devices, making VR accessible to educators and students. The analysis of user behaviour within this VR artifact showed that quantifiable strategies emerge, contributing to the understanding of how to design for collaborative VR experiences. This thesis provides insights into how the end-users in the education space perceive and use VR. The findings suggest that while educators are interested in using VR, they face barriers to adoption. The research highlights the need to design VR experiences, with understanding of existing pedagogy, that are engaging with careful thought applied to complex interactions, particularly for collaborative experiences. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential of VR in education and provides recommendations for educators and designers to enhance learning experiences using VR
Metadata as a Methodological Commons: From Aboutness Description to Cognitive Modeling
ABSTRACTMetadata is data about data, which is generated mainly for resources organization and description, facilitating finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining information①. With the advancement of technologies, the acquisition of metadata has gradually become a critical step in data modeling and function operation, which leads to the formation of its methodological commons. A series of general operations has been developed to achieve structured description, semantic encoding and machine-understandable information, including entity definition, relation description, object analysis, attribute extraction, ontology modeling, data cleaning, disambiguation, alignment, mapping, relating, enriching, importing, exporting, service implementation, registry and discovery, monitoring etc. Those operations are not only necessary elements in semantic technologies (including linked data) and knowledge graph technology, but has also developed into the common operation and primary strategy in building independent and knowledge-based information systems.In this paper, a series of metadata-related methods are collectively referred to as ‘metadata methodological commons’, which has a lot of best practices reflected in the various standard specifications of the Semantic Web. In the future construction of a multi-modal metaverse based on Web 3.0, it shall play an important role, for example, in building digital twins through adopting knowledge models, or supporting the modeling of the entire virtual world, etc. Manual-based description and coding obviously cannot adapted to the UGC (User Generated Contents) and AIGC (AI Generated Contents)-based content production in the metaverse era. The automatic processing of semantic formalization must be considered as a sure way to adapt metadata methodological commons to meet the future needs of AI era
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Design for Accessible Collaborative Engagement: Making online synchronous collaborative learning more accessible for students with sensory impairments.
This thesis looks at the accessibility of collaborative learning and the barriers to engagement experienced by blind/visually impaired (BVI) students and deaf/hard of hearing (DHH) students. It focuses specifically on online synchronous collaborative learning after establishing that this format presented the greatest barriers, and that these student groups were not engaging.
Taking a design-based research (DBR) approach, five studies were undertaken to identify these barriers and determine potential interventions. The product of the research, a result of collaborative design by the participants in the study, is a framework for accessible collaborative engagement represented in the form of an interactive website model, the Model for Accessible Collaborative Engagement (MACE).
The studies involved representatives of all stakeholders in the collaborative learning process at the institution (the Open University): students, tutors, modules teams, academics, support staff, and the student union Disabled Students Group. These studies took the form of an online survey of 327 students, 10 interviews with staff and students, 6 staff workshops and a collaborative design focus group. With significant representation of the target groups (BVI and DHH) in all studies, and taking an iterative approach to the design, evaluation and construction of the framework model, the studies established that barriers existed in four main categories covering different themes:
1. Communications: aural, visual, screen reading and navigation, text and captioning, lip reading and non-verbal communications, interpretation and third-party communications, mode control, and synchronisation.
2. Emotional and Social Factors: familiarisation, support networks, self-advocacy, opting out, cognitive load, and stress and anxiety.
3. Provisioning and Technical Factors: dissemination, speed and pacing of sessions, staff training, participation control, group size, technical provisioning, and recordings.
4. Activity and Session Design: Volume of materials, advance materials, accessible materials, accessible activities, and session formats.
Interventions were designed that could reduce the barriers in each of these categories and themes by adjustments and changes from both the student and institutional standpoints. MACE is designed to be utilised by both students and staff to provide guidance and suggestions on how to identify and acknowledge these barriers and implement interventions to reduce them.
This research represents an original and essential contribution to the field of investigation. As well as informing future research inquiry, the model can be used by all participants and stakeholders in online collaborative learning to help reduce barriers for BVI and DHH students and improve inclusivity in synchronous online events
Reframing museum epistemology for the information age: a discursive design approach to revealing complexity
This practice-based research inquiry examines the impact of an epistemic shift, brought about by the dawning of the information age and advances in networked communication technologies, on physical knowledge institutions - focusing on museums. The research charts adapting knowledge schemas used in museum knowledge organisation and discusses the potential for a new knowledge schema, the network, to establish a new epistemology for museums that reflects contemporary hyperlinked and networked knowledge. The research investigates the potential for networked and shared virtual reality spaces to reveal new ‘knowledge monuments’ reflecting the epistemic values of the network society and the space of flows.
The central practice for this thesis focuses on two main elements. The first is applying networks and visual complexity to reveal multi-linearity and adapting perspectives in relational knowledge networks. This concept was explored through two discursive design projects, the Museum Collection Engine, which uses data visualisation, cloud data, and image recognition within an immersive projection dome to create a dynamic and searchable museum collection that returns new and interlinking constellations of museum objects and knowledge. The second discursive design project was Shared Pasts: Decoding Complexity, an AR app with a unique ‘anti-personalisation’ recommendation system designed to reveal complex narratives around historic objects and places. The second element is folksonomy and co-design in developing new community-focused archives using the community's language to build the dataset and socially tagged metadata. This was tested by developing two discursive prototypes, Women Reclaiming AI and Sanctuary Stories
Handbook Transdisciplinary Learning
What is transdisciplinarity - and what are its methods? How does a living lab work? What is the purpose of citizen science, student-organized teaching and cooperative education? This handbook unpacks key terms and concepts to describe the range of transdisciplinary learning in the context of academic education. Transdisciplinary learning turns out to be a comprehensive innovation process in response to the major global challenges such as climate change, urbanization or migration. A reference work for students, lecturers, scientists, and anyone wanting to understand the profound changes in higher education
Mixed Reality Interfaces for Augmented Text and Speech
While technology plays a vital role in human communication, there still remain many significant challenges when using them in everyday life. Modern computing technologies, such as smartphones, offer convenient and swift access to information, facilitating tasks like reading documents or communicating with friends. However, these tools frequently lack adaptability, become distracting, consume excessive time, and impede interactions with people and contextual information. Furthermore, they often require numerous steps and significant time investment to gather pertinent information. We want to explore an efficient process of contextual information gathering for mixed reality (MR) interfaces that provide information directly in the user’s view. This approach allows for a seamless and flexible transition between language and subsequent contextual references, without disrupting the flow of communication. ’Augmented Language’ can be defined as the integration of language and communication with mixed reality to enhance, transform, or manipulate language-related aspects and various forms of linguistic augmentations (such as annotation/referencing, aiding social interactions, translation, localization, etc.). In this thesis, our broad objective is to explore mixed reality interfaces and their potential to enhance augmented language, particularly in the domains of speech and text. Our aim is to create interfaces that offer a more natural, generalizable, on-demand, and real-time experience of accessing contextually relevant information and providing adaptive interactions. To better address this broader objective, we systematically break it down to focus on two instances of augmented language. First, enhancing augmented conversation to support on-the-fly, co-located in-person conversations using embedded references. And second, enhancing digital and physical documents using MR to provide on-demand reading support in the form of different summarization techniques. To examine the effectiveness of these speech and text interfaces, we conducted two studies in which we asked the participants to evaluate our system prototype in different use cases. The exploratory usability study for the first exploration confirms that our system decreases distraction and friction in conversation compared to smartphone search while providing highly useful and relevant information. For the second project, we conducted an exploratory design workshop to identify categories of document enhancements. We later conducted a user study with a mixed-reality prototype to highlight five board themes to discuss the benefits of MR document enhancement
Dual voices, hybrid identities: the recontextualization of research in digital dissemination scientific discourse
The current demands placed on scientists to increase public awareness of their findings involves recontextualizing highly technical research to be understood by diversified audiences. In the present study, a corpus of 20 online digests drawn from the British Psychological Society website, which are condensed versions of recently published research articles, is quantitatively and qualitatively explored in terms of the (meta)discoursal features that the scriptwriter uses to foster comprehensibility, project a credible and authoritative voice and enhance engagement with their audience, as a way to bridge the existent knowledge asymmetries. The analysis revealed the existence of discoursal and pragmatic, as well as some multimodal, resources (i.e. code glosses, hyperlinking, evidentials, engagements markers) used by the scriptwriters to project a dual voice which aligns both with the expert and with the diversified audience, thus projecting a hybrid authorial identity
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