Rasch analysis on individual cognitive styles for museum learning performances

The advantages offered by the web-based environment have successfully convinced museums around the world to employ the technology in enriching their visitors’ learning experiences.However, the design and development of such environment in presenting the museum exhibits is challenging due to the complexities of human-computer interaction. The diverse profiles of museum visitors also add to the dilemma in designing effective museum leaning experiences for all.This paper addresses the issue by focusing on the effects between media representation formats and individual cognitive preferences.The data collected utilizing a quasi-experimental design was then analyzed using Rasch Model. The findings reveal that cognitive styles do have an effect on the learning performance thus should be consider during the design process of the learning environment

The Cultural Identity of Mien Ethnic Group in a Digital Era

Purpose: The study aimed to identify the cultural identity of the Mien ethnic group and their adaptation to dominant society.   Theoretical Framework: The study was conducted physically at Mae Yao District of Chiang Rai Province, located in the northern part of Thailand.   Methodology: The qualitative study employed Esser model of social integration. Primary data was collected from focus groups, in-depth interviews, on-site observations, and secondary data from related documents and research work.   Findings: As part of Thailand's rural population, hill tribes were considered as vulnerable group of society, who mainly depends on slash and burn subsistence farming lifestyle with low-income employment, socially distanced, low education, and poverty. Through the Royal Project of King Rama IX initiatives, issues concerning hill tribe livelihood, including quality of life and cultural preservation have been addressed.    Research, Practical & Social Implications: Socio-economic status and socio-cultural mingling in dominant society for their livelihood are the most significant factors that consequently impact upon their thinking patterns of the individuals and community. Although technology such as mobile phones and the Internet has played an explicit role in the community today, preserving the traditional way of life without oblivion still exists. Digital culture therefore becomes an essential aspect of the community's way of life with the influence of digital media.   Originality: This study provides important impacts to a better identification of the Mien ethnic group cultural and their adaptation to dominant society

Interactive effects between cognitive preferences and instructional strategies in museum learning experiences

The wide opportunities offered by web-mediated environment have successfully convinced museums around the world to utilise the technology in enhancing their visitors' learning experiences.However, museum's visitor profiles are expected to involve diverse characteristics such as gender, background, and prior knowledge.These visitors' profile differences thus enforce museum curators to be mindful of how to present their online exhibits to ensure they afford more effective learning experiences. Yet, the rising interest in creating online museum environments presents fresh dilemmas for museum curators and their exhibit designers to understand the visitors' numerous differences. Meanwhile, examining cognitive differences in individuals is now becoming essential in understanding and explaining the complexities of effective human-computer interaction (HCI) whereby suggest that individual cognitive preferences may have an impact on how environmental variables affect learning.Accordingly, this research proposed that allowing for an individual's cognitive preferences may provide an appropriate solution to improve the design of the museum exhibits, particularly in the web-mediated environment. Applying the quasi-experimental design, the research investigated the interactive effects between the participants' cognitive preferences and the museum information representation formats within two different instructional strategies.The findings reveal that cognitive preferences do have an effect on the participants' performance in their museum learning outcome.Accordingly, an interaction effect was noted between the participants' cognitive preferences and the instructional strategies in their museum learning performances. The findings from this research help to understand how learners' mental models may work to enhance their information processing through the web-mediated instruction they receive thus provide the empirical evidence that it is important to understand how specific multimedia format can better present the online museum exhibits

Muzium padi kiosk: a case study in muzium padi Kedah

This paper describes the design and development of Muzium Padi Kiosk. The process was done according to the software development process.The phase started with the requirement analysis before it goes into the design and formative evaluation.Some amendment was also made at the end of the process to ensure that the kiosk will be effective and successful to deliver meaningful information to the museum visitors. As a result an interactive kiosk is ready to be used at Muzium Padi Kedah

Children road safety awareness: Design and development of a road safety application

Road safety campaigns and programs have been extensively introduced and implemented in Malaysia. However, their effectiveness is still being debated. Children especially will become the unfortunate victims of road accidents if they are unaware of the danger and precaution actions to be safe on the road. In response to that, this paper introduces an application as an alternative that inculcates road safety awareness to further support existing related programs and campaigns. Particularly, an interactive web application incorporating interactive multimedia elements has been designed and evaluated. Results on the usability test indicate a promising success and highlight aspects and issues that can be further focused for improvement and enhancement

