Supporting organisational learning: an overview of the ENRICH approach

Traditional training separates learning from the work context in which the newly acquired knowledge is to be applied. This requires the worker themselves to apply imparted theoretical knowledge to knowledge in practice, a process that is grossly inefficient. The ENRICH approach builds on organisational learning theory to intertwine working and learning. The ENRICH methodology incorporates theories of learning at the individual, group and organisational level. Individual level learning is supported through the provision of semantically related resources to support problem reframing and to challenge assumptions. Group learning is supported through the evolution of domain concepts through work documents and representations linked to formal models of group knowledge, and the development of group practices and perspectives through enhanced sharing and collaboration. Organisational learning is supported through exposure to customs and conventions of other groups through shared best practices and knowledge models. The approach is being investigated in a range of industrial settings and applications

Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

This paper explores the design issues of 9 situated play within a museum through the study of a 10 museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts

Ontology-based user modeling in an augmented audio reality system for museums

Ubiquitous computing is a challenging area that allows us to further our understanding and techniques of context-aware and adaptive systems. Among the challenges is the general problem of capturing the larger context in interaction from the perspective of user modeling and human–computer interaction (HCI). The imperative to address this issue is great considering the emergence of ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. This paper provides an account of our addressing the specific problem of supporting functionality as well as the experience design issues related to museum visits through user modeling in combination with an audio augmented reality and tangible user interface system. This paper details our deployment and evaluation of ec(h)o – an augmented audio reality system for museums. We explore the possibility of supporting a context-aware adaptive system by linking environment, interaction object and users at an abstract semantic level instead of at the content level. From the user modeling perspective ec(h)o is a knowledge based recommender system. In this paper we present our findings from user testing and how our approach works well with an audio and tangible user interface within a ubiquitous computing system. We conclude by showing where further research is needed

Ec(h)o: Situated play in a tangible and audio museum guide

In this paper we discuss an adaptive museum guide prototype in which playfulness is a key design goal for the interaction experience. The interface for our prototype is a combined tangible user interface and audio display. We discuss how we determined the specific requirements for play through an ethnographic study and analysis based on ecological concepts of Bell and Nardi & O’Day. We found that we could consider play in two main forms in regard to the interface: content and physical play. We also found that play is highly contextual. Designers need to consider the situated nature of play for two reasons: 1) to best serve the overall design purpose; 2) in order to understand the nature and degree of play required. We augmented traditional user experience evaluation methods of questionnaires and interviews with observational analysis based on Djajadiningrat’s descriptions of aesthetic interaction

Rules and ontologies in support of real-time ubiquitous application

The focus of this paper is the practical evaluation of the challenges and capabilities of combination of ontologies and rules in the context of realtime ubiquitous application. The ec(h)o project designed a platform to create a museum experience that consists of a physical installation and an interactive virtual layer of three-dimensional soundscapes that are physically mapped to the museum displays. The retrieval mechanism is built on the user model and conceptual descriptions of sound objects and museum artifacts. The rule-based user model was specifically designed to work in environments where the rich semantic descriptions are available. The retrieval criteria are represented as inference rules that combine knowledge from psychoacoustics and cognitive domains with compositional aspects of interaction. Evaluation results both from the laboratory and museum deployment testing are presented together with the end user usability evaluations.We also summarize our findings in the lessons learned that provide a transferable generic knowledge for similar type of applications. The ec(h)o proved that ontologies and rules provide an excellent platform for building a highly-responsive context-aware interactive application

A report on participatory workshops for the design of adaptive collaborative learning

This “work-in-progress” paper discusses the process of conducting participatory workshops during the design of an adaptive, collaborative learning system. We outline our methods for exploring group interaction, collaboration, and learning in an iterative series workshops. We conclude with a discussion of how the results of these workshops have influenced our ongoing work in designing an adaptive system for family groups in the museum

Web Rule Languages to Carry Policies

Recent efforts in the area of Web policy languages show concerns on how to better represent both context and rules of a domain to deal with large number of resources and users. Interaction between domains with different business rules is also another questionable issue in this same area. Web rule languages have been recently introduced as a means to facilitate interaction between parties with dissimilar policies and business rules. Efforts have been placed to further review the possibility of the proposed solutions and extend them to work with other Web technologies. In this paper, we introduce REWERSE Rule Markup Language (R2ML) as a Web rule language that can be employed to make concepts, policies, and elements of a domain digestible by another domain through the use of vocabularies, rules, and annotations. We also show how R2ML elements can model the concepts and elements of different policy languages and assist systems with diverse policies with their interactions. 1

The evolution of learning object repository technologies: Portals for On-line Objects for Learning

Learning objects are the digital files that are used to construct e-learning experiences, and repositories provide mechanisms to encourage their discovery, exchange, and reuse. Portals for On-line Objects in Learning (POOL) is a consortium project of the TeleLearning NCE to build a learning object repository scalable to the national level. Funded in part by the CANARIE Learning Program, POOL efforts have resulted in the development of two focal technologies: POOL, POND and SPLASH, a distributed architecture for a peer-to-peer network of learning object repositories; and CanCore, a practical metadata protocol for cataloguing learning objects. The authors conjecture that the technology of learning objects and repositories is in an early phase of development and that significant evolution can be expected as user communities form, protocols emerge for the functional linking of these structures, and the underlying technology becomes less visible