Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like

Exploring the user experience through collage

We explore the use of collage in requirements elicitation, as a tool to support potential end-users in expressing their impressions, understanding, and emotions regarding a system

Synote mobile HTML5 responsive design video annotation application

Synote Mobile has been developed as an accessible cross device and cross browser HTML5 webbased collaborative replay and annotation tool to make web-based recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and others. It has been developed as a new mobile HTML5 version of the award winning open source and freely available Synote which has been used since 2008 by students throughout the world to learn interactively from recordings. While most UK students now carry mobile devices capable of replaying Internet video, the majority of these devices cannot replay Synote’s accessible, searchable, annotated recordings as Synote was created in 2008 when few students had phones or tablets capable of replaying these videos

Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend

Smartphone sensing platform for emergency management

The increasingly sophisticated sensors supported by modern smartphones open up novel research opportunities, such as mobile phone sensing. One of the most challenging of these research areas is context-aware and activity recognition. The SmartRescue project takes advantage of smartphone sensing, processing and communication capabilities to monitor hazards and track people in a disaster. The goal is to help crisis managers and members of the public in early hazard detection, prediction, and in devising risk-minimizing evacuation plans when disaster strikes. In this paper we suggest a novel smartphone-based communication framework. It uses specific machine learning techniques that intelligently process sensor readings into useful information for the crisis responders. Core to the framework is a content-based publish-subscribe mechanism that allows flexible sharing of sensor data and computation results. We also evaluate a preliminary implementation of the platform, involving a smartphone app that reads and shares mobile phone sensor data for activity recognition.Comment: 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management ISCRAM2014 (2014

Young people and sexting in Australia: ethics, representation and the law

The Young People and Sexting in Australia report presents the findings of a qualitative study of young people’s understandings of, and responses to, current Australian laws, media and educational resources that address sexting. The project, led by Dr Kath Albury involved a review of both international local and academic research as well as popular media addressing sexting, and a review of educational resources for young people. Three focus groups were conducted with young people aged 16 and 17 in 2012, and a working paper based on those findings was then distributed to adult stakeholders in the fields of law enforcement, youth and children’s legal support, education, criminology, media and communications, youth work, youth health care, counseling and youth health promotion