Pervasive Displays Research: What's Next?

Reports on the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays that took place from June 6-8 in Munich, Germany

Maladaptive Coping Habits Amongst Student Leaders in Peer Support Roles: Reframing Exposure to Vicarious Trauma

Undergraduate orientation programs at post-secondary institutions are important platforms for new students to adjust to a new social and academic climate. Student leaders play a critical role in helping new students find belonging on campus. However, being in a peer support role can heighten student leaders’ exposure to vicarious trauma (VT) if they have not yet mastered how to regulate their own emotions or withstand the social and academic pressures associated with university. Many student leaders experience exacerbated symptoms of VT because of their maladaptive coping habits. Institution X does not have a viable framework to monitor or regulate student leaders’ interactions when supporting students in distress, nor does it have the means to measure coping skills or provide effective critical incident support. This Organizational Improvement Plan examines the use of maladaptive coping habits by student leaders when supporting peers in distress and discusses strategies to help these leaders develop heathy attitudes towards coping to overcome the negative effects of vicarious trauma. Situational Leadership® II (Blanchard et al., 2013; Zigarmi & Roberts, 2017) and Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007) can be used to influence coping habits by creating a new paradigm for thinking about change management in which student leaders and administrators can explore issues collaboratively. A proposed solution is to create an extended training framework, which establishes learning communities as vehicles to teach adaptive coping skills using a modified dialectical behaviour therapy curriculum

Learning preferences for personalisation in a pervasive environment

With ever increasing accessibility to technological devices, services and applications there is also an increasing burden on the end user to manage and configure such resources. This burden will continue to increase as the vision of pervasive environments, with ubiquitous access to a plethora of resources, continues to become a reality. It is key that appropriate mechanisms to relieve the user of such burdens are developed and provided. These mechanisms include personalisation systems that can adapt resources on behalf of the user in an appropriate way based on the user's current context and goals. The key knowledge base of many personalisation systems is the set of user preferences that indicate what adaptations should be performed under which contextual situations. This thesis investigates the challenges of developing a system that can learn such preferences by monitoring user behaviour within a pervasive environment. Based on the findings of related works and experience from EU project research, several key design requirements for such a system are identified. These requirements are used to drive the design of a system that can learn accurate and up to date preferences for personalisation in a pervasive environment. A standalone prototype of the preference learning system has been developed. In addition the preference learning system has been integrated into a pervasive platform developed through an EU research project. The preference learning system is fully evaluated in terms of its machine learning performance and also its utility in a pervasive environment with real end users

Comparative Student Perception and Interactional Event Analysis in an Urban Computer-Based Distance Education Environment

This two-part study used quasi-experimental research methodologies to analyze and assess students\u27 perceptions of the level of their personal interaction, overall interaction, observed interaction, attitude, satisfaction and direct participation in synchronous computer-based interactive remote instruction (IRI) and two-way audio/one-way video (TELETECHNET) intra-urban distance learning environments. For the first part of this study 101 subjects were measured during a semester of instruction in three 4-week interval observations. Intact groups assigned to two different treatment environments, computer-based upper division and graduate level computer science distance learning courses, and two-way audio/one-way video upper division computer science distance learning courses were observed at an urban university\u27s main campus site location and an adjacent intra-urban remote site location. Subjects in the two learning environments differed significantly in the three trial mean of their perceptions of individual interaction. Computer-based distance learning environment subjects had a more positive mean score on perceptions of individual interaction than did their two-way audio/one-way video counterparts. Perception of individual interaction for computer-based subjects was significantly higher than two-way audio/one way video environment subjects perceptions of individual interaction and relatively flat across trials one and two with a large linear increase at trial three. Scores for observed interaction were significantly higher for two-way audio/one-way video subjects both as an overall mean and as a function of each trial. Direct participation was significantly higher for computer-based students both as a function of overall score across and as a function of trial. Perceptions of overall interaction did not vary significantly between the environments. Subject attitude stayed nominally, but not significantly, higher in the two-way audio/one-way video environment both overall and by trial. Measured levels of student satisfaction did not differ significantly by overall mean, by trial or by trend between each environment. There were no significant differences in the dependent variables between the main or remote intra-urban sites for either environment. A multiple regression analysis revealed that 63% of the variance in satisfaction in the computer-based environment and 52% for the two-way audio/one-way video environment could be explained by the combined influence of the criterion variables of student attitude and perceptions of individual interaction measured in this study. In the second part of the study, the researcher defined and categorized IRI classroom events. A modified interactional analysis methodology was presented to provide a framework for future quantitative analysis that can capture the component elements of student perceptions of interaction measured in the first part of the study. Implications of the findings for educators, policy makers and student populations within the urban milieu were discussed. Recommendations for increasing student perceptions of each environment\u27s less prevalent forms of interactivity and directions for future research were offered

