Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content. Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design, implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media (i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed

Is Vivaldi smooth and takete? Non-verbal sensory scales for describing music qualities

Studies on the perception of music qualities (such as induced or perceived emotions, performance styles, or timbre nuances) make a large use of verbal descriptors. Although many authors noted that particular music qualities can hardly be described by means of verbal labels, few studies have tried alternatives. This paper aims at exploring the use of non-verbal sensory scales, in order to represent different perceived qualities in Western classical music. Musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to six musical excerpts in major key and to evaluate them from a sensorial and semantic point of view (Experiment 1). The same design (Experiment 2) was conducted using musically trained and untrained listeners who were required to listen to six musical excerpts in minor key. The overall findings indicate that subjects\u2019 ratings on non-verbal sensory scales are consistent throughout and the results support the hypothesis that sensory scales can convey some specific sensations that cannot be described verbally, offering interesting insights to deepen our knowledge on the relationship between music and other sensorial experiences. Such research can foster interesting applications in the field of music information retrieval and timbre spaces explorations together with experiments applied to different musical cultures and contexts

Doing pedagogical research in engineering

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Effects of Prenatal Exposure to Cocaine and Associated Risk Factors on Language Development

During the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the number of children born with prenatal exposure to cocaine. However, there is very little hard data concerning the later development of these children. The purpose of this preliminary study was to compare the language development profiles of 5 children prenatally exposed to cocaine and associated risk factors to the language development profiles of a matched non-exposed control group in terms of analyses of the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, and form components of language. The language evaluation was based on the analysis of a 30-minute language sample. The results suggested differences between the two groups as well as differences within the cocaine-exposed group. The major differences between the two groups were in discourse-pragmatics although less marked differences in syntactic development were also found. The results are discussed in relation to the potential contribution of pertinent medical and environmental risk factors. The study suggests that for children with prenatal exposure to cocaine in combination with multiple associated risk factors, language development may be compromised

ESL Pedagogy and Certification: Teacher Perceptions and Efficacy

Increasing numbers of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the U.S. classrooms have prioritized to building quality teacher education programs so that all teachers have the tools necessary to support their students. National, state, and local mandates have also enacted certain requirements to ensure that ELLs are receiving quality instruction with the new language proficiency and content standards. Pressure has pervaded into teacher education programs working to immerse teacher candidates with good pedagogical practices for working with ELLs. This mixed method study on 144 PK-12 teachers with five or less years of experience highlighted the importance of teachers\u27 perceptions and efficacy beliefs in working with ELLs. Findings revealed a statistical significance in efficacy beliefs for teachers with and ESL certification as opposed to teachers without the credentials. Five in-depth cases augmented the finding to support how individual classroom practices exemplified specific ESL pedagogy learned from pre-service contexts to promote more efficacious behaviors

Geometric and functional knowledge in the acquisition of spatial language

Considerable debate surrounds the nature of spatial categories, beginning with the observation that all languages use a limited and closed set of terms to encode object location and what appears to be a large and diverse set of object relations and configurations (Talmy, 1985). In previous work, Johannes, Landau and colleagues (Johannes, Wilson, & Landau, 2012, submitted; Landau, Johannes, Skordos, & Papafragou, under review) proposed that the structure of the conceptual categories of Containment and Support that underlie spatial language is reflected in the probabilistic use of spatial terms like in and on. The work in this thesis expands on these earlier findings by exploring the nature of the conceptual information underlying probabilistic spatial expression use and the relationship between conceptual knowledge and spatial expression use across development. The studies probe relationships between adults' and children's spatial expression use and a small set of geometric features, derived from studies of pre-linguistic spatial cognition knowledge (Hespos & Baillargeon, 2001, 2008; Hespos & Spelke, 2004, 2007), and a functional feature, Locational Control, adapted from psycholinguistic studies of in and on (Garrod, Ferrier, & Campbell, 1999). The results of three studies show that adults' and children's use of different types of spatial expressions (including BE + in(side)/on (top) and lexical verbs) for a large and diverse set of Containment and Support items are predicted by different combinations of geometric and functional features. Geometric features show consistent relationships to expression use across development, while Locational Control differs in its relationship to adults' and children's use of different expression types. Parents of 4- and 6-year-old participants also provided estimates of how likely they were to use different expression types to describe the same set of experimental items to their children. Including these estimates, alongside features, in models of child expression use improved the accuracy of model predictions, particularly for children’s use of lexical verb expressions, which initially showed weak relationships to feature ratings. These findings are among the first to account for spatial language usage and development as a complex function of spatial (geometric and functional) knowledge and input environment and the first to systematically examine spatial encoding for such a diverse sample of items that are representative of the everyday object configurations that children and adults encounter in the world