Not Yet Ready for Everyone: An Experience Report about a Personal Learning Environment for Language Learning

Abstract. A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a mash-up of learning services. It enables students and teachers to assemble a work environment that is adapted to a domain and specific individual needs. In this article, we report on our experiences on using a PLE for Lan-guage Learning in five French lectures at the Shanghai Jiao Tong Uni-versity Continuing Education School. We found that while a PLE has the potential to simplify access to and usage of Web sites and services for language learning, students will use it only if properly motivated. Fur-thermore, at the time being, difficulties that result from the user interface and technical implementation make the interactions with PLEs difficult. The problems need to be overcome in order for PLEs to become adopted by the average, not technically highly literate students and teachers. Key words: PLE, mash-up, experience report

Understanding, scoping and defining user experience: A survey approach

Despite the growing interest in user experience (UX), it has been hard to gain a common agreement on the nature and scope of UX. In this paper, we report a survey that gathered the views on UX of 275 researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Most respondents agree that UX is dynamic, context-dependent, and subjective. With respect to the more controversial issues, the authors propose to delineate UX as something individual (instead of social) that emerges from interacting with a product, system, service or an object. The draft ISO definition on UX seems to be in line with the survey findings, although the issues of experiencing anticipated use and the object of UX will require further explication. The outcome of this survey lays ground for understanding, scoping, and defining the concept of user experience. Copyright 2009 ACM

Interplay between User Experience Evaluation and System Development: State of the Art

User Experience (UX) is an emerging research area pertaining to as well as extending beyond the traditional usability. Issues in the realm of usability may be amplified in UX because of its larger scope. Four key non-orthogonal issues are: definition, modeling, method selection, and interplay between evaluation and development. Leveraging the legacy of a series of earlier workshops, I-UxSED 2012 aims to develop a deeper understanding of how evaluation feedback shapes software development, especially when experiential qualities such as fun, trust, aesthetic values are concerned. Is feedback on these fuzzy qualities less useful for problem prioritization or less persuasive for problem fixing? This and other challenging questions will be explored in I-UxSED 2012 that brings together researchers and practitioners from two communities - HCI and Software Engineering.Industrial DesignIndustrial Design Engineerin

Using Theory of Mind to assess users' sense of agency in social chatbots

The technological advancements in the field of chatbot research is booming. Despite this, it is still difficult to assess which social characteristics a chatbot needs to have for the user to interact with it as if it had a mind of its own. Review studies have highlighted that the main cause is the low number of research papers dedicated to this question, and the lack of a consistent protocol within the papers that do address it. In the current paper, we suggest the use of a Theory of Mind task to measure the implicit social behaviour users exhibit towards a text-based chatbot. We present preliminary findings suggesting that participants adapt towards this basic chatbot significantly more than when they conduct the task alone (p < .017). This task is quick to administer and does not require a second chatbot for comparison, making it an efficient universal task. With it, a database could be built with scores of all existing chatbots, allowing fast and efficient meta-analyses to discover which characteristics make the chatbot appear more 'human'

Deducing User States of Engagement in Real Time by Using a Purpose Built Unobtrusive Physiological Measurement Device: An Empirical Study and HCI Design Challenges

Human emotion is a psycho-physiological state in most cases not obvious to the subject. Different permutations of emotional constituents sometimes cause similar outward expressions; therefore facial expression methods cannot achieve reliable estimates. Sensing physiological manifestations of hormonal and neural stimulations instigated by emotion and affect is widely accepted as a credible method of detecting psycho-physiological states. A major impediment in interactive environments employing physiological sensing affecting the credibility of measurements is the physical and psychological impairment caused by electrodes and wiring used for the acquisition of signals. In the system described in this paper, the above obstacle has been overcome. Physiological signals acquired via an in-house developed computer mouse and coinciding physiological patterns were investigated as reactions to emotion raising events. A classification algorithm analyzed herein produced a real time allocation model of states of engagement. Experiments have revealed strong correlations between events and respective emotional states