Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like

Social media: a guide for researchers

This guide has been produced by the International Centre for Guidance Studies, and aims to provide the information needed to make an informed decision about using social media and select from the vast range of tools that are available. One of the most important things that researchers do is to find, use and disseminate information, and social media offers a range of tools which can facilitate this. The guide discusses the use of social media for research and academic purposes and will not be examining the many other uses that social media is put to across society. Social media can change the way in which you undertake research, and can also open up new forms of communication and dissemination. It has the power to enable researchers to engage in a wide range of dissemination in a highly efficient way.Research Information Networ

Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend

Harnessing Collaborative Technologies: Helping Funders Work Together Better

This report was produced through a joint research project of the Monitor Institute and the Foundation Center. The research included an extensive literature review on collaboration in philanthropy, detailed analysis of trends from a recent Foundation Center survey of the largest U.S. foundations, interviews with 37 leading philanthropy professionals and technology experts, and a review of over 170 online tools.The report is a story about how new tools are changing the way funders collaborate. It includes three primary sections: an introduction to emerging technologies and the changing context for philanthropic collaboration; an overview of collaborative needs and tools; and recommendations for improving the collaborative technology landscapeA "Key Findings" executive summary serves as a companion piece to this full report

The phone as a tool for combining online and offline social activity – teenagers’ phone access to an online community

We have analyzed two months of log data and 100 surveys on the phone use of a Swedish online community for teenagers to investigate the mobile use of an established online service. This shows that the phone use mostly takes place during times of the day when teenagers have social time and the use is not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone makes the community access more private compared to the computer, but teens do share the use when they want to. The cell phone bridges the online and offline social communities and allows teens to participate in both at the same time. The online community is not only a place for social activity online, it is also a social activity offline that is carried out face-to-face with friends. The cell phone thus was a tool for the teens to combine their participation in the online and the offline world

Collaborative recommendations with content-based filters for cultural activities via a scalable event distribution platform

Nowadays, most people have limited leisure time and the offer of (cultural) activities to spend this time is enormous. Consequently, picking the most appropriate events becomes increasingly difficult for end-users. This complexity of choice reinforces the necessity of filtering systems that assist users in finding and selecting relevant events. Whereas traditional filtering tools enable e.g. the use of keyword-based or filtered searches, innovative recommender systems draw on user ratings, preferences, and metadata describing the events. Existing collaborative recommendation techniques, developed for suggesting web-shop products or audio-visual content, have difficulties with sparse rating data and can not cope at all with event-specific restrictions like availability, time, and location. Moreover, aggregating, enriching, and distributing these events are additional requisites for an optimal communication channel. In this paper, we propose a highly-scalable event recommendation platform which considers event-specific characteristics. Personal suggestions are generated by an advanced collaborative filtering algorithm, which is more robust on sparse data by extending user profiles with presumable future consumptions. The events, which are described using an RDF/OWL representation of the EventsML-G2 standard, are categorized and enriched via smart indexing and open linked data sets. This metadata model enables additional content-based filters, which consider event-specific characteristics, on the recommendation list. The integration of these different functionalities is realized by a scalable and extendable bus architecture. Finally, focus group conversations were organized with external experts, cultural mediators, and potential end-users to evaluate the event distribution platform and investigate the possible added value of recommendations for cultural participation

Online cooperation learning environment : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

This project aims to create an online cooperation learning environment for students who study the same paper. Firstly, the whole class will be divided into several tutorial peer groups. One tutorial group includes five to seven students. The students can discuss with each other in the same study group, which is assigned by the lecturer. This is achieved via an online cooperation learning environment application (OCLE), which consists of a web based J2EE application and a peer to peer (P2P) java application, cooperative learning tool (CLT). It can reduce web server traffic significantly during online tutorial discussion time

FOTE 2008 Conference Report

A report prepared by JA.Net and ULCC about the Future of Technology in Education (FOTE 2008) conference, Imperial College, 3rd October 2008. It covers the main speakers, themes and presentations: Cloud Computing, Second Life, Portability, Personalisation, Shared Services, Campus of the Future, Mobile Technology, Creativity and Media Production, Social Collaboration Tools for Staff and Students