ForWord: A Study on an Interactive Learning Environment in Foreign Language

With constant advances in technology, the world becomes a smaller community each day. In line with its reputation as a cultural melting pot, children of immigrants are the fastest growing student population in the United States today. It\u27s clear that the U.S. needs a strong approach in language education; one that can keep pace with our potential and our lives. Technology can be used to foster student collaboration and shared learning experiences, thereby increasing learner interest, motivation and learning outcomes. ForWord aims to use interaction design in foreign language education to meet this need. ForWord has four main goals: provide a user-friendly online learning environment, promote teacher-student interaction and collaboration, promote student-student interaction and collaboration, and increase learner interest and motivation. This project takes the form of a proof-of-concept web application. The outcome relies heavily on research, design principles, user experience and human-computer interaction theory, and the use of technology to demonstrate the overarching concepts

Virtual worlds: A new paradigm for advertising?

This thesis explores the new paradigms that are emerging as advertising encounters the Internet. The area that I explore is the convergence of corporate advertising and the online game, Second Life. The thesis takes as its starting point the economic and social/cultural history of advertising. I examine both Marxist and cultural theories of advertising, in order to properly understand the paradigm shifts of the past. I also investigate the effect that technological change has had on the practice of advertising. Having established an historical framework I· then turn to the current state of the advertising market, as it is defined by modern technology. The second and third parts of the thesis concentrate on the emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) on the Internet and the effects that these virtual worlds are having on advertising. I focus on the paradigms that the industry employs in entering these worlds. I argue that Second Life has a number of distinct and distinguishing features that render it unique among MMORPGs and that these features have also attracted significant interest from major corporations and advertisers. Finally the thesis investigates the practice of advertising in Second Life, through a comparative analysis of advertising originating in world and a case study of a successful corporate campaign that embodies the new paradigm that has emerged to facilitate engaging with Second Life and its users

Designing a sports platform for RTP, to increase sports´ content offer - providing a wide and diversified offer through on demand and live content

The project focuses on RTP ́s sports offer with the purpose of under standing how can the company increase the content offer, by developing a digital sports platform. In order to reach this goal, several analyses were performed, addressing the external and internal environment, by identifying the opportunities and threats of media and sports industries and pointing the strengths and weaknesses of RTP. In order to answer the over riding question, five major recommendations were developed regarding product, placement, promotion, and people

Designing a sports platform for RTP, to increase sports´ content offer - development of a digital sports platform that offers an interactive experience

The project focuses on RTP ́s sports offer with the purpose of understanding how can the company increase the content offer, by developing a digitals ports platform. In order to reach this goal, several analyses were performed, addressing the external and internal environment, by identifying the opportunities and threats of media and sports industries and pointing the strengths and weaknesses of RTP. In order to answer the over riding question, five major recommendations were developed regarding product, placement, promotion, and people

The Media in the Network Society: Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship

560 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.Libro ElectrónicoIn the Network Society the development of a new communicational model has been taking shape. A communicational model characterized by the fusion of interpersonal communication and mass communication, connecting audiences and broadcasters under a hypertextual matrix linking several media devices. The Networked Communication model is the informational societies communication model. A model that must be understood also in its needed literacies for building our media diets, media matrixes and on how it’s changing the way autonomy is managed and citizenship exercised in the Information Age. In this book Gustavo Cardoso develops an analysis that, focusing on the last decade, takes us from Europe to North America and from South America to Asia, combining under the framework of the Network Society a broad range of scientific perspectives from Media Studies to Political Science and Social Movements theory to Sociology of Communication.Index of Figures Index of Tables Preface Acknowledgements The Media in the Network Society. Contextualizing the Media in the Network Society; Media, Autonomy and Citizenship 1. The Multiple Dimensions of the Network Society. The Network Society; The Culture of the Informational Societies 2. Societies in Transition to the Network Society. Societies in Transition in the Global Network; Societies in Transitions, Values and Social Well-Being; Media and Social Change in the Network Societies 3. From Mass to Networked Communication: Communicational Models and the Informational Society Communicational Models and the Informational Society. Communicational Globalization in the 20th Century; Mass Media and New Media: the Articulation of a New Communicational Model?; Rhetoric, Accessibility of Information and Narratives Networked Communication 4. A Constellation of Networks: Mass Media, Games, Internet and Telephones. An Entertainment Meta-System in Transition: from Multimedia Games to Television; The New Entertainment Player: Multimedia Games; The Reaffirmation of TV as a Central Element of the Entertainment Meta-System; From Interactive Television to Networked Television 5. Has the Internet Really Changed the Mass Media?. From the End of Journalism to Its Reconstruction; The Information Meta-System and Its Network Organization; Television: the New Online Functions; From Radio Interactivity to Newspaper; Time Management: the Media Network 6. The Massification of the Internet Experience. The New Frontiers and Their Entry Portals; Media, Memory and Filters 7. Media and Citizenship in the Network Society. Mediation of Citizenship and Informational Literacy; The Different Media Ages; Different Media Ages, Different Forms of Citizenship? 8. Mediated Politics: Citizens and Political Parties in Continuous Democracy; An Institutional and Parliamentary; Framework for Continuous Democracy; The Internet as Hostage of Institutional Informational Politics? 9. Media, Mobilization and Protests. Goku vs. The Ministry of Culture: Terràvista, Television and Newspapers; The Closure of RTP2: Television Seen from the Internet; The Pro-East Timor Movement: Human Rights, Mass Media and the Internet; Instrumentalization of the Networked Symbolic Mediation Conclusion: Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship.Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship Bibliograph

