Harnessing the creativity of digital multimedia tools in distance learning

Over the past few decades, advances in information and communication technologies, and particularly the digitisation of information, have brought about radical changes in the way media can be produced, distributed and shared. The exchange of information, once predominately the domain of the written word, now also embraces the digital technologies of audio and video. User-generated multimedia content proliferates, and the presence of audio and video adds dimensions that greatly increase the amount of information an audience can assimilate, adding a richness and depth to the messages we want to convey. This paper presents and discusses a creative approach to the use of digital multimedia production tools incorporated in the Open University’s 60 credit level 2 module, T215 Communication and Information Technologies. These tools are used in a way that: - explores new ways to help people understand technical concepts; - supports the development of students’ technical skills; - provides opportunities for students to be creative; - provides an alternative to traditional text-based assessment. We briefly explain the key decisions made by the module team during the design stages of the teaching materials and explain the common assessment framework used throughout the different blocks of the module. We then draw on the experience of two presentations of the module, each attracting around 500 students, to examine how students have engaged with the video creation activities and to identify issues that arise in supporting students for these tasks in a distance learning environment. Finally we discuss the success of the assessment task: a 30-second video designed to explain a technical concept related to one of the module topics

On specifying an environment of software agents and web services

This paper presents an approach for specifying an environment of software agents and Web services. Users in collaboration with software agents compose Web services into high-level business processes denoted by composite services. The participation of Web services in a composite service is based on several selection criteria such as the execution cost of a Web service and the location of the resources on which a Web service is performed. Prior to that selection, the specification approach puts forwards three levels: intrinsic, organizational/functional, and behavior. © 2005 IEEE

Supporting Degree Apprenticeship students: Tutors’ and Students’ perspectives

This presentation summarises our findings investigating the support needed by Degree Apprenticeship (DA) students during their first year of studies. This initial study primarily focussed on the first cohort of English Digital and Technology Solutions students within the School of Computing and Communications. The theory module TMX130 (Computing Technologies) and the work based learning module TXY122 (Career Development and Employability) are the first case studies included at this stage. Results of students’ surveys as well as feedback from practice tutors and subject-specific tutors will be presented and contrasted. We analyzed the student performance on the module and the open comments on both surveys. The aim was to explore whether there were any issues both in the learning and in the support that should be addressed in the coming presentations. Results from the data analysis suggest that support from subject-specific tutors is very good and students are very motivated. However, some assessment methods are more relevant than others and we should consider how to customise these assessments so they relate more closely to the students’ work environments. In our future works we plan to conduct further research via surveys and interviews, with both students and tutors as the initial cohort of English students was very small. In the longer term, it is worth considering the inclusion of Scottish and Welsh apprentices, alongside English apprentices in the research, as well as contrasting our findings with apprenticeship initiatives across the UK nations

A conceptual analysis of the role of conversations in Web services composition

This paper discusses the role of conversations in the composition of Web services. A Web service is an accessible application that other applications and humans can discover and trigger to satisfy needs. While much of the work has focused on low-level standards for publishing, discovering, and invoking Web services, it is deemed appropriate to start leveraging the Web services to the level of active components. Such components would be able for example to engage conversations and make decisions

Visualising the code: a study of student engagement with programming in a distance learning context

Programming is a subject that many students find difficult and it may be particularly challenging for distance learning students working largely on their own. Many ideas have been put forward in the literature to explain why students struggle with programming, including: the relative unfamiliarity of computer programming or ‘radical novelty’ (Dijkstra, 1989), cognitive load (Shaffer, 2004) and that the whole learning environment may be influential (Scott & Ghinea, 2013). This paper reports on the first phase of a project, ‘Visualising the code’, which is investigating the impact of using a visual programming language on student engagement with programming. We used as our case-study, TU100 ‘My digital life’ which is a level 1 undergraduate Computer Science module in the Open University (UK). The rationale for this work stems from the necessity of developing an introductory undergraduate module that will engage students of widely differing prior levels of experience in terms of programming and of education generally. In TU100, the module team introduced a visual programming environment, based on Scratch (MIT, 2007), called ‘Sense’ which is used in conjunction with an electronic device, the SenseBoard. We analysed the grades of 6,159 students in the final assessment across six presentations of the module to identify student performance in the programming task, as distinct from their overall performance on the module. The aim was to explore whether there was any difference between student engagement with the programming task in comparison with non-programming tasks. Early results suggest that there is no significant difference in levels of engagement between these tasks, and it appears that success, or otherwise, in one type of task is a good predictor of engagement with the other task. There are implications for networked learning of this work, given that the learning environment encompasses: the student’s own home or other space, both printed books and digital learning materials, a programming environment linked to a physical device (i.e. the SenseBoard) and communications networks that link students to their peers and to their tutors. The learning environment also includes support through face-to-face and online tutorials and other online resources, such as forums. In the next phase of the project we will analyse the textual comments made by TU100 students in the end of module survey to evaluate their views on the visual programming environment

