A guide for Teachers

The role of the teacher in Higher Education is changing rapidly, and much of this change is as the result of the introduction of e-Learning. Teachers are now expected to share their role as course designers with many other professionals working in their institution while taking on a bigger role in the technical and resource discovery aspects of course design. This guide tackles these issues as well as examining emerging pedagogical issues that arise from the use of technologies in teaching. You will find information, advice and guidance that will help you make appropriate and effective use of e-Learning to support your students

THE USE AND DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMATION IN LABORATORY EDUCATION: part of The Connected Laboratory Project

This project examines the use of computer animation in tutorial ideos as an educational tool within the biology laboratory curriculum and explores the methodology for the development of computer animation. Student reception of the tutorials was assessed by survey (BB2903 C09 lab) with both multiple choice and open ended questions and the number of hits on the media server. Tutorials were found to be well received and instructionally beneficial. Animations were not preferred over live action of procedures, thus was recommended for supplementing live action

A VISUAL DESIGN METHOD AND ITS APPLICATION TO HIGH RELIABILITY HYPERMEDIA SYSTEMS

This work addresses the problem of the production of hypermedia documentation for applications that require high reliability, particularly technical documentation in safety critical industries. One requirement of this application area is for the availability of a task-based organisation, which can guide and monitor such activities as maintenance and repair. In safety critical applications there must be some guarantee that such sequences are correctly presented. Conventional structuring and design methods for hypermedia systems do not allow such guarantees to be made. A formal design method that is based on a process algebra is proposed as a solution to this problem. Design methods of this kind need to be accessible to information designers. This is achieved by use of a technique already familiar to them: the storyboard. By development of a storyboard notation that is syntactically equivalent to a process algebra a bridge is made between information design and computer science, allowing formal analysis and refinement of the specification drafted by information designers. Process algebras produce imperative structures that do not map easily into the declarative formats used for some hypermedia systems, but can be translated into concurrent programs. This translation process, into a language developed by the author, called ClassiC, is illustrated and the properties that make ClassiC a suitable implementation target discussed. Other possible implementation targets are evaluated, and a comparative illustration given of translation into another likely target, Java

A telepresence environment for concurrent life-cycle design and construction

Construction projects normally involve transient 'virtual organisations', where a multidisciplinary project team works together on the design and construction of a facility. Many of these participants often work independently while taking decisions that inevitably affect others. The research described in the thesis involved examining the adoption of concurrent engineering (CE) principles by the construction industry as a way to reduce the problems posed by the fragmentation of the industry, and to enhance its competitiveness. An important aspect of concurrent engineering in construction is the need for effective communication of design information between all members of the project team and across all stages of the constructed facility's life-cycle. The thesis describes the development of a communications infrastructure for Concurrent Life-Cycle Design and Construction. [Continues.

Analysis of Visualisation and Interaction Tools Authors

This document provides an in-depth analysis of visualization and interaction tools employed in the context of Virtual Museum. This analysis is required to identify and design the tools and the different components that will be part of the Common Implementation Framework (CIF). The CIF will be the base of the web-based services and tools to support the development of Virtual Museums with particular attention to online Virtual Museum.The main goal is to provide to the stakeholders and developers an useful platform to support and help them in the development of their projects, despite the nature of the project itself. The design of the Common Implementation Framework (CIF) is based on an analysis of the typical workflow ofthe V-MUST partners and their perceived limitations of current technologies. This document is based also on the results of the V-MUST technical questionnaire (presented in the Deliverable 4.1). Based on these two source of information, we have selected some important tools (mainly visualization tools) and services and we elaborate some first guidelines and ideas for the design and development of the CIF, that shall provide a technological foundation for the V-MUST Platform, together with the V-MUST repository/repositories and the additional services defined in the WP4. Two state of the art reports, one about user interface design and another one about visualization technologies have been also provided in this document

Differentiator factors in the implementation of social network sites

Estágio realizado na Business Analyst da Documento Crítico - Desenvolvimento de Software, S. A. (Cardmobili) e orientado pelo Eng.ª Catarina MaiaTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Interactive UTP Map Kiosk

For this paper I have investigated common problems that occur regarding the problem of viewing the campus map and the direction faced by the outsiders from UTP. The aim through this study is to overcome some of the problems that occurs to the outsiders to know and identify the map of the New Building in the UTP campus. The investigation involves the outsiders who are not too familiar with the UTP campus surrounding. In this project, several techniques used such as providing Questionnaires, and do some Observation. In this research, the importance is ranked from the degree of the importance of this system and its usability. Based on this ranking, the system is focusing on the New Academic Building especially for the IT IS (01 and 02) building. As the findings have been done, the study highlights the advantages of this system and the needs of the modification to enhance and improve the system functionality

Dynamic Scene Creation from Text

Visual information is an integral part of our daily life. Typically, it tends to convey more information than simple textual information. A visual depiction of a textual story, as an animation or video, provides a more engaging and realistic experience and can be used in different applications. Examples of such applications include but are not limited to education, advertisement, crime scene investigation, forensic analysis of a crime, treatment of different types of mental and psychological disorders, etc. Manual 3D scene creation is a time-consuming process and requires expertise of individuals familiar with the content creation environment. Automatic scene generation using textual description and a library of developed components offers a quick and easy alternative for manual scene representation and proof of concept ideas. In this thesis, we propose a scheme for extraction of objects of interest and their spatial relationships from a user-provided textual description to create a 3D dynamic scene and animation to make it more realistic