A task based approach to global design education

This paper provides a new perspective for managing and delivering a global design class, and a clear alternative to the traditional joint project for participating institutes. The ‘task-based approach’ used to structure a Global Design class at the University of Strathclyde is described. This entailed the creation of a series of short design exercises to be run in conjunction with three partner institutions: the University of Malta in Msida, Malta; Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia; and Stanford University in Palo Alto, USA. These exercises focussed on specific aspects of distributed working, including synchronous working, asynchronous working and digital library support, according to the location and facilities afforded by each institution. This provides a number of pedagogical and organisation benefits. Students are required to take a more strategic approach to their design work, developing a higher evaluative understanding of the tools and processes required to produce a successful design. Staff members have a greater level of control afforded by a shared collaborative class component, including assessment, timetabling and learning objectives, rather than simply having a joint project. This potentially makes global design classes a more flexible and viable option for institutions interested in participating in such programme

Archiving Complex Digital Artworks

The transmission of the documentation of changes made in each presentation of an artwork and the motivation behind each display are of importance to the continued preservation, re-exhibition and future understanding of artworks. However, it is generally acknowledged that existing digital archiving and documentation systems used by many museums are not suitable for complex digital artworks. Looking for an approach that can easily be adjusted, shared and adopted by others, this article focusses on open-source alternatives that also enable collaborative working to facilitate the sharing and changing of information. As an interdisciplinary team of conservators, researchers, artists and programmers, the authors set out to explore and compare the functionalities of two systems featuring version control: MediaWiki and Git. We reflect on their technical details, virtues and shortcomings for archiving complex digital artworks, while looking at the potential they offer for collaborative workflows

Facilitating Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning with Question-Asking Scripting Activity and its Effects on Students’ Conceptual Understanding and Critical Thinking in Science

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) provides an environment that enhances social interaction and shared knowledge construction among students. However, limited research has examined CSCL reinforced by question-asking scripting activity. This research investigated the effects of CSCL with question-asking scripting activity on the development of conceptual understanding and critical thinking in science. Moreover, the research design was a three-group pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental study in which the research sample were 106 Grade 7 students. The only difference between the control and the experimental groups was the exposure to CSCL. The experimental groups were exposed to CSCL approaches: one without scripting while one was exposed with question-asking scripting activity. Results revealed that CSCL approaches significantly affected the development of students’ conceptual understanding and critical thinking. Specifically, CSCL with scripting stimulated more intellectual discussion which allowed learners to deepen lesson comprehension and improve their critical thinking skills. Insights on the innovations through technology integration, collaborative inquiry learning, and question-asking activity to enhance science education were also discussed. The findings of this study have important implications for future practice

Diffusion Co-Policy for Synergistic Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

Modeling multimodal human behavior has been a key barrier to increasing the level of interaction between human and robot, particularly for collaborative tasks. Our key insight is that an effective, learned robot policy used for human-robot collaborative tasks must be able to express a high degree of multimodality, predict actions in a temporally consistent manner, and recognize a wide range of frequencies of human actions in order to seamlessly integrate with a human in the control loop. We present Diffusion Co-policy, a method for planning sequences of actions that synergize well with humans during test time. The co-policy predicts joint human-robot action sequences via a Transformer-based diffusion model, which is trained on a dataset of collaborative human-human demonstrations, and directly executes the robot actions in a receding horizon control framework. We demonstrate in both simulation and real environments that the method outperforms other state-of-art learning methods on the task of human-robot table-carrying with a human in the loop. Moreover, we qualitatively highlight compelling robot behaviors that demonstrate evidence of true human-robot collaboration, including mutual adaptation, shared task understanding, leadership switching, and low levels of wasteful interaction forces arising from dissent.Comment: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023. 8 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Supplementary material at https://sites.google.com/view/diffusion-co-policy-hr

Do You Know What I Know?:Situational Awareness of Co-located Teams in Multidisplay Environments

Modern collaborative environments often provide an overwhelming amount of visual information on multiple displays. In complex project settings, the amount of visual information on multiple displays, and the multitude of personal and shared interaction devices in these environments can reduce the awareness of team members on ongoing activities, the understanding of shared visualisations, and the awareness of who is in control of shared artifacts. Research reported in this thesis addresses the situational awareness (SA) support of co-located teams working on team projects in multidisplay environments. Situational awareness becomes even more critical when the content of multiple displays changes rapidly, and when these provide large amounts of information. This work aims at getting insights into design and evaluation of shared display visualisations that afford situational awareness and group decision making. This thesis reports the results of three empirical user studies in three different domains: life science experimentation, decision making in brainstorming teams, and agile software development. The first and the second user studies evaluate the impact of the Highlighting-on-Demand and the Chain-of-Thoughts SA on the group decision-making and awareness. The third user study presents the design and evaluation of a shared awareness display for software teams. Providing supportive visualisations on a shared large display, we aimed at reducing the distraction from the primary task, enhancing the group decision-making process and the perceived task performance

Situational Awareness Support to Enhance Teamwork in Collaborative Environments

Modern collaborative environments often provide an overwhelming amount of visual information on multiple displays. The multitude of personal and shared interaction devices leads to lack of awareness of team members on ongoing activities, and awareness of who is in control of shared artefacts. This research addresses the situational awareness (SA) support of multidisciplinary teams in co-located collaborative environments. This work aims at getting insights into design and evaluation of large displays systems that afford SA and effective teamwork

Developing interactive discourse in the classroom: moving beyond teacher as expert.

In this article I describe the collaborative research undertaken by a group of high school teachers and an English adviser. The teachers were keen to find ways of breaking the teacher-dominated discourse pattern within their classrooms. They wanted to see whether, when offered a variety of teacher audiences beyond that of 'expert-examiner', students would engage in the kind of exploratory talk, described by the National Oracy Project (1992), as a feature of investigative learning. I examine the teachers' belief that discourse patterns are affected by students' understanding of contextual conditions. I illustrate the importance of students’ shared understanding of collaborative discourse and discuss how their conception of learning contexts is influenced by the kinds of audiences teachers project

Power and multistakeholderism in internet global governance. Towards a synergetic theoretical framework

With the advancement of multistakeholder collaboration as a governance principle in theglobal Internet Governance, how to investigate the political process in a ‘shared power’environment emerges as a challenging methodological issue. In this paper, a synergetic theoretical approach is proposed to the study of Internet governance political process, which focuses on the concept of power, and crosses the boundaries of three academic fields, namely, Political Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, and Organization Studies. This approach aggregates, in a descending analytical manner, concepts intrinsically linked to the contemporary shifting governance paradigm (i.e. governmentality, global governance, global public-policy networks, shared power, multistakeholder collaboration). In addition, such an approach brings the collaborative process into focus (rather than the decisions it leads to) by accentuating the productive potential of a collaboration based on the ‘shared power’ formula. Each of those theoretical reflections on shifting power relations provides building elements for a synergetic theoretical framework that can be, and has been, applied to the investigation of the emergent Internet governance regime. As a result, stakeholder alliances can be mapped, instances of power dynamics can be discerned, and some longitudinal tangible and intangible outcomes of the multistakeholder collaboration can be envisioned