Prototyping a process-centered environment

This paper describes an experimental system developed and used as a vehicle for prototyping the Arcadia-1 software development environment. Prototyping is viewed as a knowledge acquisition process and is used to reduce risks in software development by gaining rapid feedback about the suitability of a production system before the system is completed. Prototyping a software development environment is particularly important due to the lack of experience with them. There is an acute need to acquire knowledge about user interaction requirements for software environments. These needs are especially important for the Arcadia project, as it is one of the first attempts to construct a process-centered environment. Our prototyping effort addresses questions about effective interaction with a process-centered environment by simulating how Arcadia-1 would interact with users in a representative range of usage scenarios. We built a prototyping system, called PRODUCER, and used it to generate a variety of prototypes simulating user interactions with Arcadia-1 process programs.Experience with PRODUCER indicates that our approach is effective at risk reduction. The prototypes greatly improved communication with our customer. They confirmed some of our design decisions but also redirected our research efforts as a result of unexpected insight. We also found that prototyping usage scenarios provides conceptual guides and design information for process programmers. Most of the benefits of our prototyping effort derive from developing and interacting with usage scenarios, so our approach is generalizable to other prototyping systems. This paper reports on our prototyping approach and our experience in prototyping a process-centered environment

Comparison of input devices in an ISEE direct timbre manipulation task

The representation and manipulation of sound within multimedia systems is an important and currently under-researched area. The paper gives an overview of the authors' work on the direct manipulation of audio information, and describes a solution based upon the navigation of four-dimensional scaled timbre spaces. Three hardware input devices were experimentally evaluated for use in a timbre space navigation task: the Apple Standard Mouse, Gravis Advanced Mousestick II joystick (absolute and relative) and the Nintendo Power Glove. Results show that the usability of these devices significantly affected the efficacy of the system, and that conventional low-cost, low-dimensional devices provided better performance than the low-cost, multidimensional dataglove

Spartan Daily, November 18, 2008

Volume 131, Issue 43https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10527/thumbnail.jp

The Design and Implementation of a Toolkit for the Creation of Virtual Environments

Virtual Reality is a field that is steadily increasing in popularity and interest. New developments in both hardware and software have empowered developers with new devices allowing faster and better quality interaction with virtual environments. However, the emphasis of research in virtual environments has been more concerned with development of new display and input devices, as opposed to the investigation of different methods of interaction that a three-dimensional environment offers. This project designs and implements a three-dimensional, interactive, virtual environment development system upon an existing three-dimensional rendering engine. The aim of the project is to allow users to generate virtual environments with ease through a simple and intuitive user interface. Support for a gesture-based input device has been provided, as well as for more conventional two-dimensional input devices such as the mouse and joystick. By catering for a variety of input devices, various different forms of input have been examined in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. It is through the use of techniques developed throughout this project that designers of virtual environments may go about their work with greater efficiency and simplicity, allowing users to concentrate on the development of the environment, rather than being limited by the tools they possess

“A Movable Object”: Props and Possibility in Writing Consultations

While writing center scholarship has occasionally engaged the role of objects in the writing center, generally through conversations about play, consultant education models remain, with a few important exceptions, heavily focused on the verbal interactions between writer and consultant. This article argues that the relationships between materials and bodies in writing centers are essential to writing center practice, and that consultant/tutor education can help writing centers more intentionally engage these practices. The article introduces a study and consultant education framework that reframes consultant orientations by considering objects as “props,” as things consultants and writers intra-act with to create multimodal possibility and access in consultations. Situated in conversation with conversations surrounding play, embodiment, access, and space in the writing center, this article outlines the findings from this study and education framework and analyzes those findings in conversation with Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. This analysis explores the intraactions and reorientations that emerge when consultants work with props and writers and considers how props education and practices have shaped, and might continue to shape, the writing center. Presenting props as integral elements of consultation phenomena that help determine what is and is not possible for us to measure or do in a consultation space, this study suggests consultants can coconstruct differently embodied and multimodal approaches, creating opportunities for access and encouraging new orientations, turnings, and possibilities.University Writing Cente

English for specific purposes: Traditions, trends, directions

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) began around fifty years ago as a result of pressing worldwide demands for fast-paced language training in occupational and professional settings, rapid revolutions in theoretical linguistics, and burgeoning pressures on schools and educators to focus on, and to be responsive to, learners’ needs. It started within the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) but has gradually established itself as an autonomous subfield of Applied Linguistics (AL). This paper will review the origins, evolution, and status quo of ESP, and then predict the future directions of this important field. The theoretical, analytical, and methodological evolutions of ESP are reviewed, the positions of genre analysis, target language use situation analysis, and context in ESP are described, the ‘just-in-case’ EAP and ‘just-in-time’ EOP approaches are compared, and the text-first and context-first approaches to discourse structure analysis are compared. The paper predicts that ESP will adopt a wide-angled epistemological stance to survey the (a) discursive, (b) generic, (c) social, and (d) organizational structures of specialized texts and discourses, as well as those of texts and discourses simplified for the popularization of science, in a systematic and contextualized manner. ESP practitioners are also warned about the potential threats of teaching genres of power within ESP

Supporting and Amplifying Teaching Experience of New College Teachers

This thesis investigates how to amplify and support novice college teacher’s teaching experience. It has been found that a majority of percent novice teachers (55%) could not prepare there are lessons effectively (Fantilli & McDougall, 2009), many of them will spend a lot of time adapting to the educating and academic environment. The main issue is that these beginning teachers cannot recognize what kinds of methods are more effective to enhance their teaching efforts in the short period term. At the meanwhile, how to enhance their class quality as a crucial problem as well. There are several factors affecting the overall situation. First, beginning teachers have different cultural backgrounds, characteristics, and experiences, and they are being confronted with new and different situations. Second, due to the courses having been designed by others, they are unfamiliar with the structure of the classes they are teaching. Third, novice college teachers generally lack of any teaching experience, so it is difficult for them to deal with particular situations. Additionally, the process of preparation is quite difficult for them to master. Two main design approaches have been taken in existing research and projects that aim to help novice teachers. One design approach, which is somewhat limited, is to provide interactive functions between teachers and college students during class time. The other kind of design work concentrates on helping teachers to manage their classes. Based on the results of the literature review, peer-product review, and user studies research, I propose a mobile-based campus application with an external technology device to explore and provide useful educational information to novice teacher corresponding to the following four dimensions: teaching experience cognition, augmented reality, communication, and resources collaboration. The application aims to help novice teachers figure out an effective method for improving the quality of their classes. Additionally, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected via online questionnaires, interviews, and frameworks. As a result, I aim to design a system with an external device to support novice college teachers. The app design will concentrate on how to enhance teaching experience for new teachers. The objective is that design solution will help the beginning teachers adapting to the education environment and explore the most appropriate method to enhance the quality of their classes