Collaborative information finding in smaller communities: The case of research talks

Social navigation and social tagging technologies enable user communities to assemble the collective wisdom, and use it to help community members in finding the right information. However, it takes a significantly-sized community to make a social system truly useful. The question addressed in this paper is whether collaborative information finding is feasible in the context of smaller communities. To answer this question, we developed two social systems specifically focused on smaller communities - CoMeT and Conference Navigator II - and explored several techniques to increase the volume of user contributions. This paper reviews the explored techniques and presents empirical evidence that demonstrate their effectiveness. © 2010 ICST

Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

Conference Navigator 2.0: Community-Based Recommendation for Academic Conferences

As the sheer volume of information grows, information overload challenges users in many ways. Large conferences are one of the venues suffering from this overload. Faced with several parallel sessions and large volumes of papers covering diverse areas of interest, conference participants often struggle to identify the most relevant sessions to attend. The Conference Navigator 2.0 system was created to help conference participants go examine the schedule of paper presentation, add most interesting papers to individual schedule, and export this schedule to a calendar application. In addition, as a social system, the Conference Navigator 2.0 collects the wisdom of the user community and make it available through community-based recommendation interface to help individuals in making scheduling decisions

Making Legacy LMS adaptable using Policy and Policy templates

Koesling, A., Herder, E., De Coi, J., & Abel, F. (2008). Making Legacy LMS adaptable using Policy and Policy templates. In J. Baumeister & M. Atzmüller, Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Adaptivity and User Modeling in Interactive System, ABIS 2008 (pp. 35-40). October, 6-8, 2008, Würzburg, Germany: University of Würzburg. Website with link to proceedings: http://lwa08.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/Wiki.jsp?page=FGABIS08In this paper, we discuss how users and designers of existing learning management systems (LMSs) can make use of policies to enhance adaptivity and adaptability. Many widespread LMSs currently only use limited and proprietary rule systems defining the system behaviour. Personalization of those systems is done based on those rule systems allowing only for fairly restricted adaptation rules. Policies allow for more sophisticated and flexible adaptation rules, provided by multiple stakeholders and they can be integrated into legacy systems. We present the benefits and feasibility of our ongoing approach of extending an existing LMS with policies. We will use the LMS ILIAS as a hands-on example to allow users to make use of system personalization.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

On the Design of Collective Applications

Paper presented at SocialCom 2009 Vancouver, 2009In this paper we define collective applications as those that employ the aggregated distinct behaviours of individuals in a crowd to shape their environment and to provide structure and influence in that environment. Such behaviour can be seen in most systems that aggregate user-generated content, whether or not that is the intention of the designers or contributors. We identify the necessary features of such applications and observe that they pose a particularly wicked set of design problems, because important characteristics of the system, including processing and presentation, reside outside the program in the behaviour of the crowd itself. We suggest some approaches to dealing with these problems

Agoraphobia and the modern learner.

Read/write social technologies enable rich pedagogies that centre on sharing and constructing content but have two notable weaknesses. Firstly, beyond the safe, nurturing environment of closed groups, students participating in more or less public network- or set-oriented communities may be insecure in their knowledge and skills, leading to resistance to disclosure. Secondly, it is hard to know who and what to trust in an open environment where others may be equally unskilled or, sometimes, malevolent. We present partial solutions to these problems through the use of collective intelligence, discretionary disclosure controls and mindful design

Improving self-organising information maps as navigational tools: A semantic approach

