Enter the Circle: Blending Spherical Displays and Playful Embedded Interaction in Public Spaces

Public displays are used a variety of contexts, from utility driven information displays to playful entertainment displays. Spherical displays offer new opportunities for interaction in public spaces, allowing users to face each other during interaction and explore content from a variety of angles and perspectives. This paper presents a playful installation that places a spherical display at the centre of a playful environment embedded with interactive elements. The installation, called Enter the Circle, involves eight chair-sized boxes filled with interactive lights that can be controlled by touching the spherical display. The boxes are placed in a ring around the display, and passers-by must “enter the circle” to explore and play with the installation. We evaluated this installation in a pedestrianized walkway for three hours over an evening, collecting on-screen logs and video data. This paper presents a novel evaluation of a spherical display in a public space, discusses an experimental design concept that blends displays with embedded interaction, and analyses real world interaction with the installation

IODA - an Interactive Open Document Architecture

AbstractObjective of the proposed architecture is to enable representing an electronic document as a multi-layered structure of executable digital objects, which is extensible and without a need to support any particular formats or user interfaces. IODA layers are intended to reflect document content organization levels rather then system abstraction or functional levels, as in software architecture models

Three Learning Contexts as Paths to Preservice Instrumental Music Teachers\u27 Score Analysis, Rehearsal Planning, and Instructional Readiness: An Exploratory Study in Professional Development

Despite an abundance of evidence-based research pointing to the effectiveness of long-term teacher professional development (PD) (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017; Desimone, 2009), instrumental music teachers who seek to improve their teaching practices are limited to and often prefer short-term PD opportunities (Bauer, 2007; West, 2020). In recent years, a growing knowledge base focused on music teacher PD has given attention to long-term, content-based and collaborative music PD (Conway, 2015; Kastner, 2014; Stanley, Snell & Edgar, 2014) while a dearth of evidence-based research exists on short-term music PD (Bauer, 2007; West, 2020). The purpose of this collective case study was to examine short-term professional development through participants’ experiences at a professional development workshop designed to introduce and guide implementation of an approach to teaching beginning band, unfamiliar to the participants. Three short-term professional development learning contexts (self-study through reading, self-study through observation, and group collaboration) anchored the study and served as single case studies. Nine preservice instrumental music teachers—three in each cohort—attended a one-day workshop designed to deliver instruction through one of the three learning contexts. Each cohort demonstrated the ability to apply aspects of the PD content to teaching practice and expressed positive beliefs about the PD encounter. By the end of the workshop, the reading and collaboration cohorts were positioned to begin applying the approach to teaching practice while the observation cohort was still developing their understanding of the approach. Analysis revealed seven themes centered around—instructional goals, engaging learners, pedagogical shift, misunderstandings, self-efficacy, interest/value and attitude. Considered collectively, they show participants exhibiting aspects of pedagogical content knowledge and shared beliefs about their PD experience. This study brings forth a more nuanced understanding of short-term PD. Findings, herein, contribute to the knowledge base by suggesting the potential for effective short-term PD formats and offering recommendations for improvement. It is imperative that music education continue to build an evidence-based foundation related to the professional growth of music teachers. Future research on short-term music teacher PD should involve in-service teachers, include learner outcomes, and examine teachers as self-regulated learners beyond the PD encounter

Bodies of Seeing: A video ethnography of academic x-ray image interpretation training and professional vision in undergraduate radiology and radiography education

This thesis reports on a UK-based video ethnography of academic x-ray image interpretation training across two undergraduate courses in radiology and radiography. By studying the teaching and learning practices of the classroom, I initially explore the professional vision of x-ray image interpretation and how its relation to normal radiographic anatomy founds the practice of being ‘critical’. This criticality accomplishes a faculty of perceptual norms that is coded and organised and also, therefore, of a specific radiological vision. Professionals’ commitment to the cognitivist rhetoric of ‘looking at’/‘pattern recognition’ builds this critical perception, a perception that deepens in organisation when professionals endorse a ‘systematic approach’ that mediates matter-of-fact thoroughness and offers a helpful critical commentary towards the image. In what follows, I explore how x-ray image interpretation is constituted in case presentations. During training, x-ray images are treated with suspicion and as misleading and are aligned with a commitment to discursive contexts of ‘missed abnormality’, ‘interpretive risk’, and ‘technical error’. The image is subsequently constructed as ambiguous and that what is shown cannot be taken at face value. This interconnects with reenacting ideals around ‘seeing clearly’ that are explained through the teaching practices and material world of the academic setting and how, if misinterpretation is established, the ambiguity of the image is reduced by embodied gestures and technoscientific knowledge. By making this correction, the ambiguous image is reenacted and the misinterpretation of image content is explained. To conclude, I highlight how the professional vision of academic x-ray image interpretation prepares students for the workplace, shapes the classificatory interpretation of ab(normal) anatomy, manages ambiguity through embodied expectations and bodily norms, and cultivates body-machine relations

