Reaching the unreached: de-mystifying the role of ICT in the process of doctoral research

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a necessary element of academic practice in higher education today. Under normal circumstances, PhD students from all disciplines have to use ICT in some form throughout the process of their research, including the preparation, fieldwork, analysis and writing phases of their studies. Nevertheless, there has been little research to date that explores PhD students’ first-hand experiences of using various ICT to support their research practices. This paper brings together the findings and the key points from a review of significant parts of the existing literature associated with the role played by ICT in the processes PhD students use in doctoral research. The review is based on 27 papers appearing in international peer-reviewed journals published from 2005 to 2014. The study seeks to address the under-researched area in the current literature of how ICT plays a role in the processes of doctoral research. While there are many contributions taking the ‘institutional’ or ‘teaching’ perspectives, papers focusing on ‘student’ perspective, or the viewpoint of engaging ICT in daily study routine, are relatively fewer. As far as research methodology is concerned, this review found that many of the papers that were examined were mostly based on perception data such as surveys or interviews, while actual practice data were rarely present. With their ready access to technologies, PhD students are well positioned to take advantage of a range of technologies in order to carry out their research efficiently (in terms of means to an end) and effectively (in terms of reaching goals within a task). This review reveals that in the literature, this important area is under-represented

Identifying patterns in eyetracking scanpaths in terms of visual elements of web pages

Web pages are typically decorated with different kinds of visual elements that help sighted people complete their tasks. Unfortunately, this is not the case for people accessing web pages in constraint environments such as visually disabled or small screen device users. In our previous work, we show that tracking the eye movements of sighted users provide good understanding of how people use these visual elements. We also show that people's experience in constraint environments can be improved by reengineering web pages by using these visual elements. However, in order to reengineer web pages based on eyetracking, we first need to aggregate, analyse and understand how a group of people's eyetracking data can be combined to create a common scanpath (namely, eye movement sequence) in terms of visual elements. This paper presents an algorithm that aims to achieve this. This algorithm was developed iteratively and experimentally evaluated with an eyetracking study. This study shows that the proposed algorithm is able to identify patterns in eyetracking scanpaths and it is fairly scalable. This study also shows that this algorithm can be improved by considering different techniques for pre-processing the data, by addressing the drawbacks of using the hierarchical structure and by taking into account the underlying cognitive processes

We are all art historians now: Teaching media studies and/as cultural studies

This chapter is based on my experience of teaching cultural studies over 30 years, at graduate and/or undergraduate levels in many countries as a visitor, but most of the time in the US, Colombia, and Britain. In disciplinary terms, I’ve taught cultural studies ‘inside’ sociology, cinema studies, American studies, anthropology, women’s studies, English, journalism, social communication, management, film and media studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. The chapter does three things, based in part on those experiences. It makes some Olympian claims about cultural studies’ content and location, looks into ways of teaching the media as core components, and concludes that we are all art historians today—but probably shouldn’t be

A exposição itinerante como extensão universitária: um instrumento para disseminar conhecimentos de zoologia e conservação da biodiversidade / The itinerant exposure as a university extension: an instrument to disseminate knowledge of zoology and conservation of biodiversity

Como resposta aos problemas ambientais, em especial à crescente diminuição da biodiversidade brasileira, muitas escolas e instituições de ensino superior tem se preocupado com a Educação Ambiental não formal, envolvendo em suas atividades de extensão e/ou práticas que despertem o interesse dos educandos e da comunidade pela conservação do meio ambiente e da biodiversidade planetária. Atendendo essa demanda social, as exposições itinerantes são atividades de suma importância que possibilitam o acesso a informações científicas e vivencia junto a biodiversidade, neste sentido as exposições itinerantes do projeto de extensão “Café com Ciências”, do curso de Ciências Biológicas do Centro Universitário Facex (UNIFACEX), foram criadas com o objetivo de proporcionar a alunos, professores e ao público em geral, uma reflexão sobre o conhecimento e a importância da manutenção da biodiversidade.Para concretização dos objetivos e das metas do projeto foram preparadas e apresentadas, por alunos voluntários do UNIFACEX e Projeto PIBID/UNIFACEX, quatroexposições itinerantes, que ocorreram entre julho a dezembro de 2017, em escolas públicas e particulares das cidades de Natal e Nísia Floresta/RN, com a participação de 635 pessoas, incluindo alunos, professores e comunidade em geral. A apresentação das exposições contou com a participação de doze acadêmicos voluntários, que se revezaram ao longo das atividades. A participação dos acadêmicos nas atividades promoveu a inserção social dos mesmos, por meio da divulgação de seus conhecimentos científicos para a comunidade, além de oportunizar o exercício profissional e motivação no processo de ensinar Ciências e Biologia