Collaborative Creation of Teaching-Learning Sequences and an Atlas of Knowledge

The article is about a new online resource, a collaborative portal for teachers, which publishes a network of prerequisites for teaching/learning any concept or an activity. A simple and effective method of collaboratively constructing teaching­-learning sequences is presented. The special emergent properties of the dependency network and their didactic and epistemic implications are pointed. The article ends with an appeal to the global teaching community to contribute prerequisites of any subject to complete the global roadmap for an altas being built on similar lines as Wikipedia. The portal is launched and waiting for community participation at http://www.gnowledge.org.\u

Heritage Role Playing - History as an Interactive Digital Game

Creating virtual heritage environments that intend to be both engaging and educational is a challenging process. Digital archaeological reconstruction has been concerned with exact replication of facts rather than with understanding, for the latter raises the annoying dilemma of how to present scientific uncertainty. A computer model almost invariably implies certitude, and archaeologists are still not sure how to convey the murky battle of historical interpretation. Yet games are quite happy to allow users to "muddy" historical settings. And while the bulk of computer game design may be justly considered a-cultural or even anti-cultural, the underlying techniques of engaging interactively with the audience offer new ways of increasing the popularity and immersive learning of virtual environments. However there are some serious issues in heritage projects adopting a game-style approach. Would using interactive game techniques and technologies create a more engaging user experience? If we can animate the past in this way, will the entertainment factor help or impede learning, and how will we know how effective the interactivity is? And would our results help bridge the gap between the industry (be it virtual exhibitions or interactive game design) and academia

Many to many mobile maps

The rapid development of mobile computing devices along with a variety of Web 2.0 social networking tools has led to a dramatic change in the way maps and other spatial displays are utilized. The evolution from stand-alone desktop GIS to the interactive, mobile devices, in which information from one or more sources and is sent to one or more sinks, is discussed. The result is access to real-time information, which is generated from both traditional sources, social networks, and other specialized geowikis. Both the benefits of many to many mobile maps and the emergence of new problems, such as understanding the needs of the user and providing appropriate context, are discussed

Hack the Experience: Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science

Hack The Experience will reframe your perspective on how your audience engages your work. This will happen as you learn how to control attention through spatial and time-based techniques that you can harness as you build immersive installations or as you think about how to best arrange your work in an exhibition. You’ll learn things about the senses and how they interface with attention so that you can build in visceral forms of interactivity, engage people’s empathetic responses, and frame their moods. This book is a dense bouillon-cube of techniques that you can adapt and apply to your personal practice, and it’s a book that will walk you step-by-step through skill sets from ethnography, cognitive science, and multi-modal metaphors. The core argument of this book is that art is a form of cognitive engineering and that the physical environment (or objects in the physical environment) can be shaped to maximize emotional and sensory experience. Many types of art will benefit from this handbook (because cognition is pervasive in our experience of art), but it is particularly relevant to immersive experiential works such as installations, participatory/interactive environments, performance art, curatorial practice, architecture and landscape architecture, complex durational works, and works requiring new models of documentation. These types of work benefit from the empirical findings of cognitive science because intentionally leveraging basic human cognition in artworks can give participants new ways of seeing the world that are cognitively relevant. This leveraging process provides a new layer in the construction of conceptually grounded works

Path finding on a spherical self-organizing map using distance transformations

Spatialization methods create visualizations that allow users to analyze high-dimensional data in an intuitive manner and facilitates the extraction of meaningful information. Just as geographic maps are simpli ed representations of geographic spaces, these visualizations are esssentially maps of abstract data spaces that are created through dimensionality reduction. While we are familiar with geographic maps for path planning/ nding applications, research into using maps of high-dimensional spaces for such purposes has been largely ignored. However, literature has shown that it is possible to use these maps to track temporal and state changes within a high-dimensional space. A popular dimensionality reduction method that produces a mapping for these purposes is the Self-Organizing Map. By using its topology preserving capabilities with a colour-based visualization method known as the U-Matrix, state transitions can be visualized as trajectories on the resulting mapping. Through these trajectories, one can gather information on the transition path between two points in the original high-dimensional state space. This raises the interesting question of whether or not the Self-Organizing Map can be used to discover the transition path between two points in an n-dimensional space. In this thesis, we use a spherically structured Self-Organizing Map called the Geodesic Self-Organizing Map for dimensionality reduction and the creation of a topological mapping that approximates the n-dimensional space. We rst present an intuitive method for a user to navigate the surface of the Geodesic SOM. A new application of the distance transformation algorithm is then proposed to compute the path between two points on the surface of the SOM, which corresponds to two points in the data space. Discussions will then follow on how this application could be improved using some form of surface shape analysis. The new approach presented in this thesis would then be evaluated by analyzing the results of using the Geodesic SOM for manifold embedding and by carrying out data analyses using carbon dioxide emissions data

Path finding on a spherical self-organizing map using distance transformations

Spatialization methods create visualizations that allow users to analyze high-dimensional data in an intuitive manner and facilitates the extraction of meaningful information. Just as geographic maps are simpli ed representations of geographic spaces, these visualizations are esssentially maps of abstract data spaces that are created through dimensionality reduction. While we are familiar with geographic maps for path planning/ nding applications, research into using maps of high-dimensional spaces for such purposes has been largely ignored. However, literature has shown that it is possible to use these maps to track temporal and state changes within a high-dimensional space. A popular dimensionality reduction method that produces a mapping for these purposes is the Self-Organizing Map. By using its topology preserving capabilities with a colour-based visualization method known as the U-Matrix, state transitions can be visualized as trajectories on the resulting mapping. Through these trajectories, one can gather information on the transition path between two points in the original high-dimensional state space. This raises the interesting question of whether or not the Self-Organizing Map can be used to discover the transition path between two points in an n-dimensional space. In this thesis, we use a spherically structured Self-Organizing Map called the Geodesic Self-Organizing Map for dimensionality reduction and the creation of a topological mapping that approximates the n-dimensional space. We rst present an intuitive method for a user to navigate the surface of the Geodesic SOM. A new application of the distance transformation algorithm is then proposed to compute the path between two points on the surface of the SOM, which corresponds to two points in the data space. Discussions will then follow on how this application could be improved using some form of surface shape analysis. The new approach presented in this thesis would then be evaluated by analyzing the results of using the Geodesic SOM for manifold embedding and by carrying out data analyses using carbon dioxide emissions data

Hypermedia Systems Development: A Comparative Study of Software Engineers and Graphic Designers

Hypermedia systems development is, in many regards, different from conventional systems development, chief amongst these differences being its multidisciplinary nature. Foremost amongst the roles in hypermedia development are software engineering and graphic design. However, traditionally the tension between software engineers and graphic designers is pronounced. It is therefore important to gain an understanding of the differences between the two camps with a view to bringing them closer together. This paper reports on the findings of a survey of hypermedia developers conducted in Ireland. One of the objectives of the survey was to compare and contrast the development approaches, methods, and techniques used by software engineers with those used by graphic designers. It was found that software engineers and graphic designers are much closer than might be believed in their attitudes on the value and importance of processes and documented working methods. However, graphic designers primarily base development approaches around the use of specific tools, whereas software engineers are more reliant on traditional and object-oriented software development methods. Regarding diagramming methods, there is some evidence of cross-pollination, as software engineers often use informal techniques such as storyboarding and graphic designers use software engineering techniques such as use case diagrams, but graphic designers find software engineering techniques to be less useful than vice versa