Strategies for exchanging information in preschool

We have interviewed four parents and a teacher at a Swedish preschool to investigate the practices for spreading information in preschool. Our findings suggest that frequent presence in the premises of the preschool is important to get information, and that parents rely heavily on routines to make it work. When either of these points fail, breakdowns occur. Discrepancies in parents’ and teachers’ IT use also complicates the information exchange

What can we get “help” to observe when it comes to mobile use and mobile user experience?

Mobile devices and mobile services have been around long enough for the research community to start thinking about the next step in studying them: larger user groups and longer periods of time. Strictly quantitative methods are not very useful when it comes to studying user experience so we need to find scalable ways to support our qualitative methods to be able to take this next step. This paper reflects on automatic gathering of context data as one such way

Changing my life one step at a time – using the Twelve Step program as design inspiration for long term lifestyle change

To explore how people manage and maintain life style change, we conducted interviews with eight members of different Twelve Step Fellowships with 2-23 years of recovery about how they maintain and develop their recovery in everyday life. They reported how identification, sharing, and routines are keys to recovery. Our lessons for design concerns how these concepts support recovery in a long term perspective: Sharing to contribute in a broader sense to the fellowship and to serve as an example for fellow members created motivation even after 20 years of recovery; reflecting over routines in recovery was essential since life is constantly changing and routines need to fit into everyday life; concrete gestures were helpful for some of the abstract parts of the recovery work, such as letting go of troubling issues. Design aimed to support maintenance of lifestyle change needs to open up for ways of sharing that allow users to contribute their experiences in ways that create motivation, and support users in reflecting over their routines rather than prompting them on what to do

Online behavior from desktop and mobile devices are connected

Cell phones and other mobile devices are used to access the Internet even at home and at work where computers are easily available. They are no longer a mere backup to the computer. This means that it makes little sense to study Internet access from mobile devices separate from other Internet access. We need new methods that encompass online behavior from desktop computers and mobile devices as well as stationary and mobile online behavior

Social Media for Lifestyle Change – social with whom, and why?

We have interviewed members of three different Twelve Step programs about how they manage their recovery in a long term perspective. This data also provides insight in the social aspects of the Twelve Step program. We believe that HCI could be inspired for design of social media for lifestyle change by looking more closely at the Twelve Step program. For example the focus on sharing practical experience, creating groups with strong sense of identification as well as personal mentor relations

The phone as a tool for combining online and offline social activity – teenagers’ phone access to an online community

We have analyzed two months of log data and 100 surveys on the phone use of a Swedish online community for teenagers to investigate the mobile use of an established online service. This shows that the phone use mostly takes place during times of the day when teenagers have social time and the use is not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone makes the community access more private compared to the computer, but teens do share the use when they want to. The cell phone bridges the online and offline social communities and allows teens to participate in both at the same time. The online community is not only a place for social activity online, it is also a social activity offline that is carried out face-to-face with friends. The cell phone thus was a tool for the teens to combine their participation in the online and the offline world

How pluralistic is the research field on adult education? Dominating bibliometrical trends, 2005-2012

What the field of adult education research is and how it can be described has been a debated issue over the decades. Several scholars argue that the field today is heterogeneous, borrowing theories and methods from a range of disciplines. In this article, we take such statements as a starting point for empirical analysis. In what ways could it be argued that the field is pluralistic rather than monolithic; heterogeneous rather than homogenous? Drawing on bibliographic data of the top cited articles in three main adult education journals between 2005 and 2012, we illustrate how the citation patterns have tendencies of homogeneity when it comes to the geographical country of authorship, since the USA, UK, Australia and Canada dominate, as well as the research methods adopted, since qualitative approaches have near total dominance. Furthermore, there is a tendency to adopt similar theoretical approaches, since sociocultural perspectives, critical pedagogy and post-structuralism represent more than half of the articles in our sample. At the same time, the results of our analysis indicate signs of scholarly pluralism, for instance, in terms of authorship, since both early career researchers and established researchers are represented among the top cited publications. We conclude the article by arguing that empirical analysis of publication and citation patterns is important to further the development of reflexivity within the field, not least for early career researchers, who might benefit from knowledge about what has been recognized among peers as worth citing in recent times. (DIPF/Orig.

How to choose and how to watch: an on-demand perspective on current TV practices

In Sweden, digital TV services have until very recently not been accessible to most people through the TV set. At the same time, TV channels offer more and more content on the web and the majority of the population has access to high-speed internet connections. A web survey aimed at investigating attitudes and behavior related to on-demand TV was distributed in December 2008 to 52 households in an experimental, open (operator neutral) access network in Sweden. Questions were posed on TV arrangements, habits and attitudes; social aspects of TV watching; watching film or TV on-demand; and watching film or TV using the computer. Complementary interviews were also performed with participants that were not part of the experimental environment. Results show that participants in the studies understood and felt a need for time-shift and on-demand TV services: time-shift needs for re-scheduling, catch-up and repeats were expressed as well as on-demand needs for movies and for accessing otherwise unavailable TV content. Support for on-demand TV could also be found in that subjects reported little need for viewing TV content according to a broadcast schedule, with the main exception of news, sports events and other live broadcasts

The Ubiquitous Interactor - Device Independent Access to Mobile Services

The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise around services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In UBI, the same service can present itself with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by separating interaction between users and services from presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In this paper we describe the system design of UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service

Peripheral Interaction for Sports - Exploring Two Modalities for Real-Time Feedback

We believe that sports is a domain that would both provide valuable input to the area of peripheral interaction, as well as benefit from peripheral interaction itself. We present two pilot studies on peripheral interaction for cross-country skiing and golf using vibration feedback and audio feedback respectively. We believe the results of these initial studies are encouraging and aim to pursue the concept of peripheral interaction for the sports domain