Mobile learning scenarios in language teaching: perceptions of vocational and professional education students

Mobile devices play a significant role in society, in general, and a very limited one at the different levels of education. Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices allows learning to occur anywhere, (and at) anytime. These powerful technological devices can enhance the teaching and learning processes by helping to promote collaborative and individual learning and broadening the boundaries of the classroom to different contexts of learning. Many students have mobile devices and their applications can provide access to learning outside the classroom, for greater flexibility and more dynamic learning. In this sense, the articulation of technological and methodological efforts allowed us to create learning scenarios supported by the devices that students take to the classroom (BYOD), and use them to motivate and involve students in meaningful learning. These devices offer the advantage of integrating various technologies in the curricular contents, such as in foreign and mother language courses, representing a set of possibilities of ubiquity that can have great impact on the learning process. Thus, we developed strategies with vocational and educational students’ methodologies, such as augmented reality, project-based learning, game-based learning, collaborative learning and gamification. In this text, we present the results of two mobile learning studies in teaching French as a foreign language (to 18-23 year-old-students) and Portuguese language, as a mother tongue (to 15-19 year-old-students), in vocational education, implemented as a mediation tool in education to promote the construction of learning and development of significant skills of collaborative work. From the data collection, through a questionnaire, with open and closed questions, we highlight the favorable perception of the students to the integration of mobile devices in learning, and the recognition of the benefits of the teaching strategies used throughout the year, in the increase of curricular learning.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Immersive Virtual-Reality System for Aircraft Maintenance Education: A Case Study

Aircraft maintenance is a highly relevant procedure in many industries, yet obtaining qualified personnel to carry it out is a difficult task. Training in such techniques is complex and requires access to facilities and materials that are not readily available. Virtual reality can be a tool to improve this situation. This paper presents the whole process of design, development, and evaluation of a virtual environment that allows users to perform some of the main tasks required in aircraft maintenance after landing or for take-off. By following a user-centered design methodology and the Octalysis framework to apply motivation and engagement techniques, a gamified virtual environment was developed that allows the user to practice specific aircraft maintenance techniques. The environment was tested by users of different profiles who answered questionnaires to evaluate the perceived gamification, usability, and the feeling of sickness from the experience. The analysis of the data corroborates the good performance of the VR environment in these fields.Research was supported by the e-DIPLOMA project (project number 101061424), funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Luxury Fashion in Metaverse: What are the strategies employed by fashion brands in virtual worlds?

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Driven Marketing, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceThe metaverse, a platform bridging the real and virtual worlds, has recently emerged as an attractive business avenue, particularly for the fashion industry. Fashion brands are increasingly exploring the metaverse as a novel marketing platform to connect with younger audiences. However, the concept of the metaverse lacks consensus, and there is limited academic research on its impact on fashion brands' marketing strategies and immersive brand experiences. To address these gaps, this study employs a qualitative approach, utilizing immersive netnographic research conducted on gaming and virtual platforms to firsthand observe luxury brands' strategies. The analysis reveals three key strategies employed by fashion brands in the metaverse. Firstly, luxury brands establish their own virtual spaces within gaming platforms and virtual worlds to showcase their products and engage consumers. Secondly, brands strive to captivate and involve consumers through highly immersive experiences. Lastly, economic transactions within the metaverse predominantly rely on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), enabling brands to sell digital assets and maintain exclusivity. This study not only identifies the primary strategies of fashion brands but also serves as a model for future research endeavors aiming to conduct immersive netnographic studies in this evolving landscape

