Conceptualizing learning from the everyday activities of digital kids

This paper illustrates the intensified engagement that youth are having with digital technologies and introduces a framework for examining digital fluency – the competencies, new representational practices, design sensibilities, ownership, and strategic expertise that a learner gains or demonstrates by using digital tools to gather, design, evaluate, critique, synthesize, and develop digital media artifacts, communication messages, or other electronic expressions. A primary goal of this paper is to identify promising perspectives through which learning is conceptualized, and to share the methodological challenges in investigating digital fluency in both individual and collaborative learning activities that take place in complex naturalistic settings and socially-constructed online worlds. A review is provided of the current and prospective research methods that researchers use to capture, document and study the compelling ways in which children and young people are using digital technologies such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), social networking software, video games, multimedia authoring tools, and mobile phones in everyday life to learn and play. The paper argues for a need to study the authentic, inventive, and emergent uses of digital technologies and interactive learning environments among youth to contribute to advancement of theories of everyday learning and to build a deeper understanding of how learning occurs in out-of-school settings from a practise-oriented perspective rather than a knowledge-centred one. Implications for instructional practise are also discussed in addition to ethical and pragmatic issues that will need to be addressed in the study of digital kids

Conceptual model of mobile augmented reality for engaging hearing-impaired museum visitors

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) has matured significantly over the past decades since the birth of multimedia system. It has evolved from the conceptual idea of augmented reality experience to its actual practical applications in use on smartphones. Researchers in MAR have resolved to employ the concept of engagement in designing MAR applications to attract museum visitors’ interest and ensure a more effective learning environment. However, most of these MAR applications are tailored to normal hearing visitors while the hearing-impaired (HI) visitors are less supported. This makes HI visitors to go through unpalatable experiences and eventually become dissatisfied with their visit to the museum. Also, there is lack of studies on the conceptual model of MAR for engaging the HI museum visitors. Therefore, this study proposes a conceptual model of MAR for the HI museum engagement (MARHIME) and eventually enhances their engagement during their museum visits. In achieving the aim of this study, design science research methodology was adapted. This study has determined engagement elements through expert review which were used to design the conceptual model of MARHIME. In addition, an MAR prototype was developed based on the MARHIME conceptual model and its architecture. The MARHIME prototype includes three-dimensional models, video, text, and images to deliver salient information of important artefacts to HI museum visitors. Moreover, the MARHIME application may only function in the museum by scanning the museum environment because the HI can use MAR as a visual signal guide in order to catch missing aural signals during their visit to the museums. The study involved 73 HI museum visitors as participants in order to evaluate the MARHIME prototype on their engagement experience. From the results of the evaluation, it was found that the MARHIME prototype was able to engage the HI visitors during their visit to the museum. Therefore, this study has validated a conceptual model on MAR for engaging the HI museum visitors. This conceptual model of MARHIME can be used as guidelines for researchers in understanding the elements of MAR in engaging the HI museum visitors and for developers in assisting the process of designing and developing MAR application for the HI museum visitors. This study contributes to the engagement of HI people during their museum visits to ensure the inclusiveness of disabled people in the MAR design

Approaching algorithmic power

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. Emerging quite recently as an object of study within media and communications, cultural research, gender and race studies, and urban geography, the algorithm often seems ungraspable. Framed as code, it becomes proprietary property, black-boxed and inaccessible. Framed as a totality, its becomes overwhelmingly complex, incomprehensible in its operations. Framed as a procedure, it becomes a technique to be optimised, bracketing out the political. In struggling to adequately grasp the algorithmic as an object of study, to unravel its mechanisms and materialities, these framings offer limited insight into how algorithmic power is initiated and maintained. This thesis instead argues for an alternative approach: firstly, that the algorithmic is coordinated by a coherent internal logic, a knowledge-structure that understands the world in particular ways; second, that the algorithmic is enacted through control, a material and therefore observable performance which purposively influences people and things towards a predetermined outcome; and third, that this complex totality of architectures and operations can be productively analysed as strategic sociotechnical clusters of machines. This method of inquiry is developed with and tested against four contemporary examples: Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Alexa, and Palantir Gotham. Highly profitable, widely adopted and globally operational, they exemplify the algorithmic shift from whiteboard to world. But if the world is productive, it is also precarious, consisting of frictional spaces and antagonistic subjects. Force cannot be assumed as unilinear, but is incessantly negotiated—operations of parsing data and processing tasks forming broader operations that strive to establish subjectivities and shape relations. These negotiations can fail, destabilised by inadequate logics and weak control. A more generic understanding of logic and control enables a historiography of the algorithmic. The ability to index information, to structure the flow of labor, to exert force over subjects and spaces— these did not emerge with the microchip and the mainframe, but are part of a longer lineage of calculation. Two moments from this lineage are examined: house-numbering in the Habsburg Empire and punch-card machines in the Third Reich. Rather than revolutionary, this genealogy suggests an evolutionary process, albeit uneven, linking the computation of past and present. The thesis makes a methodological contribution to the nascent field of algorithmic studies. But more importantly, it renders algorithmic power more intelligible as a material force. Structured and implemented in particular ways, the design of logic and control construct different versions, or modalities, of algorithmic power. This power is political, it calibrates subjectivities towards certain ends, it prioritises space in specific ways, and it privileges particular practices whilst suppressing others. In apprehending operational logics, the practice of method thus foregrounds the sociopolitical dimensions of algorithmic power. As the algorithmic increasingly infiltrates into and governs the everyday, the ability to understand, critique, and intervene in this new field of power becomes more urgent