Developing Tangible Data Literacies for the Internet of Tangible Things

This paper poses the question how to design tangible interactions with the Internet of Things (IoT) in a way that supports people to develop better mental models of the underlying cyber-physical systems and thus enrich the ways that people engage with and create new knowledge from them

Understanding and Telling Stories across Online and Real-world Cultural and Historical Artefacts

Storytelling is a natural way for humans to make sense of their world. Narratives structure experience into expected forms that improve understanding of relationships between discrete objects and events. This is the rationale behind museum curation, which organises objects in the physical museum space to reveal how they are related. This thesis explores how to support people to tell and experience narratives across multiple objects. For the online world, a model of curatorial inquiry is introduced which is designed to support a historical inquiry from online sources. This model extends existing inquiry models and is inspired by museum practice in which curators organize objects into museum narratives. For the physical world, a model is introduced that describes navigation through both the physical and conceptual neighbourhood of a set of objects. It is designed to support tourist activities across a non-portable set of cultural objects, such as statues, buildings, or landscape features. Key findings, based on both participant studies and analysis of data from Foursquare, is that while people are keen to understand stories that link places in a physical space, they prefer to navigate using physical, rather than conceptual proximity, and to visit places that are popular. This is counter to many mobile tour guides that focus on prompting navigation to similar places. The proposal of this thesis is therefore to develop applications that support tourists in understanding both what is physically nearby and conceptually nearby. This would allow them to use physical proximity - or any preferred alternative – to select where to go next, whilst supporting them to make links between the places they visit. In this way tourists would be provided with enough information about the relationships of places within a physical neighbourhood that they can start to understand and create their own stories about them

Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers

Connected seeds and sensors: co-designing internet of things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-growing communities.

We present a case study of a participatory design project in the space of sustainable smart cities and Internet of Things. We describe our design process that led to the development of an interactive seed library that tells the stories of culturally diverse urban food growers, and networked environmental sensors from their gardens, as a way to support more sustainable food practices in the city. This paper contributes to an emerging body of empirical work within participatory design that seeks to involve citizens in the design of smart cities and Internet of Things, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. It also contributes empirical work towards non-utilitarian approaches to sustainable smart cities through a discussion of designing for urban diversity and slowness

Navigation strategies in the cityscape/datascape

The work described in this paper focuses on how to reveal culturally-related data to city tourists to help them in navigating both the physical space through which they are moving (the cityscape) and a conceptual space around points of interest which links them through shared stories of time, place, people and theme (the datascape). The research goal is to discover to what extent navigational strategies in a conceptual space should be reflected in a physical space, or vice versa. This paper describes preliminary analysis of results from two studies. These studies suggest that tourists have a strong preference for visiting places in order of ‘closest next’. However, tourists also want to understand how places are conceptually related. Providing this type of information may assist tourists in their informal learning from a city visit

Cultural learning across the smart city

Public involvement in defining and interpreting cultural heritage offers many benefits, including improved learning opportunities for individuals and a broader base of knowledge about art and heritage. This knowledge can in turn be used for better, smarter, information provision in the future. This paper proposes how to capture, analyse and present cultural information from differ-ent viewpoints, using narrative principles to uncover important settings (place and time) themes and people and using these to support both physical and con-ceptual navigation. We propose novel methods to provide and capture ‘in the moment’ information, via mobile devices, for both formal and lifelong cultural learning within a smart city

Visualising energy: teaching data literacy in schools

As data sets become increasingly complex and pervasive, the importance of citizens to achieve a certain level of data literacy is more important. Citizens need to understand not only how they are contributing data but how this is being used. Data literate citizens have more opportunities for understanding cities through data and informing data driven urban innovations. Current practices around teaching data in schools still focus on using small, personally collected datasets and in teaching graph or chart based visualization. This is a long way away from the types of data and visualisations that are increasingly encountered in daily life. This paper proposes to teach data literacy in schools. Of particular interest in this paper is the idea to engage students with complex data sets to get them thinking about how to produce novel visualisations of this data. Examples are given in which a class of Year 7 and Year 9 students in the U.K. are tasked with creating visualisations of data related to their home energy consumption

Curation, curation, curation

The media curation craze has spawned a multitude of new sites that help users to collect and share web content. Some market themselves as spaces to explore a common interest through different types of related media. Others are promoted as a means for creating and sharing stories, or producing personalized newspapers. Still others target the education market, claiming that curation can be a powerful learning tool for web-based content. But who really benefits from the curation task: the content curator or the content consumer? This paper will argue that for curation to fully support learning, on either side, then the curation site has to allow the content curator to research and tell stories through their selected content and for the consumer to rewrite the story for themselves. This brings the curation task inline with museum practice, where museum professionals tell stories through careful selection, organization and presentation of objects in an exhibition, backed up by research. This paper introduces the notion of ‘recuration’ to describe a process in which shared content can be used as part of learning

Mining a MOOC to examine international views of the “Smart City”

Increasing numbers of cities are focussed on using technology to become “Smart”. Many of these Smart City programmes are starting to go beyond a technological focus to also explore the value of a more inclusive approach that values the input of citizens. However, the insights gained from working with citizens are typically focused around a single town or city. In this paper we explore whether it is possible to understand people’s opinions and views on the Smart City topics of Open Data, privacy and leadership by examining comments left on a Smart City MOOC that has been delivered internationally. In doing so we start to explore whether MOOCs can provide a lens for examining views on different facets of the Smart City agenda from a global audience, albeit limited to the demographic of the typical MOOC user

From closing space to contested spaces: re-assessing current conflicts over international civil society support

S.a. Legal Foreign Funding Restrictions on Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) Worldwide (additional online resource). http://bit.ly/1QuWt8