Evaluación de aplicaciones educativas de AR con estudiantes adultos

There is a growing interest in the educational applications of Augmented Reality (AR). While most applications of these technologies have been examined in the context of children education, our knowledge about their usefulness in adult education is deficient and particularly more in the category of Location-Based Augmented Reality (LBMAR) games, so the aim of this thesis is to examine the opinions of adult learners (young, middle-aged and elderly) about one particular LBMAR game, the “Ingress”. The main problems addressed by this research comprise questions relating to the usefulness of some key technological components of AR in education (secondarily) and to aspects of training adults by using AR (primarily). As concerns the technological aspects, i.e. "which one of the three types of AR (marker-based, markerless, location-based) is more often associated with naturalistic approaches and what are their relative advantages?”, this research showed that naturalistic approaches applied to marker-based AR enhance active participation in virtual environments, motivate learners, promote personal involvement in conquering new information, offer different perspectives of the content and arouse interest for knowledge. In the case of markerless AR, naturalistic designs foster participants’ collaboration in games, enhance interactivity, offer panoramic views, visualization, and the possibility to examine the role of visual controls. Moreover, naturalistic approaches applied to location-based AR are suitable for designing multidisciplinary applications, can be used for training and have the possibility to be designed so as to account for locality and context. The fact that, as appears from the peer-reviewed literature that was examined, the location-based AR technologies are more appropriate for education and for smartphones, hints that a deeper examination of their potential usefulness for education (and for adult education in particular) might be interesting. As concerns the educational aspects, which also constitute the main focus of the thesis, these focus on the exploration of the usefulness of the LBMAR game “Ingress” in adult education, by answering two intertwined questions: a) how to assess opinions of adult learners about the LBMAR game “Ingress”? and b) what do adult learners think about this game and how do they perceive its features? Providing answers to these questions is tantamount to receiving adequate results from quantitative and qualitative empirical research which would be designed so as to explore their opinions, views and attitudes with respect to this LBMAR game. Hence, 45 adult persons from Greece, aged 20 to 62,cooperated as subjects of this research. They followed a short introductory informal training (on AR, VR, MAR and the games that are relevant to these technologies) by the researcher of this thesis and were subsequently given the instructions of how to use “Ingress” on a smartphone. The quantitative research was carried out before and after training and all trainees participated by filling 31 Likert-type closed questions before and after training. The qualitative research was based on the analysis of their responses to two different sets of open-ended questions. The first set consisted in 5 such questions to which answered 24 participants and the second set had 2 broader questions to which responded 36 participants. This research showed the advantages for adult education of integrating the ARCS model into the learning phase of an LBMAR game. Specifically, it was shown that using Keller’s widely known “ARCS model” (Attention – Relevance – Confidence - Satisfaction) enabled the classification of users’ responses with respect to their interaction with the game and is therefore useful in evaluating adult education with LBMAR games. The players’ responses did not change linearly with their age and the training has had different impact on each age group of learners. Also, statistical analyses proved that training increased the scores of the factors of ARCS model. Other results of this research showed that those over 36 years old focused more on the facts that the play of “Ingress” is primarily a geographical game and its scenario reflects interesting discussions about the evolution of humanity. Participants in the age groups 20–35 and >52 agreed that the game does not have idle phases, that it combines excitement with insecurity, and that it is pleasant to play locally a game of planetary proportions.Another age-related observation concerned the answers to the question (“How do you feel when you endow the geographical space with personal preferences?”) between age groups with age groups agreeing in pairs: the first two age groups (20–30) and (30–40) agreed more than with the last two (40–50) and (50–60). Yet, in question “Do you think that the game offers opportunities for learning and teaching geography, building on your previous geographical knowledge?” , there was an overlap in the responses of participants among age groups. As for the first question, the most critical concept was: “the users feel a kind of nostalgia”, followed by the concept “the users consider portals as personal creations”. In the case of the second question, the most critical concept was that the participants believe that the game offers entirely new opportunities for education in geography, compared with their previous experiences. This fosters an evidence of constructivist approaches to adult education and, also, relevance of some other prominent theories of adult education such as humanism. Methodologically, this research it was shown that content analysis is a valuable method for exploring opinions and attitudes of adult users towards MAR games and Jaccard indices can be used to quantitatively explore themes emerging from content analysis. Content analysis was performed on the users’ responses qualitatively in order to identify characteristic sentences expressing attitudes and opinions. For the quantitative assessment of similarities between responses for each question and subconcept, the Jaccard similarity index was calculated pair-wise for every pair of participants. In addition to the Jaccard indices and furthering the scope of new methods for content analysis, this thesis shows how to use Social Network Analysis (SNA) to model concept maps, thus opening up excellent opportunities to create visualizations of concepts and their inter-relationships. Quantitative aspects of SNA analysis (i.e. by using radial centrality and information centrality) provide mechanisms suitable to measure internal relationships in concept maps (in addition to visual inspection) that would not otherwise be visible. Using SNA enabled the classification of users’ responses with respect to their interaction with the game and therefore was a fruitful approach for education that involves MAR games. Furthermore, with this novelty, it is shown how texts derived from interviews or from responses to open questions by different individuals can be analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively with SNA. Concluding, this research has produced novelties at both the educational and the methodological levels. As concerns adult education, it was shown that i) LBMAR games are suitable for it, ii) adult education about them can be enhanced by following Keller’s ARCS model, iii) perception and satisfaction of adult learners depends on age, and iv) certain theories of adult education (i.e. constructivism and humanism) can be relevant when adult learners use LBMAR games such as “Ingress”. As concerns methods of educational research, this research suggested entirely new methods, for first time ever, for analyzing data that are derived from trainees' responses to open questions. These new methods are content analysis of the participants’ responses with the use of Jaccard indices and methods of SNA and can have a wider applicability to educational research.Existe un creciente interés por las aplicaciones educativas de la Realidad Aumentada (RA). Mientras que la mayoría de las aplicaciones de estas tecnologías se han examinado en el contexto de la educación infantil, nuestro conocimiento sobre su utilidad en la educación de adultos es deficiente y, en particular, más en la categoría de juegos de Realidad Aumentada Basada en la Localización (LBMAR), por lo que el objetivo de esta tesis es examinar las opiniones de los estudiantes