Human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D):the Southern African landscape

Human-Computer interaction for development (HCI4D) research aims to maximise the usability of interfaces for interacting with technologies designed specifically for under-served, under-resourced, and under-represented populations. In this paper we provide a snapshot of the Southern African HCI4D research against the background of the global HCI4D research landscape.We commenced with a systematic literature review of HCI4D (2010-2017) then surveyed Southern African researchers working in the area. The contribution is to highlight the context- specific themes and challenges that emerged from our investigation

Demarcating mobile phone interface design guidelines to expedite selection

Guidelines are recommended as a tool for informing user interface design. Despite a proliferation of guidelines in the research literature, there is little evidence of their use in industry, nor their influence in academic literature. In this paper, we explore the research literature related to mobile phone design guidelines to find out why this should be so. We commenced by carrying out a scoping literature review of the mobile phone design guideline literature to gain insight into the maturity of the field. The question we wanted to explore was: “Are researchers building on each others’ guidelines, or is the research field still in the foundational stage?” We discovered a poorly structured field, with many researchers proposing new guidelines, but little incremental refinement of extant guidelines. It also became clear that the current reporting of guidelines did not explicitly communicate their multi-dimensionality or deployment context. This leaves designers without a clear way of discriminating between guidelines, and could contribute to the lack of deployment we observed. We conducted a thematic analysis of papers identified by means of a systematic literature review to identify a set of dimensions of mobile phone interface design guidelines. The final dimensions provide a mechanism for differentiating guidelines and expediting choice

A framework to maximise the communicative power of knowledge visualisations

Knowledge visualisation, in the field of information systems, is both a process and a product, informed by the closely aligned fields of information visualisation and knowledg management. Knowledge visualisation has untapped potential within the purview of knowledge communication. Even so, knowledge visualisations are infrequently deployed due to a lack of evidence-based guidance. To improve this situation, we carried out a systematic literature review to derive a number of “lenses” that can be used to reveal the essential perspectives to feed into the visualisation production process.We propose a conceptual framework which incorporates these lenses to guide producers of knowledge visualisations. This framework uses the different lenses to reveal critical perspectives that need to be considered during the design process. We conclude by demonstrating how this framework could be used to produce an effective knowledge visualisation

Human-Computer Interaction for Development: A knowledge mobilisation framework

Human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D) is an interdisciplinary field aimed at understanding and designing technologies for under-served, under-resourced, and under-represented populations around the world. The interdisciplinary nature complicates knowledge transfer and articulation between the disciplines contributing to the HCI4D domain with the consequence that researchers in one sub-domain do not always build on the extant theoretical and methodological progress in other sub-domains. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for HCI4D that could facilitate a better understanding of this domain, for knowledge mobilisation and articulation between researchers in HCI4D and the related field of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D). Previous studies have presented an overview of the HCI4D field in terms of the geographies it covers, technologies it targets, and its varied epistemological and methodological underpinnings. This paper builds on those methodologies and findings to conduct a systematic literature review which revisits the domain questions, thus, the core issues and topics (why), the phenomenon of interest (what) and the research methods (how). A comparison of the findings from three seminal HCI4D papers led to the identification of three core issues (motor themes) namely, context, design and development. Based on Ward’s idea of a knowledge mobilisation framework, the findings from the systematic literature review are then synthesised and presented as a framework which comprises the core issues, recurring themes and the salient elements for each of the domain questions. The contribution is a knowledge mobilisation framework to enrich discussions on positioning HCI4D as research field

Development informatics research and the challenges in representing the voice of developing country researchers: A South African view

Indigenous or local researchers from developing countries have not made a leading contribution to development informatics (DI) or information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) research. This is noteworthy since these researchers should be in a prominent position to contribute to the discourse, where context knowledge is regarded as vital. Furthermore, a dependence on foreign scholarly direction can create a gap between research and reality in a way that affects the success of ICT programmes in African countries. Extant literature highlights this problem, but most studies stop short of considering the causes and proposing how to amplify the voice of developing country researchers. This paper documents the ICT4D/DI research discourse that took place during four seminal academic events in South Africa during the period 2012 to 2015. Those discussions are presented and analysed here to contribute to the wider discourse on ICT research and practice in developing countries, with the aim of enhancing the research contribution of developing countries. An interpretivist, involved researcher analysis of the workshop reports is conducted to gain an improved understanding of the South African ICT4D/DI researcher’s challenges to proportional participation. While this study takes a South African perspective, many of the findings could apply to researchers in other developing countries.CA2016www.wits.ac.za/linkcentre/aji

Scholarly Impact: a Bibliometric and Altmetric study of the Journal of Community Informatics

Demonstrating scholarly impact is a matter of growing importance. This paper reports on a bibliometric and altmetric analysis conducted on the Journal of Community Informatics (JOCI). Besides the bibliometric analysis the study also looked into JOCI article-level metrics by comparing usage metrics (article views), alternative metrics (Mendeley readership), and traditional citation metrics (Google Scholar citations). The main contribution is to provide more insight into the metrics that could influence the citation impact in Community Informatics research. Furthermore, the study used article-level metrics data to identify, compare and rank the most impactful papers published in JOCI over a 12-year period