Purpose - The goal of the research is to explore whether the use of higher-level semantic features can help us to build better self-organising map (SOM) representation as measured from a human-centred perspective. The authors also explore an automatic evaluation method that utilises human expert knowledge encapsulated in the structure of traditional textbooks to determine map representation quality. Design/methodology/approach - Two types of document representations involving semantic features have been explored - i.e. using only one individual semantic feature, and mixing a semantic feature with keywords. Experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of semantic representation quality on the map. The experiments were performed on data collections from a single book corpus and a multiple book corpus. Findings - Combining keywords with certain semantic features achieves significant improvement of representation quality over the keywords-only approach in a relatively homogeneous single book corpus. Changing the ratios in combining different features also affects the performance. While semantic mixtures can work well in a single book corpus, they lose their advantages over keywords in the multiple book corpus. This raises a concern about whether the semantic representations in the multiple book corpus are homogeneous and coherent enough for applying semantic features. The terminology issue among textbooks affects the ability of the SOM to generate a high quality map for heterogeneous collections. Originality/value - The authors explored the use of higher-level document representation features for the development of better quality SOM. In addition the authors have piloted a specific method for evaluating the SOM quality based on the organisation of information content in the map. © 2011 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Broker-based service-oriented content adaptation framework

Electronic documents are becoming increasingly rich in content and varied in format and structure. At the same time, user preferences vary towards the contents and their devices are getting increasingly varied in capabilities. This mismatch between rich contents and user preferences along with the end device capability presents a challenge in providing ubiquitous access to these contents. Content adaptation is primarily used to bridge the mismatch by providing users with contents that is tailored to the given contexts e.g., device capability, preferences, or network bandwidth. Existing content adaptation systems employing these approaches such as client-side, server-side or proxy-side adaptation, operate in isolation, often encounter limited adaptation functionality, get overload if too many concurrent users and open to single point of failure, thus limiting the scope and scale of their services. To move beyond these shortcomings, this thesis establishes the basis for developing content adaptation solutions that are efficient and scalable. It presents a framework to enable content adaptation to be consumed as Web services provided by third-party service providers, which is termed as “service-oriented content adaptation”. Towards this perspective, this thesis addresses five key issues – how to enable content adaptation as services (serviceoriented framework); how to locate services in the network (service discovery protocol); how to select best possible services (path determination); how to provide quality assurance (service level agreement (SLA) framework); and how to negotiate quality of service (QoS negotiation). Specifically, we have: (i) identified the key research challenges for service-oriented content adaptation, along with a systematic understanding of the content adaptation research spectrum, captured in a taxonomy of content adaptation systems; (ii) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for enabling content adaptation as Web services, providing the facilities to serve clients’ content adaptation requests through the client-side brokering; (iii) developed a service discovery protocol, by taking into account the searching space, searching time, match type of the services and physical location of the service providers; (iv) developed a mechanism to choose the best possible combination of services to serve a given content adaptation request, considering QoS levels offered; (v) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for managing quality through the conceptualization of service level agreement; and (vi) introduced a strategy for QoS negotiation between multiple brokers and service providers, by taking into account the incoming requests and server utilization and, thus requiring the basis of determining serving priority and negotiating new QoS levels. The performance of the proposed solutions are compared with other competitive solutions and shown to be substantially better

Wedding planner in a box

Marriage describes the connection of two souls who promise to become one heart. Everyone dreams their marriage to be nearly perfect and that will happen only if they are able to make their wedding plan with best packages. In this busy world, many couples delay their wedding mainly because of high budget required to meet their dream wedding ceremony. Wedding ceremony requires careful and meticulous planning from many aspects such as choosing the food, make up, decoration, and gifts

The Impact of In-Classroom Non-Digital Game-Based Learning Activities on Students Transitioning to Higher Education

The initial phase of learning at a university has a bearing on students’ long-term academic development and plays a crucial role in enabling them to successfully transition to higher education. While higher education institutes have long been struggling to address the challenge of student retention and student success, the new generation of learners (millennials and Generation Z) entering universities have brought in further complexity. This study explores the impact of in-classroom, non-digital game-based learning techniques on the academic performance, classroom engagement, and peer interaction among the first-year university students studying computing qualification. The study aimed to deduce how the overall enhanced learning experience of these students enables them to integrate into the new learning environment in the university, thereby helping them to successfully transition to higher education. Data for this study were taken from among the first-year computing students across two consecutive years of study (N = 251). The results corroborated the findings from previous studies and highlighted how academic performance, classroom engagement, and peer interaction considerably enhance students’ academic integration. The study concludes with a discussion of the limitations and implications for practice and future research