adultos (jóvenes, de mediana edad y mayores) sobre un juego LBMAR, el "Ingress". Los principales problemas que aborda esta investigación comprenden cuestiones relacionadas con la utilidad de algunos componentes tecnológicos de la RA en la educación (secundariamente) y con aspectos de la formación de adultos mediante el uso de la RA (principalmente). En cuanto a los aspectos tecnológicos, es decir "¿cuál de los tres tipos de RA (basada en marcadores, sin marcadores, basada en la localización) se asocia más a los enfoques naturalistas y cuáles son sus ventajas relativas?", esta investigación demostró que los enfoques naturalistas aplicados a la RA basada en marcadores potencian la participación activa en entornos virtuales, motivan a los alumnos, promueven la implicación personal en la conquista de nueva información, ofrecen diferentes perspectivas del contenido y despiertan el interés por el conocimiento. En el caso de la RA sin marcadores, los diseños naturalistas fomentan la colaboración de los participantes en los juegos, mejoran la interactividad, ofrecen vistas panorámicas, visualización y la posibilidad de examinar los controles visuales. Además, los enfoques naturalistas aplicados a la RA basada en la localización son adecuados para el diseño de aplicaciones multidisciplinares, pueden utilizarse para la formación y tienen la posibilidad de diseñarse teniendo en cuenta la localidad y el contexto. El hecho de que, como se desprende de la literatura revisada por pares que se examinó, las tecnologías de RA basadas en la localización son más apropiadas para la educación y para los teléfonos smartphones, sugiere que podría ser interesante un examen más profundo de su utilidad potencial para la educación (y para la educación de adultos en particular). En cuanto a los aspectos educativos, que también constituyen el foco principal de la tesis, éstos se centran en la exploración de la utilidad del juego LBMAR "Ingress" en la educación de adultos, respondiendo a dos preguntas entrelazadas: a) ¿cómo evaluar las opiniones de los alumnos adultos sobre el juego LBMAR "Ingress"? y b) ¿qué piensan los alumnos adultos sobre este juego y cómo perciben sus características? Dar respuesta a estas preguntas equivale a recibir resultados adecuados de una investigación empírica, cuantitativa y cualitativa, que se diseñaría para explorar sus opiniones, puntos de vista y actitudes con respecto a este juego LBMAR. Por lo tanto, 45 personas adultas de Grecia, con edades entre 20 y 62 años, colaboraron como sujetos de esta investigación. Siguieron una breve formación informal introductoria por parte del investigador de esta tesis (sobre RA, realidad virtual, RA móvil, y sobre los juegos relacionados con estas tecnologías) y posteriormente se les dieron las instrucciones de cómo utilizar "Ingress" en un smartphone. La investigación cuantitativa se llevó a cabo antes y después de la formación y todos los alumnos participaron respondiendo a 31 preguntas cerradas del tipo Likert antes y después de la formación. La investigación cualitativa se basó en el análisis de sus respuestas a dos conjuntos diferentes de preguntas abiertas. El primer conjunto constaba de 5 preguntas de este tipo (a las que respondieron 24 participantes) y el segundo conjunto tenía 2 preguntas más amplias, a las que respondieron 36 participantes. La investigación cuantitativa mostró las ventajas para la educación de adultos de integrar el modelo ARCS en la fase de aprendizaje de un juego LBMAR. En concreto, se demostró que la utilización del conocido "modelo ARCS" de Keller (Atención - Relevancia - Confianza - Satisfacción) permitió clasificar las respuestas de los usuarios con respecto a sus interacciones con el juego y, también, es útil para evaluar la educación de adultos con juegos LBMAR. Las respuestas de los jugadores no cambiaron linealmente con su edad y el entrenamiento ha tenido un impacto diferente en cada grupo de edad de los alumnos. Además, los análisis estadísticos demostraron que el entrenamiento aumentó las puntuaciones de los factores del modelo ARCS. Otros resultados de esta investigación mostraron que los mayores de 36 años se centraron más en el hecho de que el juego "Ingress" es principalmente un juego geográfico y su escenario refleja interesantes debates sobre la evolución de la humanidad. Las opiniones de los participantes de los grupos de edad de 20-35 y >52 coincidieron en que el juego no tiene fases ociosas, que combina la emoción con la inseguridad y que es agradable jugar a nivel local a un juego de proporciones planetarias. Otra observación relacionada con la edad se refería a las respuestas a la pregunta ("¿Cómo te sientes cuando dotas al espacio geográfico de preferencias personales?") entre grupos de edad que coincidían: los dos primeros grupos de edad (20-30) y (30-40) estaban más de acuerdo que los dos últimos (40-50) y (50-60). Sin embargo, en la pregunta "¿Crees que el juego ofrece oportunidades para aprender y enseñar geografía, aprovechando tus conocimientos geográficos previos?" hubo un solapamiento en las respuestas de los participantes entre los grupos de edad. En cuanto a la primera pregunta, el concepto más crítico fue: "los usuarios sienten una especie de nostalgia", seguido del concepto "los usuarios consideran los portales como creaciones personales". En el caso de la segunda pregunta, el concepto más crítico fue que los participantes creen que el juego ofrece oportunidades totalmente nuevas para la educación en geografía en comparación con sus experiencias anteriores. Esto fomenta una evidencia de los enfoques constructivistas de la educación de adultos y, también, la relevancia de algunas otras teorías prominentes de la educación de adultos, como el humanismo. Metodológicamente, esta investigación demostró también que el análisis de contenido es un método valioso para explorar las opiniones y actitudes de los usuarios adultos hacia los juegos MAR y los índices de Jaccard pueden utilizarse para explorar cuantitativamente los temas que surgen del análisis de contenido. El análisis de contenido se realizó sobre las respuestas de los usuarios de forma cualitativa para identificar las frases características que expresan actitudes y opiniones. Para la evaluación cuantitativa de las similitudes entre las respuestas de cada pregunta y subconcepto, se calculó el índice de similitud de Jaccard por parejas para cada par de participantes. Además de los índices de Jaccard y de ampliar el alcance de los nuevos métodos de análisis de contenido, esta tesis muestra cómo utilizar el Análisis de Redes Sociales (Social Networks Analysis - SNA) para modelar los mapas conceptuales, abriendo así excelentes oportunidades para crear visualizaciones de los conceptos y sus interrelaciones. Los aspectos cuantitativos del análisis SNA (es decir mediante el uso de la centralidad radial y la centralidad de la información) proporcionan mecanismos adecuados para medir las relaciones internas en los mapas conceptuales (además de la inspección visual) que de otro modo no serían visibles. El uso del SNA permitió la clasificación de las respuestas de los usuarios con respecto a su interacción con el juego y, por lo tanto, fue un enfoque fructífero para la educación que involucra los juegos MAR. Además, con esta novedad, se muestra cómo los textos derivados de las entrevistas o de las respuestas a las preguntas abiertas de diferentes individuos pueden ser analizados tanto cualitativamente como cuantitativamente usando SNA. En conclusión, esta investigación ha aportado novedades, tanto a nivel educativo como metodológico. En lo que respecta a la educación de adultos, se ha demostrado que i) los juegos LBMAR son adecuados para ella, ii) la educación de adultos sobre ellos puede mejorarse siguiendo el modelo ARCS de Keller, iii) la percepción y la satisfacción de los alumnos adultos depende de la edad, y iv) ciertas teorías de la educación de adultos (es decir, el constructivismo y el humanismo) pueden ser relevantes cuando los alumnos adultos utilizan juegos LBMAR como "Ingress". En cuanto a los métodos de investigación educativa, esta investigación sugirió métodos totalmente nuevos para analizar los datos que se derivan de las respuestas de los alumnos a las preguntas abiertas. Estos nuevos métodos son el análisis de contenido de las respuestas de los participantes con el uso de los índices de Jaccard y los métodos de SNA y pueden tener una aplicabilidad más amplia a la investigación educativa

