Advanced Mediation

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held July 14-15, 2022

An Investigation of the Social and Academic Uses of Digital Technology by University Students

Aquest estudi ens presenta una perspectiva diferent de què és el que pensen els alumnes de la URV sobre l’ús de les tecnologies digitals amb finalitat acadèmica i social; i com es senten sobre el fenomen “natiu digital”. L’objecte central d’aquest estudi és entendre com els estudiants universitaris utilitzen les tecnologies digitals i quines són les implicacions del seu ús en l’educació superior. Per abordar aquest objectiu, el investigador va adoptar un enfocament interpretatiu i va desenvolupar una estratègia d’investigació de mètodes mixtes. Les principals tècniques de recollida de dades utilitzades van ser la revisió integradora de la literatura, els qüestionaris en línia i les entrevistes semi-estructurades. L’estudi es va realitzar a la Facultat de Ciències de l’Educació i Psicologia de la Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) de Tarragona, Espanya. La comunicació cara a cara, les xarxes socials, el correu electrònic personal, els missatges de text i el telèfon mòbil són les formes preferides de comunicació i connexió amb els altres. La majoria dels estudiants es comuniquen en grups via Facebook i WhatsApp que estan inclosos com part del seu procés d’aprenentatge per compartir informació relacionada amb la classe. Els resultats ens suggereixen que el seu coneixement tecnològic no és el que s’esperaria per els representants de la generació de natius digitals. Els resultats no confirmen l’afirmació que existeix una bretxa tecnològica entre els estudiants més joves i els seus companys de major edat. De fet, ambdós utilitzen les mateixes tecnologies en la seva vida quotidiana, com el ordenador, els telèfons mòbils (WhatsApp), el Internet, el correu electrònic i el Facebook; però això no ha de portar a la conclusió que la nova generació d’estudiants ha desenvolupat sofisticades habilitats tecnològiques.Este estudio nos presenta una perspectiva diferente de qué es lo que piensan los alumnos de la URV acerca del uso de las tecnologías digitales con fines académicos y sociales; y cómo se sienten sobre el fenómeno "nativo digital". El objetivo central de este estudio es entender cómo los estudiantes universitarios utilizan las tecnologías digitales y cuáles son las implicaciones de su uso en la educación superior. Para abordar este objetivo, el investigador adoptó un enfoque interpretativo y desarrolló una estrategia de investigación de métodos mixtos. Las principales técnicas de recogida de datos utilizados fueron la revisión integradora de la literatura, cuestionarios en línea y entrevistas semi-estructuradas. El estudio se realizó en la Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación y Psicología de la Universidad Rovira i Virgili (URV) de Tarragona, España. Comunicación cara a cara, redes sociales, correo electrónico personal, mensajes de texto y el teléfono móvil son los modos preferidos de comunicación y conexión con los demás. La mayoría de los estudiantes se comunica en grupos vía Facebook y WhatsApp que son incluidas como parte de su proceso de aprendizaje para compartir información relacionada con la clase. Los resultados nos sugieren que su conocimiento tecnológico no es lo que se esperaría para los representantes de la generación de nativos digitales. Los resultados no confirman la afirmación de que existe una brecha tecnológica entre los estudiantes más jóvenes y sus compañeros de mayor edad. De hecho, ambos utilizan las mismas tecnologías en su vida cotidiana, como el ordenador, teléfonos móviles (WhatsApp), Internet, correo electrónico y Facebook; pero esto no debe llevar a la conclusión de que la nueva generación de estudiantes ha desarrollado sofisticadas habilidades tecnológicas.This study presents a different perspective of what URV learners think about their use of digital technologies for academic and social purposes and how they feel about the “Digital Native Generation” phenomenon. The central aim of the study is to understand how university learners use digital technologies and what are the implications of their use for higher education. To address this aim, the researcher adopted an interpretivist approach and developed a mixed-method research strategy. The main data collection techniques used were integrative literature review, online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The study was conducted in the Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology at the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) in Tarragona, Spain. Face-to-face interaction, social networks, personal email, text message and mobile cellphone were the preferred modes of communicating and connecting with others. Most of students’ communication is in groups via Facebook and WhatsApp and had integrated them as part of the learning process to share class-related information. The results suggest that their technological knowledge is not what would be expected for representatives of the digital native generation. The findings do not support the claim that there is a substantial gap between more technologically adept younger students and their older classmates. Indeed, both used many of the same technologies in their everyday lives, with computer, mobile phones (WhatsApp), the Internet, e-mail (personal and institutional account) and Facebook; but this should not lead to the conclusion that the new generation of students has developed sophisticated technological abilities

