Progressor: Social navigation support through open social student modeling

The increased volumes of online learning content have produced two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work presented in this paper combines the ideas of personalized and social learning in the context of educational hypermedia. We introduce Progressor, an innovative Web-based tool based on the concepts of social navigation and open student modeling that helps students to find the most relevant resources in a large collection of parameterized self-assessment questions on Java programming. We have evaluated Progressor in a semester-long classroom study, the results of which are presented in this paper. The study confirmed the impact of personalized social navigation support provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics attempting more questions and achieving higher success rates in answering them. A deeper analysis of the social navigation support mechanism revealed that the top students successfully led the way to discovering most relevant resources by creating clear pathways for weaker students. © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Cultural influences on perception of disability and disabled people: A comparison of opinions from students in the United Kingdom (UK) Pakistan (PAK) about a generic wheelchair using a semantic differential scale

Assistive Technology (AT) product use occurs within a socio-cultural setting. The growth internationally in the AT product market suggests that designers need to be aware of the influences that diverse cultures may have on the societal perception of an AT product through its semantic attributes. The study aimed to evaluate the visual interaction with an AT product by young adults from Pakistan, a collectivist society, and the United Kingdom (UK), an individualist society. A paper-based questionnaire survey was carried out with 281 first-year undergraduate students from the UK and Pakistan to evaluate their perception towards the visual representation of a generic conventional wheelchair image. A semantics differential (SD) scale method was used involving a seven-point bipolar SD scale incorporating sixteen pairs of adjectives defining functional, meaning, and usability attributes of the product. The mean (M) and standard deviation (sd) values were obtained for each pair of adjectives and compared between both groups by employing appropriate parametric tests. The results show that having a diverse cultural background did not appear to have overtly influenced the meanings ascribed to the generic manual wheelchair, which was unexpected. The University ‘Internationalist’ environment may have influenced the results. Some minor but critical differences were found for some pairs of adjectives (bulky-compact, heavy-light), having p-value less than 0.05 (p<0.05) that related to previous experience of wheelchairs and/or their use. Further studies are planned to investigate and validate outcomes with other student and non-student groups

Understanding Avatar Sentiments Using Verbal and Non-Verbal Cues

With the increased popularity of virtual worlds, hundreds of thousands of people from different physical locations can join virtual worlds. In this computer-based simulated 3D environment, avatars can both interact with each other and the environment. This new type of world has important implications for business, education, and society at large. In order to fully use the benefits of virtual worlds, it is important to know how the residents (i.e., avatars) behave, such as how they express sentiments. This research in progress seeks to study avatar sentiments in virtual worlds to examine whether and how sentiments are conveyed by avatars. Both verbal and non-verbal cues will be utilized in the sentiment analysis. To conduct the study, an advanced data collection method is leveraged to obtain various types of avatar data from a large number of real virtual world residents in Second Life in an effective and efficient way

Sometimes the Internet reads the question wrong: children’s search strategies & difficulties

When children search for information on a given topic, how do they go about searching for and retrieving information? What can their information seeking strategies tell us about the development of search interfaces for children's digital libraries, search engines and information repositories? We interviewed New Zealand (NZ) school children to seek insights into how they are conducting information searches during their education

Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces

abstract: Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces applies feminist, gender, and rhetorical theories and methods, along with critical discourse analysis, to case studies of the popular online social media platforms of Jezebel, Pinterest, and Facebook. This project makes visible the structural inequities that underpin the design and development of internet technologies, as well as commonplace assumptions about who is an online user, who is an active maker of internet technologies, and who is a passive consumer of internet technologies. Applying these critical lenses to these inequities and assumptions enables a re-seeing of commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender performativity and digital cultures and practices. Together, these lenses provide a useful set of tools for methodically resisting the mystique of technologies that are, simultaneously, represented as so highly technical as to be opaque to scrutiny, and as ubiquitous to everyday life as to be beneath critical examination. Through a close reading of the discourses surrounding these popular social media platforms and a rhetorical analysis of their technological affordances, I documented the transference of gender-biased assumptions about women's roles, interests, and competencies, which have historically been found in face-to-face contexts, to these digital spaces. For example, cultural assumptions about the frivolity of women's interests, endeavors, issues, and labors make their way into digital discourse that situates the online practices of women as those of passive consumers who use the internet only to shop and socialize, rather than to go about the serious, masculine business of making original digital content. This project expands on existing digital identity and performativity research, while applying a sorely needed feminist critique to online discourses and discursive practices that assume maleness and masculinity as the default positionality. These methods are one approach to addressing the pressing problems of online harassment, the gender gap in the technology sector, and the gender gap in digital literacies that have pedagogical, political, and structural implications for the classroom, workplace, economic markets, and civic sphere.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation English 201

HiER 2015. Proceedings des 9. Hildesheimer Evaluierungs- und Retrievalworkshop

Die Digitalisierung formt unsere Informationsumwelten. Disruptive Technologien dringen verstärkt und immer schneller in unseren Alltag ein und verändern unser Informations- und Kommunikationsverhalten. Informationsmärkte wandeln sich. Der 9. Hildesheimer Evaluierungs- und Retrievalworkshop HIER 2015 thematisiert die Gestaltung und Evaluierung von Informationssystemen vor dem Hintergrund der sich beschleunigenden Digitalisierung. Im Fokus stehen die folgenden Themen: Digital Humanities, Internetsuche und Online Marketing, Information Seeking und nutzerzentrierte Entwicklung, E-Learning

Patterns of place:an integrated approach for the design and evaluation of real and virtual environments

This chapter describes an approach to the development of virtual representations of real places. The work was funded under the European Union’s €20 m Future and Emerging Technologies theme of the 5th Framework Programme, “Presence”. The aim of the project, called BENOGO, was to develop a novel technology based on real-time image-based rendering (IBR) for representing places in virtual environments. The specific focus of the work presented here concerned how to capture the essential features of real places, and how to represent that knowledge, so that the team developing the IBR-based virtual environments could produce an environment that was as realistic as possible. This involved the development and evaluation of a number of virtual environments and the evolution of two complementary techniques; the Place Probe and Patterns of place

A prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images

This work was funded by the COMPANIONS project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434. Companions demonstrators can be seen at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼roberta/companions/Web/.This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: (1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. (2) The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. (3) A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. (4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC’s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.peer-reviewe

Cross-cultural influences on the semantics ascribed to assistive technology product and its envisaged user

Culture is an important variable when considering the communication of meaning through an artefact. A literature review has highlighted distinct differences in the cognitive processing that delivers perception between individuals from individualist and collectivist societies. The projected growth in Assistive Technology (AT) online marketing suggests industrial designers need to be more aware of the influence that diverse cultures may have on consumer’s perception of an AT product attributes. Artefact semantic language is the vehicle to deliver design intent during an online user-product visual interaction. Little is published about how cultural differences in cognition relate to semantic preferences of AT product attributes and their users. This study aims to evaluate visual interaction of an AT product and its perceived user by individuals from culturally distinct countries; United Kingdom (individualist) and Pakistan (collectivist). A survey was conducted with first-year undergraduate students (N=281) from both countries, to evaluate their perception of a conventional attendant wheelchair. A Semantics Differential (SD) scale was employed having sixteen pairs of adjectives defining functional, meaning, and usability attributes of the product. The mean, standard deviation values were acquired for each pair of adjective and compared between both groups by performing appropriate statistical tests. In results, diverse cultures did not appear to have overtly influenced the meanings ascribed to the product, which was unexpected. Following statistical analysis minor but critical differences were found for some pairs of adjectives (bulky-compact, heavy-light), with p-value of less than 0.05 indicating the differences. Studies are planned to further investigate outcomes and validate results