Visitor-sensing: Involving the crowd in cultural heritage organizations

As organizations are increasingly involving individuals across their boundaries in the generation of new knowledge, crowd involvement can also be beneficial to cultural heritage organizations. We argue that in an "Open Innovation in Science" approach, visitors can contribute to generate new scientific knowledge concerning their behavior and preferences, by which museum managers can re-design the cultural offerings of their institutions in ways that generate major economic and social impacts. Accordingly, we advance visitor-sensing as a novel framework in which museum managers leverage digital technologies to collect visitors' ideas, preferences, and feedback in order to improve path design and the organization of artwork in exhibitions, and to shape a more satisfying museum experience for visitors. We contend that visitor-sensing has the potential to yield higher numbers of visitors, with positive impacts in terms of increased revenues and increased literacy of the general public, thus benefiting the economic and social sustainability of cultural organizations towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals outlined in the Agenda 2030

Metafora teatrale e laboratorio pedagogico

The theatre in education does not only act as an instrument. A strong analogy may be drawn between the experience offered by education and that offered by theatre. Viewing theatre as a metaphor for education implies drawing attention to an ambivalent relationship and a crucial element of pedagogical experience. A theatre workshop enables us to acquire a new familiarity, an art, a mindful presence and the ability to reflect competently about ambivalent structure of educational experience.However the metaphoric dimension is also directly related to critical aspects of designing a theatre laboratory with educational, as opposed to exclusively performative, aims.Underlying this position is an interpretation of education and training that differs from the mainstream conception. Specifically, the idea that education is a dispositif. In this view, education is not an experience that has primarily to do with values or morals, or with somebody’s intentions or motivation. Of course these aspects are important, but what actually structures and generates educational experience is a dispositif. Thus the theatrical workshop becomes a field of experience for transformative and performative learning

Il senso pedagogico della soggettivazione

Foucault come educatore non dirige da un luogo esterno verso di noi un insegnamento, una dottrina, piuttosto sente la responsabilità di cercare e di estrarre dal mondo «qualcosa» che possa animare l’esperienza che si fa del mondo, di mostrare da una prospettiva latente l’esperienza già fatta, come una scheggia di «reale» che nel mondo si manifesta. Foucault può essere un educatore se accettiamo che la verità è sempre ancora da fare, concretamente, che siamo sempre corresponsabili della verità che è in gioco nella nostra formazione. Può essere educatore, infatti, solo chi è disposto non tanto a «comprendere prima», ma a comprendere nuovamente ogni volta, ogni volta che si dà un’occasione formativa e a profanare eventualmente l’attualità e la solidità di quel che si sa nella condivisione del rischio e della libertà che ogni pratica di ricerca comporta

Temporalità e ritmicità nell’esperienza formativa

Time represents both a crucial concept to interpret one’s own experience and a taken-for-granted dimension of everyday life. These intertwined aspects impact individual and collective actions: time remains essentially a locus of power dy-namics, that’s why it must be understood and studied as a ‘dispositive’ and it needs a deep analysis from a pedagogical perspective. There is no doubt that peo-ple’s experience of temporal alienation and temporal habitus espressed in differ-ent forms of living and acting, had to be questioned from an educational point of view. This paper provides a focusing analysis of the relationship between educa-tional temporality and rhythms of the pedagogical processes exploring a possible perspective of a genealogy of formative temporality to develop a rethinking of emancipation and some forms of organization that affect autonomy and agency

Bring them aboard: rewarding participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects

Citizen science involves the general public in research activities that are conducted in collaboration with professional scientists. In these projects, citizens voluntarily contribute to the research aims set forward by the scientists through the collection and analysis of large datasets, without a preliminary technical background required. While advancements in information technology have facilitated the involvement of the general public in citizen science through online platforms, several projects still fail due to limited participation. This paper investigates the feasibility of using selected reward mechanisms to positively influence participation and motivations to contribute in a technology-mediated citizen science project. More specifically, we report the results of an empirical study on the effects of monetary and public online acknowledgement rewards. Survey indices and electroencephalographic measurements are synergistically integrated to offer a comprehensive basis for the analysis of citizens' motivations. Our results suggest that both reward mechanisms could crowd-in participants in technology-mediated citizen science projects. With this study, we seek to lay the foundations for a private-collective research model, where the focus is the intensification of participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects

Nudging e la citizen science per la ricerca di nuove soluzioni

Oggigiorno ci troviamo a dover fronteggiare Grand Challenges, cio\ue8 pressanti problemi ambientali e sociali che impattano l\u2019intera societ\ue0. Vi \ue8 un grande fermento a livello globale per trovare e applicare strategie che possano risultare utili a tali Grand Challenges. Le risposte di Francesco Cappa e Luca Giustiniano a queste pressanti domande, soprattutto per quanto riguarda il ruolo che i cittadini (non specialisti) possono svolgere, se opportunamente stimolati, nella conduzione di ricerche scientifiche (citizen science) e nell\u2019adozione di comportamenti virtuosi (attraverso il nudging)

Activating social strategies: Face-to-face interaction in technology-mediated citizen science

The use of crowds in research activities by public and private organizations is growing under different forms. Citizen science is a popular means of engaging the general public in research activities led by professional scientists. By involving a large number of amateur scientists, citizen science enables distributed data collection and analysis on a scale that would be otherwise difficult and costly to achieve. While advancements in information technology in the past few decades have fostered the growth of citizen science through online participation, several projects continue to fail due to limited participation. Such web-based projects may isolate the citizen scientists from the researchers. By adopting the perspective of social strategy, we investigate within a measure-manipulate-measure experiment if motivations to participate in a citizen science project can be positively influenced by a face-to-face interaction with the scientists leading the project. Such an interaction provides the participants with the possibility of asking questions on the spot and obtaining a detailed explanation of the citizen science project, its scientific merit, and environmental relevance. Social and cultural factors that moderate the effect brought about by face-to-face interactions on the motivations are also dissected and analyzed. Our findings provide an exploratory insight into a means for motivating crowds to participate in online environmental monitoring projects, also offering possible selection criteria of target audience

A Framework for More Effective Dark Web Marketplace Investigations

The success of the Silk Road has prompted the growth of many Dark Web marketplaces. This exponential growth has provided criminal enterprises with new outlets to sell illicit items. Thus, the Dark Web has generated great interest from academics and governments who have sought to unveil the identities of participants in these highly lucrative, yet illegal, marketplaces. Traditional Web scraping methodologies and investigative techniques have proven to be inept at unmasking these marketplace participants. This research provides an analytical framework for automating Dark Web scraping and analysis with free tools found on the World Wide Web. Using a case study marketplace, we successfully tested a Web crawler, developed using AppleScript, to retrieve the account information for thousands of vendors and their respective marketplace listings. This paper clearly details why AppleScript was the most viable and efficient method for scraping Dark Web marketplaces. The results from our case study validate the efficacy of our proposed analytical framework, which has relevance for academics studying this growing phenomenon and for investigators examining criminal activity on the Dark Web