9,231 research outputs found
Reservoir hill and audiences for online interactive drama
This paper analyses the interactive experiences constructed for users of the New Zealand online interactive drama Reservoir Hill (2009, 2010), focusing both on the nature and levels of engagement which the series provided to users and the difficulties of audience research into this kind of media content. The series itself provided tightly prescribed forms of interactivity across multiple platforms, allowing forms of engagement that were greatly appreciated by its audience overall but actively explored only by a small proportion of users. The responses from members of the Reservoir Hill audience suggests that online users themselves are still learning the nature of, and constraints on, their engagements with various forms of online interactive media. This paper also engages with issue of how interactivity itself is defined, the difficulties of both connecting with audience members and securing timely access to online data, and the challenges of undertaking collaborative research with media producers in order to gain access to user data
Mobile Knowledge, Karma Points, and Digital Peers: The Tacit Epistemology and Linguistic Representation of MOOCs
Media representations of massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as those offered by Coursera, edX and Udacity reflect tension and ambiguity in their bold promise of democratized education and global knowledge sharing. An approach to MOOCs that emphasizes the tacit epistemology of such representations suggests a richer account of the ambiguities of MOOCs, the unsettled linguistic and visual representations that reflect the strange lifeworld of global online courses and the pressing need for promising innovation that seeks to serve the restless global desire for knowledge. This perspective piece critically appraises the linguistic laboratory of thought such representation reveals and its destabilized rhetoric of technology and educational practice. The mobile knowledge of MOOCs, detached from context and educational purpose and indifferent to cultural boundary distortions, contains both the promise of democratized education and the shadow of post-colonial knowledge export
Automation of play:theorizing self-playing games and post-human ludic agents
This article offers a critical reflection on automation of play and its significance for the theoretical inquiries into digital games and play. Automation has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. On the following pages, the author explores various instances of automated non-human play and proposes a post-human theoretical lens, which may help to create a new framework for the understanding of videogames, renegotiate the current theories of interaction prevalent in game studies, and rethink the relationship between human players and digital games
Rethinking Privacy and Freedom of Expression in the Digital Era: An Interview with Mark Andrejevic
Mark Andrejevic, Professor of Media Studies at the Pomona College in Claremont, California, is a distinguished critical theorist exploring issues around surveillance from pop culture to the logic of automated, predictive surveillance practices. In an interview with WPCC issue co-editor Pinelopi Troullinou, Andrejevic responds to pressing questions emanating from the surveillant society looking to shift the conversation to concepts of data holdersâ accountability. He insists on the need to retain awareness of power relations in a data driven society highlighting the emerging challenge, âto provide ways of understanding the long and short term consequences of data driven social sortingâ. Within the context of Snowdenâs revelations and policy responses worldwide he recommends a shift of focus from discourses surrounding âpre-emptionâ to those of âpreventionâ also questioning the notion that citizens might only need to be concerned, âif we are doing something âwrongââ as this is dependent on a utopian notion of the state and commercial processes, âthat have been purged of any forms of discriminationâ. He warns of multiple concerns of misuse of data in a context where âa total surveillance society looks all but inevitableâ. However, the academy may be in a unique position to provide ways of reframing the terms of discussions over privacy and surveillance via the analysis of âthe long and short term consequences of data driven social sorting (and its automation)â and in particular of algorithmic accountability
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The Future of Personalisation at News Websites: Lessons from a Longitudinal Study
This paper tracks the recent history of personalization at national news websites in the United Kingdom and United States, allowing an analysis to be made of the reasons for and implications of the adoption of this form of adaptive interactivity. Using three content surveys conducted over three and a half years, the study recordsâat an unprecedented level of detailâthe range of personalization features offered by contemporary news websites, and demonstrates how news organizations increasingly rely on software algorithms to predict readersâ content preferences. The results also detail how news organizationsâ deployment of personalization on mobile devices, and in conjunction with social networking platforms, is still at an early stage. In addressing the under-researched but importantâand increasingly prevalentâphenomenon of personalization, this paper contributes to debates on journalismâs future funding, transparency, and societal benefits
Formal representation and proof for cooperative games
In this contribution we present some work we have been doing in representing and proving theorems from the area of economics, and mainly we present work we will do in a project in which we will apply mechanised theorem proving tools to a class of economic problems for which very few general tools currently exist. For mechanised theorem proving, the research introduces the field to a new application domain with a large user base; more specifically, the researchers are collaborating with developers working on state-of-the-art theorem provers. For economics, the research will provide tools for handling a hard class of problems; more generally, as the first application of mechanised theorem proving to centrally involve economic theorists, it aims to properly introduce mechanised theorem proving techniques to the discipline.\u
Comparative Advantage Learning Software: Application (Off-line) Software with Assessment Capabilities
This paper describes software, written by the author, for learning comparative advantage and the specialisation gains from trade. Starting with given absolute costs and available resources for two nations, the student constructs production possibilities curves. He or she then picks a term of trade and feasible levels of exports and imports at which both nations can gain from trade. This non-commercial software is application software rather than a web application. As such, it is easier to develop than comparable web applications. Traditionally, application software has lacked the relatively secure assessment (i.e. grading) capability of web applications. The software described in this paper, however, produces a verifiable assessment by producing a code based on the student's identifiers and his or her score. This code is then passed to the instructor who, using other software, decodes it.
Non-user-friendly
User-friendly design makes our use of emerging technologies intuitive and seamless, but it also conceals the new solutionsâ influence over how we act, think and plan. In this paper, I analyze the logic of our newly developed âtouchscreen sensibilitiesâ to speculate on alternative, ânon-user-friendlyâ design practices that, by invading intuitive interfaces, could make the users aware of their reliance on invisible algorithmic operations to learn and to feel. I revisit Ĺ˝iĹžek and Pfallerâs conception of âinterpassivityâ to explore its potential as a means of resisting interactivity and inciting consciousness in contemporary speculative design. The critical interface I envision must defamiliarize consumption, prevent participation, and de-frame perception â make the user experience what lack of control feels like, and do so to encourage resistance.</jats:p
Naming trouble in online internationalized education
This paper offers an analysis of cultural politics that emerged around naming practices in an ethnographic study of the interactions within an online MBA unit, offered by an Australian university to both âlocalâ Australian students and international students enrolled through a Malaysian partner institution. It became evident that names were doing important identity, textual and pedagogical work in these interactions and considerable interactive trouble arose over the social practices surrounding names. The analysis uses sociolinguistic concepts to analyse selected slices of the online texts and participants' interview accounts. The analysis shows how ethnocentric default settings in the courseware served to heighten and exacerbate cultural difference as a pedagogical problem. These events are related to the larger problematic of theorising the context of culture in times of globalisation and increasingly entangled educational routes, with implications for the enterprise of online internationalised education
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