Social shaping of digital publishing: exploring the interplay between culture and technology

The processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing since the advent of the Web. In recent years, the open access movement has been a major driver of scholarly communication, and change is also evident in other fields such as e-government and e-learning. Whilst many changes are driven by technological advances, an altered social reality is also pushing the boundaries of digital publishing. With 23 articles and 10 posters, Elpub 2012 focuses on the social shaping of digital publishing and explores the interplay between culture and technology. This book contains the proceedings of the conference, consisting of 11 accepted full articles and 12 articles accepted as extended abstracts. The articles are presented in groups, and cover the topics: digital scholarship and publishing; special archives; libraries and repositories; digital texts and readings; and future solutions and innovations. Offering an overview of the current situation and exploring the trends of the future, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves digital publishing

The influence of sponsorship engagement on brand loyalty: an analysis of the on-site and social media activational communications.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of sponsorship engagement (enacted via sponsorship activations) on consumers’ responses to sponsors’ activational communications. Specifically, this study aimed at examining if interaction and engagement with their team’s sponsors’ activational communication on-site, as well as on social media, influenced loyalty towards the sponsors. The study utilized service-dominant (S-D) logic as the theoretical framework. The S-D logic perspective recognizes that consumer behavior is centered on the interactive experiences between a consumer and an object, in this case the sponsor, and that a level of consumer interest and/or personal relevance with respect to the sponsor is required prior to the emergence of specific engagement levels, the outcome of which is brand loyalty (Brodie et al., 2013). Additionally, the study also recognizes the multidimensional nature of consumer engagement, and that the engagement consumer has with a sponsor differs across contexts. Based on this perspective, six hypotheses were tested. The first hypothesis formulated was that sport team involvement will have a positive relationship with sponsorship engagement. Second, brand interactivity will be positively associated with sponsorship engagement. Third, sponsorship engagement will be positively related to brand loyalty. Fourth, sponsorship engagement acts as a mediator in the relationship between sport team involvement and brand loyalty. Fifth, sponsorship engagement acts as a mediator in the relationship between brand interactivity and brand loyalty. Sixth, gender will act as a moderator in these relationships with sponsorship engagement as the mediator. To address the purpose of the study, two separate research contexts were used. The first research context of the study was social media (study-1). In this study, a questionnaire was distributed to U.S.-based fans of a women’s professional soccer team via Facebook groups organized around fan support and interactions for the women’s professional soccer team. The second research context was on-site (study-2), and U.S.-based fans of a professional football team, who visited the sponsor activation zone and interacted with the representatives, were intercepted and asked to fill out a questionnaire. Both questionnaires assessed fans’ levels of involvement with their team, perceived interactivity of the sponsorship activation, level of engagement with the sponsorship activation, and level of loyalty towards the sponsor. Data were collected from a total of 422 respondents - 241 survey respondents recruited via Facebook groups for the social media study, and 181 survey respondents intercepted at the site of activation. Data were analyzed using path analysis. The results from both contexts supported the multi-dimensional structure of consumer brand engagement. Further, all the hypotheses were supported as involvement with the sport team and brand interactivity were found to be significant drivers of sponsorship engagement, which was also found to exert a significant impact on brand loyalty. The mediating effect of sponsorship engagement was also confirmed while gender acted as a moderating variable in the relationship between brand interactivity and brand loyalty via sponsorship engagement. Overall, the conceptual model performed better in an on-site context (sport team involvement, brand interactivity, and sponsorship engagement explained 39% of the variance in brand loyalty) compared to the social media context (sport team involvement, brand interactivity, and sponsorship engagement explained 35% of the variance in brand loyalty). The findings offer several theoretical and practical implications. From a theoretical standpoint, this research finds support for the use of S-D logic as a theoretical lens to investigate the multi-dimensional nature of CBE in a sport sponsorship setting. In addition, the findings also broaden the theoretical application of S-D logic to sponsorship effectiveness/evaluation models by establishing the importance of fan-sponsor interactions and fan involvement with the sport team. The results also provides researchers with a sponsorship engagement model which they can utilize in a variety of new research contexts covering sponsorship activations. Practitioners are informed by this research on the importance of engaging the fans through activations, which offers sponsors an avenue to break through the sponsorship clutter and achieve the key marketing objective of building loyalty with the fans