Teaching and learning in virtual worlds: is it worth the effort?

Educators have been quick to spot the enormous potential afforded by virtual worlds for situated and authentic learning, practising tasks with potentially serious consequences in the real world and for bringing geographically dispersed faculty and students together in the same space (Gee, 2007; Johnson and Levine, 2008). Though this potential has largely been realised, it generally isn’t without cost in terms of lack of institutional buy-in, steep learning curves for all participants, and lack of a sound theoretical framework to support learning activities (Campbell, 2009; Cheal, 2007; Kluge & Riley, 2008). This symposium will explore the affordances and issues associated with teaching and learning in virtual worlds, all the time considering the question: is it worth the effort

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field

Transforming pre-service teacher curriculum: observation through a TPACK lens

This paper will discuss an international online collaborative learning experience through the lens of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. The teacher knowledge required to effectively provide transformative learning experiences for 21st century learners in a digital world is complex, situated and changing. The discussion looks beyond the opportunity for knowledge development of content, pedagogy and technology as components of TPACK towards the interaction between those three components. Implications for practice are also discussed. In today’s technology infused classrooms it is within the realms of teacher educators, practising teaching and pre-service teachers explore and address effective practices using technology to enhance learning

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

Inter-organizational collaboration among health and social care: TRT©, a transactional approach

Inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs) faces challenges on many fronts in 21st century England as well as globally. Between the somewhat desirable ideal of 'joined up' systems providing efficient services to customers and clients on one side of the continuum, and the costs and risk factors associated with integrating data or constructing large databases on the other side, a fundamental tension exists. This paper addresses this issue in two parts. Firstly, it argues that there is a way forward for information sharing among heterogeneous organizations which does not involve the integration of systems, interoperability, joined up recordkeeping, database linkage, or construction of yet another large database. Transactions in Real Time© (TRT©), the transaction by transaction information sharing approach, satisfies all the requirements of each collaborating organization for information sharing. Secondly, this paper briefly considers the future of IOC among health and social care and possible pathways forward through this uncertain area. The health and social care information sharing transaction is often unique among the particular transaction situation, and the micro and macro environments

Capture and Reuse of Knowledge in ICT-based Decisional Environments

Health care practitioners continually confront with a wide range of challenges, seeking to making difficult diagnoses, avoiding errors, ensuring highest quality, maximizing efficacy and reducing costs. Information technology has the potential to reduce clinical errors and to im-prove the decision making in the clinical milieu. This paper presents a pilot development of a clinical decision support systems (CDSS) entitled MEDIS that was designed to incorporate knowledge from heterogeneous environments with the purpose of increasing the efficiency and the quality of the decision making process, and reducing costs based on advances of in-formation technologies, especially under the impact of the transition towards the mobile space. The system aims to capture and reuse knowledge in order to provide real-time access to clinical knowledge for a variety of users, including medical personnel, patients, teachers and students.Clinical Decision Support Systems, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Interoperability, Mobile Interface, Object-relational Mapping

Emergent Frameworks for Decision Support Systems

Knowledge is generated and accessed from heterogeneous spaces. The recent advances in in-formation technologies provide enhanced tools for improving the efficiency of knowledge-based decision support systems. The purpose of this paper is to present the frameworks for developing the optimal blend of technologies required in order to better the knowledge acquisition and reuse in large scale decision making environments. The authors present a case study in the field of clinical decision support systems based on emerging technologies. They consider the changes generated by the upraising social technologies and the challenges brought by the interactive knowledge building within vast online communities.Knowledge Acquisition, CDDSS, 2D Barcodes, Mobile Interface

Innovative in silico approaches to address avian flu using grid technology

The recent years have seen the emergence of diseases which have spread very quickly all around the world either through human travels like SARS or animal migration like avian flu. Among the biggest challenges raised by infectious emerging diseases, one is related to the constant mutation of the viruses which turns them into continuously moving targets for drug and vaccine discovery. Another challenge is related to the early detection and surveillance of the diseases as new cases can appear just anywhere due to the globalization of exchanges and the circulation of people and animals around the earth, as recently demonstrated by the avian flu epidemics. For 3 years now, a collaboration of teams in Europe and Asia has been exploring some innovative in silico approaches to better tackle avian flu taking advantage of the very large computing resources available on international grid infrastructures. Grids were used to study the impact of mutations on the effectiveness of existing drugs against H5N1 and to find potentially new leads active on mutated strains. Grids allow also the integration of distributed data in a completely secured way. The paper presents how we are currently exploring how to integrate the existing data sources towards a global surveillance network for molecular epidemiology.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to Infectious Disorders - Drug Target

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion