Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment

Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub-problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX). User interaction, with both the virtual environment and its digital contents, is one of the main elements affecting UX. With respect to this I focused on one of the most recent and promising approaches: the natural interaction, which is based on the idea that persons need to interact with technology in the same way they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life. Then, I focused on the problem of presenting, displaying and communicating contents. VLE represent an ideal presentation layer, being multiplatform hypermedia applications where users are free to interact with the virtual reconstructions by choosing their own visiting path. Cultural items, embedded into the environment, can be accessed by users according to their own curiosity and interests, with the support of narrative structures, which can guide them through the exploration of the virtual spaces, and conceptual maps, which help building meaningful connections between cultural items. Thus, VLE environments can even be seen as visual interfaces to DBs of cultural contents. Users can navigate the VE as if they were browsing the DB contents, exploiting both text-based queries and visual-based queries, provided by the re-contextualization of the objects into their original spaces, whose virtual exploration can provide new insights on specific elements and improve the awareness of relationships between objects in the database. Finally, I have explored the mobile dimension, which became absolutely relevant in the last period. Nowadays, off-the-shelf consumer devices as smartphones and tablets guarantees amazing computing capabilities, support for rich multimedia contents, geo-localization and high network bandwidth. Thus, mobile devices can support users in mobility and detect the user context, thus allowing to develop a plethora of location-based services, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits and cultural or tourist sites according to visitors’ personal interest and curiosity

2017-2018 Course Catalog

2017-2018 Course Catalo

2015-2016 Course Catalog

2015-2016 Course Catalo

2016-2017 Course Catalog

2016-2017 Course Catalo

“Access denied”? Barriers for staff accessing, using and sharing published information online within the National Health Service (NHS) in England: technology, risk, culture, policy and practice

The overall aim of the study was to investigate barriers to online professional information seeking, use and sharing occurring within the NHS in England, their possible effects (upon education, working practices, working lives and clinical and organisational effectiveness), and possible explanatory or causative factors. The investigation adopted a qualitative case study approach, using semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis as its methods, with three NHS Trusts of different types (acute - district general hospital, mental health / community, acute – teaching) as the nested sites of data collection. It aimed to be both exploratory and explanatory. A stratified sample of participants, including representatives of professions whose perspectives were deemed to be relevant, and clinicians with educational or staff development responsibilities, was recruited for each Trust. Three non-Trust specialists (the product manager of a secure web gateway vendor, an academic e-learning specialist, and the senior manager at NICE responsible for the NHS Evidence electronic content and web platform) were also interviewed. Policy documents, statistics, strategies, reports and quality accounts for the Trusts were obtained via public websites, from participants or via Freedom of Information requests. Thematic analysis following the approach of Braun and Clarke (2006) was adopted as the analytic method for both interviews and documents. The key themes of the results that emerged are presented: barriers to accessing and using information, education and training, professional cultures and norms, information governance and security, and communications policy. The findings are discussed under three main headings: power, culture, trust and risk in information security; use and regulation of Web 2.0 and social media, and the system of professions. It became evident that the roots of problems with access to and use of such information lay deep within the culture and organisational characteristics of the NHS and its use of IT. A possible model is presented to explain the interaction of the various technical and organisational factors that were identified as relevant. A number of policy recommendations are put forward to improve access to published information at Trust level, as well as recommendations for further research

The impact of tecchnological advancements on intermediaries in the motion picture industry.

The main research objective of the dissertation is to systematically capture and explain those changes in a particular sector of the media industry that are triggered through technological advancements and have an impact on intermediation. Intermediation is an economic concept, which has proven its usefulness in the analysis of certain industries such as the trade or the financial service sector. However, the microeconomic-based concept of intermediation is typically not used for the analysis of technology-driven changes. In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, a new approach, namely, the Intermediation Analysis Approach is developed over the course of the dissertation and applied to a sample sector. The motion picture industry has been selected for this as intermediaries such as sales agencies and distributors traditionally play an important role. In addition, the motion picture sector has witnessed numerous technological advancements in the past and is thus perfectly suited for an ex-post analysis of the last fifteen years. In addition, intermediaries in the motion picture industry received little attention so far in literature. The theoretical foundation established at the beginning of the dissertation is from paramount importance for the development of the Intermediation Analysis Approach. Industrial Economics is used as the theoretical frame of reference. Industrial Economics provides a suitable frame of reference for the research objectives and questions of this dissertation, as it is characterized by a high degree of reality. In this context, the theory of the firm is particularly important and is therefore discussed in detail from different viewpoints. In addition to the theory of the firm, the large volume of literature on intermediaries is also highly relevant for establishing the theoretical foundation. This includes findings from various research strands on intermediation, including, but not limited to, the trade and marketing literature as well as the literature on financial intermediation In the course of the analysis, the activities of intermediaries, the value provided by intermediaries and the incentives to cooperate with intermediaries are identified as the key factors that have to be examined. All these facets are incorporated into the Intermediation Analysis Approach and tools are developed for each facet. The analysis approach itself thus consists of four steps: (1) the analysis of industry characteristics (incl. the value added structure in order to identify intermediaries), (2) the analysis of the activities performed by intermediaries, (3) the analysis of the value provided by intermediaries and (4) the incentives to cooperate with intermediaries. The tools of the analysis approach employ comparative statics analysis to examine the impact of technological advancements at two distinct points in time. By examining each facet in detail, the impact of technological advancements on intermediaries can be determined and explained. While the Intermediation Analysis Approach can be employed in a variety of use cases. It is used ex-post for the analysis of the motion picture industry where the status quo of intermediaries in 1999 is compared to their status in 2014. The objective of the application of the analysis approach is to answer a variety of practical research questions for the motion picture industry. Even more importantly, the applicability of the Intermediation Analysis Approach is demonstrated. The results of the analysis show that some interesting developments have occurred. Many of which received little attention or are contrary to what some researchers predicted in the past. The analysis results show, that the activities of most intermediaries have not been directly influenced by technological advancements. Particularly the activities on the informational level still require a high degree of specialization and experience. In regards to the value that intermediaries in the motion picture sector provide and its change in the last fifteen years, the results of the analysis reveal a variety of value sources, which enable intermediaries to add value. The contact reduction based on the Baligh-Richartz-Effect, standardization, scale effects and specialization are the most prominent value sources that enable the intermediaries in the motion picture industry to increase the transaction efficiency. Technological advancement did not reduce the strength of most value sources. In regards to the incentives and disincentives of up- and downstream market participants to cooperate with intermediaries, the analysis results show that a variety of incentives and disincentives can be identified. However, in most cases the cooperation is not optional, often for both of the intermediary’s transaction partners. Nevertheless, the analysis still reveals noteworthy incentives and disincentives. The most prominent one is the observation that the decrease in transaction costs and increase in transaction efficiency is in the interest of the involved transaction partners as well. Since most intermediaries’ ability to increase efficiency improved in the examined timeframe, the incentives to cooperate with them grew stronger as well.Administración y Dirección de Empresa

The 15th International CDIO Conference: Proceedings – Full Papers

We discuss a conceptual thesis structure model and visual tool for enhancing the writing process in the context of an engineering Master’s thesis. Our model is based on visualizing the thesis as a series of funnels that adjust the writing focus to the desired scope in each individual chapter. At the end of the thesis, the focus is widened back into the original topic area with a reflection on how the solutions proposed in the thesis have impacted or potentially will impact the field. Using our model gives students the opportunity to write a good Master’s thesis in various engineering disciplines. In our experience, the Focus Funnel approach has been very useful and effective, resulting in an overall improvement in the quality of engineering Master’s theses in our degree program.</p