Early childhood problem-solving interaction:young children’s discourse during small-group work in primary school

It is widely accepted that problem solving and reasoning during small-group work with either peers only or with intervening teachers may contribute to children’s language and cognitive development, depending on the participants’ discourse. Most research is experimental of nature, focusing on teacher-initiated problems. Therefore, in this thesis young children’s construction of their own problems during small-group work in early childhood education is investigated, through a detailed analysis of videotaped and transcribed problem-solving interactions.The most important findings are: (1) Whether the teacher is present partly determines young children’s discourse. In teacher’s absence children produce significantly longer and more complex turns and sentences. Moreover, they accomplish different types of speech actions than in teacher’s presence. (2) Most teacher practices minimize young children’s opportunities to participate actively in problem-solving interventions, which follow a linear structure, as often advised in problem-solving textbooks. (3) Contrastingly, young children themselves construct also iterative, non-linear problem-solving interactions highly similar to adult business meetings. (4) By adapting their speech actions to the problem type, children construct three types of problem-solving interactions, which are all concluded, contrastingly to adult business meetings. (5) Both the type of reactions to other’s contributions and the type of accounts determine how children reason: accepting reactions and directly verifiable accounts conclude the problem-solving interaction, contrasting to oppositional reactions and personal, normative and tentative accounts enhancing children’s reasoning. All findings demonstrate that both problem solving and reasoning of young children should not be considered as an individual cognitive accomplishment, rather as an interactional sequential accomplishment

Beyond the Makerspace

Makerspaces—local workshops that offer access to and training on fabrication technologies, often with a focus on creativity, education, and entrepreneurship—proliferated in the 2010s, popping up in cities across the world. Beyond the Makerspace is a longitudinal, ethnographically informed study of a particular Seattle makerspace that begins in 2015 and ends with the closing of the space in 2018. Examining acts of making with objects, tools, words, and relationships, Beyond the Makerspace reads making as a kind of rhetoric, or meaning-making work, and argues that acts of making things are rhetorical in the sense that they are culturally situated and that they mark boundaries of what counts as making and who counts as maker. By focusing on a particular makerspace over time, Shivers-McNair attends to a changing cohort of makerspace regulars as they face challenges of bringing their vision of inclusivity and diversity to fruition, and offers an examination of how makers are made (and unmade, and remade) in a makerspace. Beyond the Makerspace contributes not only to our understanding of making and makerspaces, but also to our understanding of how to study making—and meaning making, more broadly—in ways that examine and intervene in the marking of difference. Thus, the book examines what (and whose) values and practices we are taking up when we identify as makers or when we turn a writing classroom or a library space into a makerspace

Information Seeking from Web-Based Resources: Sensemaking Strategies and Implications for Interaction Design

The internet has made an enormous volume of information available, and there has been substantial research into how users look for information. However, there has been much less research about how they make sense of what they find, and how sensemaking is shaped by the tasks they are trying to achieve. This research addresses that gap, with empirical studies of sensemaking during web-based information tasks. Two main studies are presented, which aimed to expose the relationship between information seeking and information comprehension and use. The first study explored the actions of experienced information processors (in this case, doctoral students) as they undertook research-related web-based tasks related to their own work. The second study observed experienced users as they undertook an unfamiliar topic comprehension task. In both studies participants were encouraged to ‘think-aloud’ as they completed web-based tasks. Audio-recording was used in Study-1 with video-recording in Study-2. In addition to the task session, background questionnaires and sample interviews were applied. A detailed, iterative inductive analysis was undertaken for each study. The analysis produced a framework that models the users’ process in terms of five categories of information interactions: seeking, evaluating for selection, evaluating for use, compilation, and planning. A range of visual representations were developed to capture the user sessions, expressing facets such as how resources were used over time and in combination, and the sequences of user behaviours. Attention was given to the use of representation throughout this process. Sensemaking goals and strategies were inferred from users’ behaviours and utterances, and were related to their activity and output. The intertwined nature of information seeking and sensemaking activity was revealed, and planning (not addressed in previous literature) was identified as a significant behaviour that drives strategy and binds the other behaviours to the task-in-hand. These findings have implications for interaction design and for tools to support sensemaking