Rock your Dreams Chair.

Conceptual design for The Rock Your Dream Chair. This is a collaborative intervention with Tim van den Burg, a creative maker from Breda, the Urban Living Lab Breda, and THE SPACE, which aims to give a voice to local communities in voicing their dreams for the future (of the places where they live)

Rock your Dreams Chair.

Conceptual design for The Rock Your Dream Chair. This is a collaborative intervention with Tim van den Burg, a creative maker from Breda, the Urban Living Lab Breda, and THE SPACE, which aims to give a voice to local communities in voicing their dreams for the future (of the places where they live)

Scholarship 2.0: analyzing scholars' use of Web 2.0 tools in research and teaching activity

Over the past 15 years the Web has transformed the ways in which we search for information and use it. In more recent years, we have seen the emergence of a new array of innovative tools that collectively go under the name of 'Web 2.0', in which the information user is also increasingly an information producer (i.e., prosumer), by sharing or creating content. The success of Web 2.0 tools for personal use is only partially replicated in the professional sphere and, particularly, in the academic environment in relation with research and teaching. To date, very few studies have explored the level of adoption of Web 2.0 among academic researchers in their research and teaching activity. It is not known in what way how and how much Web 2.0 is currently used within research communities, and we are not aware of the drivers and the drawbacks of the use of Web 2.0 tools in academia, where the majority of people is focused either on research or on teaching activities. To analyse these issues, i.e. the combined adoption of Web 2.0 tools in teaching and research, the authors carried out a survey among teaching and researching staff of the University of Breda in The Netherlands. This country was chosen mainly because it is on the cutting edge as far as innovation is concerned. An important driver in choosing the Breda University's academic community was the fact that one of the two authors of this survey works as senior researcher at this university. The purpose of our survey was to explore the level of adoption of Web 2.0 tools among the academic communities. We were interested in investigating how they were using these tools in the creation of scientific knowledge both in their research and teaching activity. We were also interested in analysing differences in the level of adoption of Web 2.0 tools with regard to researchers' position, age, gender, and research field. Finally, in our study we explored the issue of peer reviewing in the Web 2.0 setting. In particular, we investigated whether social peer review is regarded by researchers as a viable alternative to the current closed peer review system (single-blind or double blind). We approached about 60 staff members, but only 12 faculty members completed the survey fully. This means that our results can only be regarded as exploratory, but we still believe that they represent a complementary perspective with respect to previous studies

How psychophysiology can aid the design process of casual games : a tale of stress, facial muscles, and paper beasts

Psychophysiological measurements have so far been used to express player experience quantitatively in game genres such as shooter games and race games. However, these methods have not yet been applied to casual video games. From a development point of view, games developed in the casual sector of the games industry are characterized by very short production cycles which make them ill-suited for complex and lengthy psychophysiological testing regimes. This paper discusses some methodological innovations that lead to the application of psychophysiological measurements to enhance the design of a commercially released casual game for the Apple iPad, called ‘Gua-Le-Ni’; or, The Horrendous Parade’. The game was tested in different stages of its development to dry-run a cycle of design improvements derived from psychophysiological data. The tests looked at the correlation between stress levels and the contraction of facial muscles with in-game performance in order to establish whether ‘Gua-Le-Ni’ offered the cognitive challenge, the learning curve, and the enjoyment the designers had in mind for this product. In this paper, we discuss the changes that were made topeer-reviewe

Towards generic adaptive systems : analysis of a case study

This paper analyses one of the most well-known general purpose adaptive hypermedia systems, AHA!, and, based on this analysis, make some general observations about adaptive hypermedia systems and some improvement suggestions for the AHA! system. We suggest here a concept-based approach to the structuring of adaptive hypermedia systems, as well as an extension of the well-known rule-based overlay method for user-adaptation. This approach is another step towards flexible generic-purpose adaptive hypermedia

Enhancing users'experience: a content analysis of 12 university libraries Facebook profiles

This paper intends to explore the use of Facebook in university libraries by making an empirical analysis of 12 Facebook library pages. Findings of the study show that Facebook library pages can be an effective tool to communicate and to outreach to students if librarians are proactive and keep the wall alive, but there is no evidence at the moment that content delivery or services have been improved in this way

New journal models and publishing perspectives in the evolving digital environment

Open access combined with Web 2.0 networking tools is fast changing the traditional journals’ functions and framework and the publishers’ role. As content is more and more available online in digital repositories and on the web an integrated, interconnected, multidisciplinary information environment is evolving and Oldenburg’s model disintegrates and scholars attention is deeply concentrated on article level. New journal models are thus evolving. In the first part of the presentation authors discuss these new experimental journal models, i.e. - overlay journals - interjournals - different levels journals. In the second part authors drive readers’ attention on the role commercial publishers could play in this digital seamless writing arena. According to the authors, publishers should concentrate much more on value-added services both for authors, readers and libraries, such as navigational services, discovery services, archiving and ex-post evaluation services