Focus: Implementing participation - Advancement of social services in analog and digital spaces

Digitale Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien gewinnen als fester Bestandteil zunehmend Bedeutung in den alltäglichen Lebenswelten einer wachsenden Zahl von Menschen. Ihre Entwicklung und selbstverständliche Nutzung schreiten in einem immer rasanteren Tempo voran; die vielfältigen Anwendungsmöglichkeiten adressieren längst alle Lebensbereiche. Während der Digitalisierung von Kommunikationsprozessen zuweilen demokratisierende Kräfte zugesprochen werden, scheint eine kritische Reflexion möglicher Potentiale und Auswirkungen digitaler Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien auf Teilhabedynamiken in unterschiedlichen Lebensbereichen dringend erforderlich. Die Autorinnen und Autoren möchten mit dieser SI:SO-Schwerpunktausgabe einen Beitrag zu einer kritischen Reflexion digitaler Innovationen und ihrer Auswirkungen auf die zukünftige Gestaltung sozialer Dienste leisten. Mit der zweisprachigen Ausgabe ist zudem die Hoffnung verbunden, diesen Beitrag auch einem europäischen und weltweiten Publikum zugänglich zu machen.Digital information and communications technologies are becoming an increasingly important part in everyday life of a growing number of people. Their development and natural use are progressing even faster with a wide range of possible applications addressing all areas of life. While the digitization of communication processes is sometimes said to have democratizing forces, critical reflection on the potential and impact of digital information and communication technologies on participation dynamics in different areas of life seems urgently needed. The Authors would like to contribute to a critical reflection on digital innovations and their impact on the future design of social services. The bilingual edition further aims to make this contribution accessible to a European and global audience

Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic’s Distance Learning on Students and Teachers in Schools and in Higher Education.

The worldwide imposed lockdowns forced schools and universities to digitise conventional teaching in a very short time and to convert teaching and learning formats partially or completely to Distance Learning. The changes in everyday teaching brought by Distance Learning were felt worldwide. With 22 double blind peerreviewed articles of researchers reporting on 17 different countries, the editors of this book want to shed light on the effects of Distance Learning in different regions of the world. This will allow for a value-free comparison of how the COVID-19 pandemic has been addressed in education in different parts of the world and what impacts it has had, is having or may have in the future

Exploring perspectives of people with type-1 diabetes on goalsetting strategies within self-management education and care

Background. Collaborative goal-setting strategies are widely recommended for diabetes self-management support within healthcare systems. Creating self-management plans that fit with peoples’ own goals and priorities has been linked with better diabetic control. Consequently, goal-setting has become a core component of many diabetes selfmanagement programmes such as the ‘Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating (DAFNE) programme’. Within DAFNE, people with Type-1 Diabetes (T1D) develop their own goals along with action-plans to stimulate goal-achievement. While widely implemented, limited research has explored how goal-setting strategies are experienced by people with diabetes.Therefore, this study aims to explore the perspectives of people with T1D on theimplementation and value of goal-setting strategies within DAFNE and follow-up diabetes care. Furthermore, views on barriers and facilitators to goal-attainment are explored.Methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 people with T1D who attended a DAFNE-programme. Following a longitudinal qualitative research design, interviews took place 1 week, and 6-8 months after completion of DAFNE. A recurrent cross-sectional approach is applied in which themes will be identified at each time-point using thematic analyses.Expected results. Preliminary identified themes surround the difference in value that participants place on goal-setting strategies, and the lack of support for goal-achievement within diabetes care.Current stage. Data collection complete; data-analysis ongoing.Discussion. Goal-setting strategies are increasingly included in guidelines for diabetes support and have become essential parts of many primary care improvement schemes. Therefore, exploring the perspectives of people with T1D on the value and implementation of goal-setting strategies is vital for their optimal application