Postgraduate dissertation assessment: Exploring extant use and potential efficacy of visualisations

In the context of assessment, two specific challenges face South African academics. The first is that their universities have experienced an unprecedented increase in postgraduate students without a concomitant increase in supervision capacity. The second challenge is that many South African students are studying in a second or third language and struggle to express themselves in English. It is notoriously difficult to write text that is easy to read. Examiners are thus finding it challenging to maintain their own existing high standards of consistency, accuracy and fairness. This paper focuses on identifying a way of making the assessment of dissertations more efficient, while retaining rigour and fairness. In so doing, we want to provide students with a tool that will help them to communicate their research more effectively. In seeking an intervention, we noted the emerging use of visualisation as a communication facilitator in other areas of academia. Given the innate human ability to understand and remember visual representations, and the deep level of cognitive processing required to produce such visualisations, the considered inclusion of visualisations could be the means we are seeking. In this paper we report on an investigation into the extant use and potential usefulness of visualisation in a number of dissertations. We also explore supervisor expectations with respect to the use of visualisation in research reporting. Based on our findings, we propose that a discourse be opened into the deliberate use of visualisation in postgraduate research reporting

Knowledge Mobilisation of Human-Computer Interaction for Development Research: core issues and domain questions

Human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D) operates at the intersection of Human-computer interaction (HCI) and information and communication technology for development (ICT4D). The interdisciplinary nature complicates knowledge transfer and articulation between the disciplines contributing to the HCI4D domain. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to highlight the core issues and domain questions in HCI4D towards supporting knowledge mobilization between researchers in HCI4D and the related fields. This paper presents an overview of the HCI4D literature (2007–2017) which investigated the domain questions, including the core issues, focus areas, the phenomena of interest, target users and the research methods. The findings were presented as a conceptual framework which comprises the core issues and salient elements for each of the domain questions. This framework was evaluated and checked against 2017–2019 literature to propose a final HCI4D knowledge mobilization framework (HCI4D_KMF). The contribution lies in knowledge transfer and articulation towards enriching discussions on HCI4D research.School of Computin

Research on Mobile Cloud Computing in Teaching and Learning: A Conceptual Model

Advances in cloud computing technology coupled with increasing volumes of data has driven the growth and differentiation of cloud-based solutions in teaching and learning. The cloud computing industry has matured over the past decade and the number of publications steadily rose, to build on the maturity of the field researchers investigating cloud computing research in the mobile teaching and learning domain need to be cognisant of the state of the art. The objective of this paper is to analyse the available literature in the field of cloud computing for mobile teaching and learning to identify the main categories of research, the prevalent methodologies and research gaps, and then integrate the findings in a conceptual framework representing the current state of the field in terms of research opportunities. A systematic mapping study on relevant publications in journals and conferences was conducted. Mapping studies are a suitable method for structuring a research field concerning research questions about contents, methods and trends in the available publications. A systematic literature review and mapping was used to select 107 articles from a total of 21 822 publications in five prominent databases, namely ACM, ERIC, IEEE, Google Scholar and Springer. The analysis was done in October 2017 on papers published between 2013 and 2017. The contribution is to classify existing work and suggest future opportunities based on a systematic mapping of mobile cloud computing (MCC) for teaching and learning research. The analysis provides an overview of the field in terms of what is researched, how that is researched and where the future research contributions may lie. The findings are integrated to present a non-prescriptive, conceptual framework on mobile cloud computing research for teaching and learning. Researchers can use the proposed framework as a point of reference in starting or aligning their own projects and establishing where future research opportunities exist.School of Computin

Citizen Science: The Ring to Rule Them All?

There are many uncertainties about the future of e-Learning, but one thing is certain: e-Learning will be more data-driven in the future. The automation of data capturing, analysis and presentation, together with economic constraints that require evidence-based proof of impact, compels this data focus. On the other hand, the importance of community involvement in learning analytics and educational data mining is an accepted fact. Citizen science, at the nexus of community engagement, and data science can bridge the divide between data-driven and community-driven approaches to policy and content development. The rationale for this paper is the investigation of citizen science as an approach to collecting data for learning analytics in the field of e-Learning. Capturing data for policy and content development for learning analytics through citizen science projects is novel in the e-Learning field. Like any other new area, citizen science needs to be mapped in terms of the existing parent fields of data science and education so that differences and potential overlaps can be made explicit. This is important when considering conceptual or functional definitions, research tools and methodologies. A preliminary review of the literature has not provided any conceptual positioning of citizen science in relation to the research topics of learning analytics, data science, big data and visualisation in the e-Learning environment. The intent of this paper is firstly to present an overview of citizen science and the related research topics in the academic and practitioner literature based on a systematic literature review. Secondly, we propose a model that represents the relationship between citizen science and other salient concepts and shows how citizen science projects can be positioned in the e-Learning environment. Finally, we suggest research opportunities involving citizen science projects in the field of e-Learning.School of Computin