Assisting design ideas: PToolkit, a pilot study

Design for persuasion requires the designer to understand theories, ideas and strategies of persuasion that could change, modify or adapt people’s behavior.This situation requires the designer to access appropriate persuasion knowledge by making the design suit to the persuasion intention. Therefore, a tool called as PToolkit was introduced to assist designer during the design process. Then, a pilot evaluation was conducted to evaluate PToolkit.This is to ensure that the actual evaluation phase would run smoothly, as well as having an initial understanding of the ability of PToolkit in influencing the design ideas.As a result, few evaluation procedures were amended and ways of data interpretation were suggested

Understanding children's museum learning from multimedia instruction

The use of multimedia instructions for online learning has become very common particularly with the advances of the Internet technology. Consequently museums around the world utilize such information and communications technology (ICT) tools in order to provide richer learning experiences for their visitors.This paper discusses a study that investigated the relationship between multimedia instructional formats with individual cognitive learning preferences in a museum learning environment.A total of 91 school children age between 10 to 12 years old were randomly assigned into treatment groups based on their cognitive learning ratio.We employed a pre-test post-test quasi experimental design to reveal that general performance of the children exposed to the physical museum exhibits is better than the online museum environment.Although single cognitive learning preferences were evaluated, our findings suggest that analytics perform better than the wholists when exposed to the physical exhibits; whilst the result is reversed for the online exhibits environment.Verbalisers were found to be better than visualisers in the physical a museum context.Yet they were found to have slight differences when compared to visualisers in an online environment.Our findings on the combined cognitive styles (CCS) show that the analytics-visualisers’ mean scores were different between physical and online exhibits, compared to the other three CCS

Safeguarding Malaysian folktale through adventure game

Folktale is part of people's culture and heritage that represents the identity of a society. Malaysia is prosperous with folktale, which is traditionally diffused verbally from generation to generation. Inopportunely, this heritage is slowly being forgotten by the younger generations especially by teenagers. The study aims to safeguard local folktale through an adventure game made for teenagers. In the context of the study, Bawang Putih Bawang Merah was selected. The study seeks to discover the adventure game’s elements from the game guideline and from the user (teenagers). Once found, it is a question of how both the elements can be employed to design and develop the folktale adventure game branded as Orkid Emas in the study. Based on the definitive version of the game, it is a question of obtaining the teenagers’ feedback about the game’s design and development and safeguarding aspects. The methods employed in the study are the formal and semi-structured interview, document analysis, flowboarding and prototyping. The results of the study show that both the elements of the adventure game from the guidelines and users were ascertained. The Orkid Emas adventure game was successfully designed and developed using the combination of the elements. At large, positive feedback was obtained from select representing teenagers regarding the Orkid Emas’ design and development, and folktale safeguarding aspects

Persuasion knowledge for design community: Design of PToolkit prototype

Persuasion knowledge has been used in various disciplines, and now is being utilized by interaction designer for designing persuasive application.Although lots of interactive applications were designed with aims to influence on certain aspects the availability of persuasion knowledge for design community is limited.Therefore, Persuasion Knowledge Toolkit (PToolkit) is designed to make the persuasion knowledge more easily accessible for designer during the design ideation phase.This paper describes the design process of PToolkit prototype in making the persuasion knowledge available for designers

Temporal dynamics modelling for aggression level of victims in disaster evacuation center

Natural disaster such as flood, earthquake, and typhoon poses a serious threat for humanity. However, post disaster is the hardest part to deal with. Assisting survivors who are looking for help always poses big challenges for volunteers to handle, especially when the number of victims is high.In this stage, emotional state of the victims is often unstable; and therefore, controlling them becomes a difficult task. This paper explained the idea of modelling individuals’ aggression levels in evacuation centers for floods (or any other natural disasters) victims. It described the development of a formal model that can be used as a base for building an intelligent agent or other types of software that can be helpful in training volunteers to handle victim’s aggressive.This will enhance the effectiveness of the volunteer work, thus improving the environment in the evacuation centers