3D Cadastre visualization and dissemination: Most recent progresses and future directions

The 3D Cadastre has been investigated from many viewpoints (including legal, organizational and technical). However, to date little research has focused specifically on visualizationrelated aspects despite the value-added of the third dimension. The paper first proposes an overview of progress made in the last five years in 3D cadastral visualization. The authors then summarize discussions at the 2014 3D Cadastre workshop regarding future research and development on the topic. This synthesis is complemented by a broad review of the most recent advances in 3D visualization beyond the 3D cadastral domain, with the goal of providing a number of important directions for further work, allowing researchers, developers and users to consolidate their respective activities, and encouraging collaboration

A Smartphone Application Designed to Engage the Elderly in Home-Based Rehabilitation

As life expectancy increases, it is imperative that the elderly take advantage of the benefits of technology to remain active and independent. Mobile health applications are widely used nowadays as they promote a healthy lifestyle and self-management of diseases, opening new horizons in the interactive health service delivery. However, adapting these applications to the needs and requirements of the elderly is still a challenge. This article presents a smartphone application that is part of a multifactorial intervention to support older people with balance disorders. The application aims to enable users to self-evaluate their activity and progress, to communicate with each other and, through strategically selected motivational features, to engage with the system with undiminished interest for a long period of time. Mock-up interfaces were evaluated in semi-structured focus groups and interviews that were performed across three European countries. Further evaluation in the form of four pilot studies with 160 participants will be performed and qualitative and quantitative measures will be used to process the feedback about the use of the application