Exploring Organizational Values of the Organizations and Employee-Owners in Worker-Owned Cooperatives

AbstractResearchers have documented a variety of challenges that worker-owned cooperatives experience as a result of poor management. Most cooperative literature is focused on agriculture economics and cooperative organizations in other countries. The lack of attention in the social science literature on worker cooperatives in the United States reflects a need for further exploration of this business model. Accordingly, this qualitative case study was conducted to explore mismatches in organizational value between the organization and the employee–owners. The goal was to gather the perceptions of employee–owners and managerial personnel that could be leveraged to increase member commitment for a successful worker-owned cooperative. Person–organization fit and value congruence theories were the conceptual frameworks used to address the effect of organizational identification and member commitment as a work outcome among employee–owners. A purposeful sample of 15 respondents from multiple worker-owned cooperatives in the United States participated in virtual semi structured one-on-one interviews. Notes from reflective journaling, document review, and archival material were coded and analyzed forming preliminary free codes. Study results indicated no mismatch between the organization and employee–owners; instead, the results suggested five factors that influence the perception of value. This research study is significant for employee–owners, cooperative practitioners, and cooperative scholars in the effort to increase the general knowledge and understanding of worker-owned cooperatives

Building Embodied Conversational Agents:Observations on human nonverbal behaviour as a resource for the development of artificial characters

"Wow this is so cool!" This is what I most probably yelled, back in the 90s, when my first computer program on our MSX computer turned out to do exactly what I wanted it to do. The program contained the following instruction: COLOR 10(1.1) After hitting enter, it would change the screen color from light blue to dark yellow. A few years after that experience, Microsoft Windows was introduced. Windows came with an intuitive graphical user interface that was designed to allow all people, so also those who would not consider themselves to be experienced computer addicts, to interact with the computer. This was a major step forward in human-computer interaction, as from that point forward no complex programming skills were required anymore to perform such actions as adapting the screen color. Changing the background was just a matter of pointing the mouse to the desired color on a color palette. "Wow this is so cool!". This is what I shouted, again, 20 years later. This time my new smartphone successfully skipped to the next song on Spotify because I literally told my smartphone, with my voice, to do so. Being able to operate your smartphone with natural language through voice-control can be extremely handy, for instance when listening to music while showering. Again, the option to handle a computer with voice instructions turned out to be a significant optimization in human-computer interaction. From now on, computers could be instructed without the use of a screen, mouse or keyboard, and instead could operate successfully simply by telling the machine what to do. In other words, I have personally witnessed how, within only a few decades, the way people interact with computers has changed drastically, starting as a rather technical and abstract enterprise to becoming something that was both natural and intuitive, and did not require any advanced computer background. Accordingly, while computers used to be machines that could only be operated by technically-oriented individuals, they had gradually changed into devices that are part of many people’s household, just as much as a television, a vacuum cleaner or a microwave oven. The introduction of voice control is a significant feature of the newer generation of interfaces in the sense that these have become more "antropomorphic" and try to mimic the way people interact in daily life, where indeed the voice is a universally used device that humans exploit in their exchanges with others. The question then arises whether it would be possible to go even one step further, where people, like in science-fiction movies, interact with avatars or humanoid robots, whereby users can have a proper conversation with a computer-simulated human that is indistinguishable from a real human. An interaction with a human-like representation of a computer that behaves, talks and reacts like a real person would imply that the computer is able to not only produce and understand messages transmitted auditorily through the voice, but also could rely on the perception and generation of different forms of body language, such as facial expressions, gestures or body posture. At the time of writing, developments of this next step in human-computer interaction are in full swing, but the type of such interactions is still rather constrained when compared to the way humans have their exchanges with other humans. It is interesting to reflect on how such future humanmachine interactions may look like. When we consider other products that have been created in history, it sometimes is striking to see that some of these have been inspired by things that can be observed in our environment, yet at the same do not have to be exact copies of those phenomena. For instance, an airplane has wings just as birds, yet the wings of an airplane do not make those typical movements a bird would produce to fly. Moreover, an airplane has wheels, whereas a bird has legs. At the same time, an airplane has made it possible for a humans to cover long distances in a fast and smooth manner in a way that was unthinkable before it was invented. The example of the airplane shows how new technologies can have "unnatural" properties, but can nonetheless be very beneficial and impactful for human beings. This dissertation centers on this practical question of how virtual humans can be programmed to act more human-like. The four studies presented in this dissertation all have the equivalent underlying question of how parts of human behavior can be captured, such that computers can use it to become more human-like. Each study differs in method, perspective and specific questions, but they are all aimed to gain insights and directions that would help further push the computer developments of human-like behavior and investigate (the simulation of) human conversational behavior. The rest of this introductory chapter gives a general overview of virtual humans (also known as embodied conversational agents), their potential uses and the engineering challenges, followed by an overview of the four studies