Creating Knowledge, volume 2, 2009

Dear Students, Faculty Colleagues, and Friends, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, through the deliberations and efforts of its Task Force on “Students Creating Knowledge”, chaired by Professor Ralph Erber, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, committed itself to a number of new strategic initiatives that would enhance and enrich the academic quality of the student experience within the College. Chief among these initiatives was one that would encourage students to become actively engaged in creating scholarship and research and give them a venue for the publication of their essays. Last year, this eventuated in the publication of the very first volume of Creating Knowledge: The LA&S Student Research Journal. Of course, it might be argued that a tradition of such student scholarship and accomplishment can only be truly started if there are follow-up volumes to the “premiere” edition of the journal. And so, I am extremely pleased to be able to introduce the second volume of Creating Knowledge. It is through the continuing, annual publication of this undergraduate student journal that we aim to encourage students across the College and the University to understand that leadership within their disciplines requires them to not only be familiar with the knowledge base of the discipline, but to have the experience of being actively engaged in understanding how creative work and/or scientific discoveries are created through research, scholarship, and the dissemination and sharing of knowledge. I want to congratulate, first and foremost, the many student scholars whose work is featured in this second volume of the journal. I also want to thank the students and faculty who served to make this publication possible—those who served on the editorial board that shaped this journal and who reviewed the many submissions of student work. In accomplishing this task all of you have participated in what is the heart of scholarship—the contributions to enabling and sustaining an intellectual community—one which we hope will lead you to make similar contributions beyond the College and DePaul University. To one and all, my most sincere congratulations and gratitude. Chuck Suchar Deanhttps://via.library.depaul.edu/ckgallery/1001/thumbnail.jp

CUshop: A Simulated Shopping Environment Fostering Consumer-Centric Packaging Design & Testing

Consumer product packaging provides product damage protection, extends product shelf life, and communicates product usage instructions to the consumer. Its collective contribution to the waste stream is notorious, but its role in product salability is much less understood. Consumers now make the majority of product purchase decisions while present at the shelf, and since they do it very quickly (within 5-8 seconds), and do not appear to adhere to strong brand loyalty as was once more common, packaging (and more specifically, its aesthetics and contrast with its competitors) plays a dominant role in the decision-making process. It is difficult, however, to measure and predict the effectiveness of package design via empirical consumer response testing, and even more challenging to seamlessly integrate consumer response measures into the package design process. The key to meaningful measurement of consumer behavior in the package design process is immersion of the consumer in a convincing environment that elicits natural shopping behavior. While an actual retail store offers the most realistic environment, controlling experimental conditions in this setting is problematic. An artificial simulation of such an environment is desirable for reasons of efficiency, cost, and flexibility. CUshop, a unique laboratory mixing physical store elements with those akin to virtual reality simulation, is introduced. The laboratory has been created with the goal of priming participants into a shopping context, or shopping frame of mind, prompting realistic consumer behavior that can be measured and studied via objective forms of measurement (e.g., eye tracking)

Integrating Haptic Feedback into Mobile Location Based Services

Haptics is a feedback technology that takes advantage of the human sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to a haptic-enabled device such as a mobile phone. Historically, human-computer interaction has been visual - text and images on the screen. Haptic feedback can be an important additional method especially in Mobile Location Based Services such as knowledge discovery, pedestrian navigation and notification systems. A knowledge discovery system called the Haptic GeoWand is a low interaction system that allows users to query geo-tagged data around them by using a point-and-scan technique with their mobile device. Haptic Pedestrian is a navigation system for walkers. Four prototypes have been developed classified according to the user’s guidance requirements, the user type (based on spatial skills), and overall system complexity. Haptic Transit is a notification system that provides spatial information to the users of public transport. In all these systems, haptic feedback is used to convey information about location, orientation, density and distance by use of the vibration alarm with varying frequencies and patterns to help understand the physical environment. Trials elicited positive responses from the users who see benefit in being provided with a “heads up” approach to mobile navigation. Results from a memory recall test show that the users of haptic feedback for navigation had better memory recall of the region traversed than the users of landmark images. Haptics integrated into a multi-modal navigation system provides more usable, less distracting but more effective interaction than conventional systems. Enhancements to the current work could include integration of contextual information, detailed large-scale user trials and the exploration of using haptics within confined indoor spaces

Teaching social studies content to students with autism using a graphic organizer intervention

The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) emphasizes the teaching of social studies to provide students with information, critical thinking skills, and experiences to allow them to grow into responsible and effective citizens. In the past more attention was given to creating central standards in the area of social studies (National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, 2010). There has been very little research in academic skill acquisition for students with developmental disabilities (Browder et al., 2006). There were no studies found that addressed social studies instruction for student with developmental disabilities. One of the barriers to teaching social studies to students without and with disabilities is students’ ability to read and understand written expository text. This current study investigated the use of specific vocabulary of social studies instruction to teach middle school students with autism to use a modified graphic organizer procedure to promote improved expository text comprehension in social studies topic area of United States History. Three students were instructed to use a modified graphic organizer intervention to answer nine items from self-read history passages. Results indicated that each of the three students increased their ability to independently respond to the nine items on the graphic organizer

Mustang Daily, November 20, 1995

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/5930/thumbnail.jp