S-commerce: Injecting social elements into m-commere

This paper presents the S-Commerce Framework (SC-F) that weaves social elements into mobile commerce. The SC-F consists of three blocks referring to consumers, providers, and brokers, and ensures their connection through different relationships that are then mapped onto social networks. Examples of relationships include competition, referral, and loyalty. This paper, also, discusses the Smart Mobile Restaurant Guide (SMRG) that demonstrates the SC-F usefulness such as increasing the successful rate of satisfying users\u27 requests. © 2011 IEEE

Conversations for Web services composition

This paper presents how conversations are integrated into Web services composition. While much of the recent work on Web services has focussed on low-level standards for publishing, discovering, and triggering them, this paper promotes Web services to the level of active components. Such components engage in conversations, make decisions, and adjust their behavior according to the context of the situations in which they participate. Conversations between Web services are specified with state chart diagrams enhanced with context-awareness mechanisms. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005

False Hopes in Automated Abuse Detection (Short Paper)

The idea of a protected characteristic is supposedly based on the evidence of discrimination against a group of people associated with that characteristic or a combination of those characteristics. However, this determination is political and evolves over time as existing forms of discrimination are recognised and new forms emerge. All the while, these notions are also rooted in colonial practices and legacies of colonialism that create and re-create injustice and discrimination against those same “protected” groups. Automated hate-speech detection software is based typically on those political definitions of hate, which are then codified in law. Moreover, the law tends to focus on classes of characteristics (e.g. gender, ethnicity), rather than specific characteristics that are particularly targeted by discrimination and hate (being a woman, being Indigenous, Black, Asian, etc.). In this paper, we explore some of the implications of this for hate speech detection, particularly that supported with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and for groups that experience a significant amount of prejudicial hate online

Teaching and learning ICT and computing with creative ultimedia: two case studies

Whilst digital technologies such as handheld devices, mobile phones and digital cameras continue to develop into more affordable, more flexible and easier-to-use tools, Internet technologies such as the Web provide the basis for creative activity and sharing that now take place on an unprecedented scale. Developments in the areas of networking and telecommunications have opened up new avenues for multimedia sharing over the Web, with an astounding amount of user-generated multimedia content being negotiated daily over a number of social networking platforms. This paper presents ongoing work that seeks to create opportunities for students in ICT and Computing to engage with multimedia in creative and pedagogically-meaningful ways. The paper focuses on the multimedia-based work carried out in two Open University (UK OU) modules: T215 Communication and Information Technologies and TU100 My Digital Life. Both modules are compulsory components of a named degree in ICT and Computing. T215 is a 60-point level-2 module and TU100 is a 60-point introductory module that is also expected to attract students with more general interests from outside the discipline. At the time of writing T215 is reaching the final stages of its first year of presentation, whilst TU100 is being developed for launch in October 2011. In subsequent years it is expected that students will study TU100 before T215

Unified Compressive Sensing Paradigm for the Random Demodulator and Compressive Multiplexer Architectures

A major challenge in spectrum sensing for cognitive radio (CR) applications is the very high sampling rates involved, which imposes significant demands on the signal acquisition technology. This has given impetus to applying compressive sensing (CS) as a sub-Nyquist sampling paradigm for CR-type wireless signals which exhibit sparsity in certain domains. CS architectures like the random demodulator (RD) and compressive multiplexer (CM) can be used for CR spectral sensing, though both are inherently restricted in terms of the signal classes they can effectively process. To address these limitations, this paper presents two unified RD and CM-based CS architectures that seamlessly integrate precolouring and the multitaper spectral estimator into their respective structures to facilitate efficient sensing of both digitally modulated and narrowband signals, along with popular CR-access technologies like orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. A significant feature of these unified CS architectures is they do not require a priori knowledge of either the input signal or modulation scheme, while a tristate spectral classifier is introduced to afford notably enhanced spectrum access opportunities for unlicensed secondary users. A critical performance evaluation corroborates that both unified architectures demonstrate consistently superior CS results and robustness across a broad range of CR-type signals, modulations and access technologies