Building Embodied Conversational Agents:Observations on human nonverbal behaviour as a resource for the development of artificial characters

"Wow this is so cool!" This is what I most probably yelled, back in the 90s, when my first computer program on our MSX computer turned out to do exactly what I wanted it to do. The program contained the following instruction: COLOR 10(1.1) After hitting enter, it would change the screen color from light blue to dark yellow. A few years after that experience, Microsoft Windows was introduced. Windows came with an intuitive graphical user interface that was designed to allow all people, so also those who would not consider themselves to be experienced computer addicts, to interact with the computer. This was a major step forward in human-computer interaction, as from that point forward no complex programming skills were required anymore to perform such actions as adapting the screen color. Changing the background was just a matter of pointing the mouse to the desired color on a color palette. "Wow this is so cool!". This is what I shouted, again, 20 years later. This time my new smartphone successfully skipped to the next song on Spotify because I literally told my smartphone, with my voice, to do so. Being able to operate your smartphone with natural language through voice-control can be extremely handy, for instance when listening to music while showering. Again, the option to handle a computer with voice instructions turned out to be a significant optimization in human-computer interaction. From now on, computers could be instructed without the use of a screen, mouse or keyboard, and instead could operate successfully simply by telling the machine what to do. In other words, I have personally witnessed how, within only a few decades, the way people interact with computers has changed drastically, starting as a rather technical and abstract enterprise to becoming something that was both natural and intuitive, and did not require any advanced computer background. Accordingly, while computers used to be machines that could only be operated by technically-oriented individuals, they had gradually changed into devices that are part of many people’s household, just as much as a television, a vacuum cleaner or a microwave oven. The introduction of voice control is a significant feature of the newer generation of interfaces in the sense that these have become more "antropomorphic" and try to mimic the way people interact in daily life, where indeed the voice is a universally used device that humans exploit in their exchanges with others. The question then arises whether it would be possible to go even one step further, where people, like in science-fiction movies, interact with avatars or humanoid robots, whereby users can have a proper conversation with a computer-simulated human that is indistinguishable from a real human. An interaction with a human-like representation of a computer that behaves, talks and reacts like a real person would imply that the computer is able to not only produce and understand messages transmitted auditorily through the voice, but also could rely on the perception and generation of different forms of body language, such as facial expressions, gestures or body posture. At the time of writing, developments of this next step in human-computer interaction are in full swing, but the type of such interactions is still rather constrained when compared to the way humans have their exchanges with other humans. It is interesting to reflect on how such future humanmachine interactions may look like. When we consider other products that have been created in history, it sometimes is striking to see that some of these have been inspired by things that can be observed in our environment, yet at the same do not have to be exact copies of those phenomena. For instance, an airplane has wings just as birds, yet the wings of an airplane do not make those typical movements a bird would produce to fly. Moreover, an airplane has wheels, whereas a bird has legs. At the same time, an airplane has made it possible for a humans to cover long distances in a fast and smooth manner in a way that was unthinkable before it was invented. The example of the airplane shows how new technologies can have "unnatural" properties, but can nonetheless be very beneficial and impactful for human beings. This dissertation centers on this practical question of how virtual humans can be programmed to act more human-like. The four studies presented in this dissertation all have the equivalent underlying question of how parts of human behavior can be captured, such that computers can use it to become more human-like. Each study differs in method, perspective and specific questions, but they are all aimed to gain insights and directions that would help further push the computer developments of human-like behavior and investigate (the simulation of) human conversational behavior. The rest of this introductory chapter gives a general overview of virtual humans (also known as embodied conversational agents), their potential uses and the engineering challenges, followed by an overview of the four studies