DADT, DOMA and Fidelity to the Constitution

The author defends the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to appeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) ruling on constitutional grounds: The Executive Branch has a constitutional obligation to defend the laws duly enacted by Congres

DADT, DOMA and Fidelity to the Constitution

The author defends the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to appeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) ruling on constitutional grounds: The Executive Branch has a constitutional obligation to defend the laws duly enacted by Congres

A feature-based approach to continuous-gesture analysis

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-98) and index.by Alan Daniel Wexelblat.M.S

Interaction history for digital objects

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-143) and index.Digital information has no history. When we interact with physical objects, we are able to read the traces left by past interactions with the object. These traces, sometimes called "wear," form a basis for the interaction history of the object. In the physical world, we make use of interaction history to help come up with solutions and guidance. This is not possible in the digital realm, because the traces are missing. This dissertation describes a theoretical framework for talking about interaction history. This framework is related to work in anthropology, ethnomethodology, architecture, and urban planning. The framework describes a space of possible history-rich digital systems and gives properties which can be used to analyze existing systems. The space consists of six properties: proxemic/distemic, active/passive, rate/form of change, degree of permeation, personal/social, and kind of information. We also present an implementation of these ideas in a system called Footprints, a toolset for aiding information foraging on the World Wide Web. Our tools assume that users know what they want but that they need help finding it and help understanding - putting in context - what they have found. Footprints is a social navigation system, designed to show that information from past users can help direct present problem-solvers. We present results from informal use of the tools over the last two years, and from formal surveys and experiments on a controlled task. These experiments showed that people could achieve the same or better results with significantly less effort by using our tools.by Alan Daniel Wexelblat.Ph.D

Motivational Social Visualizations for Personalized E-Learning

A large number of educational resources is now available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produces at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources, and how to engage them into using these resources and benefiting from them. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential methods for addressing these problems. Our work presented in this paper attempts to combine the ideas of personalized and social learning. We introduce Progressor + , an innovative Web-based interface that helps students find the most relevant resources in a large collection of self-assessment questions and programming examples. We also present the results of a classroom study of the Progressor +  in an undergraduate class. The data revealed the motivational impact of the personalized social guidance provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more educational resources and motivated them to do some work ahead of the course schedule. The increase in diversity of explored content resulted in improving students’ problem solving success. A deeper analysis of the social guidance mechanism revealed that it is based on the leading behavior of the strong students, who discovered the most relevant resources and created trails for weaker students to follow. The study results also demonstrate that students were more engaged with the system: they spent more time in working with self-assessment questions and annotated examples, attempted more questions, and achieved higher success rates in answering them

Designing electronic collaborative learning environments

Electronic collaborative learning environments for learning and working are in vogue. Designers design them according to their own constructivist interpretations of what collaborative learning is and what it should achieve. Educators employ them with different educational approaches and in diverse situations to achieve different ends. Students use them, sometimes very enthusiastically, but often in a perfunctory way. Finally, researchers study them and—as is usually the case when apples and oranges are compared—find no conclusive evidence as to whether or not they work, where they do or do not work, when they do or do not work and, most importantly, why, they do or do not work. This contribution presents an affordance framework for such collaborative learning environments; an interaction design procedure for designing, developing, and implementing them; and an educational affordance approach to the use of tasks in those environments. It also presents the results of three projects dealing with these three issues

Personalizing Interactions with Information Systems

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to the individual. In this chapter, we study personalization from the viewpoint of personalizing interaction. The survey covers mechanisms for information-finding on the web, advanced information retrieval systems, dialog-based applications, and mobile access paradigms. Specific emphasis is placed on studying how users interact with an information system and how the system can encourage and foster interaction. This helps bring out the role of the personalization system as a facilitator which reconciles the user’s mental model with the underlying information system’s organization. Three tiers of personalization systems are presented, paying careful attention to interaction considerations. These tiers show how progressive levels of sophistication in interaction can be achieved. The chapter also surveys systems support technologies and niche application domains