U-Note: Capture the Class and Access it Everywhere

We present U-Note, an augmented teaching and learning system leveraging the advantages of paper while letting teachers and pupils benefit from the richness that digital media can bring to a lecture. U-Note provides automatic linking between the notes of the pupils' notebooks and various events that occurred during the class (such as opening digital documents, changing slides, writing text on an interactive whiteboard...). Pupils can thus explore their notes in conjunction with the digital documents that were presented by the teacher during the lesson. Additionally, they can also listen to what the teacher was saying when a given note was written. Finally, they can add their own comments and documents to their notebooks to extend their lecture notes. We interviewed teachers and deployed questionnaires to identify both teachers and pupils' habits: most of the teachers use (or would like to use) digital documents in their lectures but have problems in sharing these resources with their pupils. The results of this study also show that paper remains the primary medium used for knowledge keeping, sharing and editing by the pupils. Based on these observations, we designed U-Note, which is built on three modules. U-Teach captures the context of the class: audio recordings, the whiteboard contents, together with the web pages, videos and slideshows displayed during the lesson. U-Study binds pupils' paper notes (taken with an Anoto digital pen) with the data coming from U-Teach and lets pupils access the class materials at home, through their notebooks. U-Move lets pupils browse lecture materials on their smartphone when they are not in front of a computer

Understanding Business Travel Time and Its Place in the Working Day

This article argues that there is a need to understand business travel time in the context of the wider organization of work time. It considers why travel time use is potentially changing with the use of mobile technologies by the increasing number of individuals engaged in ‘knowledge work’, and examines existing evidence that indicates that travel time use is part of a wider work-related ‘taskscape’. However, it not only considers material productive output, but suggests that travel time as ‘time out’ from work-related activities also plays a vital role for employees. It also suggests that business travel time use that is not of benefit to the employer may not be at the employer's expense. This is contrasted with the assumptions used in UK transport appraisal. Data gathered from the autumn 2004 wave of the National Rail Passenger Survey (GB) is used to illustrate some key issues concerning productivity and ‘anti-activity’. A case study of an individual business traveller then points towards the need for a new approach to exploring the role played by travel time in the organization of work practices to be considered. © 2008, Sage Publications. All rights reserved

Is the writing on the wall for tabletops?

We describe an ethnographic study that explores how low tech and new tech surfaces support participation and collaboration during a workshop breakout session. The low tech surfaces were post-it notes and large sheets of paper. The new tech surfaces were writeable walls and a multi-touch tabletop. Four groups used the different surfaces during three phases: i) brief presentation of position papers and discussion of themes, ii) the creation of a group presentation and iii) a report back session. Participation and collaboration varied depending on the physical, technological and social factors at play when using the different surfaces. We discuss why this is the case, noting how new shareable surfaces may need to be constrained to invite participation in ways that are simply taken for granted because of their familiarity when using low tech materials

Technology and Discourse: A Comparison of Face-to-face and Telephone Employment Interviews

Very little research has investigated the comparability of telephone and face-to-face employment interviews. This exploratory study investigated interviewers' questioning strategies and applicants' causal attributions produced during semi structured telephone and face-to-face graduate recruitment interviews (N=62). A total of 2044 causal attributions were extracted from verbatim transcripts of these 62 interviews. It was predicted that an absence of visual cues would lead applicants to produce, and interviewers to focus on, information that might reduce the comparative anonymity of telephone interviews. Results indicate that applicants produce more personal causal attributions in telephone interviews. Personal attributions are also associated with higher ratings in telephone, but not face-to-face interviews. In face-to-face interviews, applicants who attributed outcomes to more global causes received lower ratings. There was also a non-significant tendency for interviewers to ask more closed questions in telephone interviews. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed

Toward the paperless hospital?

This report describes an ethnographic study of document use by anaesthetists. In doing so, it focuses on the role of the preoperative risk assessment form as used in anaesthetic practice at a cardiothoracic hospital, and considers what would be the advantages and disadvantages of shifting the paper into the electronic form. Evidence from this case study is used to comment on how the practical use of documents by medical professionals can be fundamentally at odds with how the organization at large would like to use them. We argue that hospital trusts need to take into account this practical perspective in order to build effective, on-line document systems

The Lost Cosmonaut: An Interactive Narrative Environment on the Basis of Digitally Enhanced Paper

The Lost Cosmonaut is an interactive narrative based on digitally enhanced paper. This technology uses an electronic pen to mediate between paper and computer. Thus any actions of the pen on the paper can be captured and manipulated by a computer as well as we can map digitally controlled events onto paper. The story in this narrative environment reveals itself partially through written text and images on the paper surface just as any other printed story. However, additional information in form of digitally controlled outputs such as sound, light and projections can be accessed through interaction with pen and paper. Furthermore the audience is not only supposed to read and otherwise perceive information, we also want them to actively produce content for this environment by writing onto the paper. By doing so they also add content to the database containing the digital output at the same time. Hence we produce a complex multimedia environment that works on three levels: On paper, in a digitally controlled visual and acoustic environment and in the combination of both worlds. Last but not least this environment is an open system, which grows as a collaborative effort over time as each user adds his own entries to paper and database. We argue that using paper as an integrated part of a digital environment is a best-of-both-world approach that opens up new possibilities for producing and perceiving narrative

The use of conventional and new music media Implications for future technologies

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:4335.26205(2001-102) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Music sharing as a computer supported collaborative application

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:4335.26205(2001-103) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo