Design and Evaluation of Menu Systems for Immersive Virtual Environments

Interfaces for system control tasks in virtual environments (VEs) have not been extensively studied. This paper focuses on various types of menu systems to be used in such environments. We describe the design of the TULIP menu, a menu system using Pinch Gloves™, and compare it to two common alternatives: floating menus and pen and tablet menus. These three menus were compared in an empirical evaluation. The pen and tablet menu was found to be significantly faster, while users had a preference for TULIP. Subjective discomfort levels were also higher with the floating menus and pen and tablet

Handwriting analysis for diagnosis and prognosis of Parkinson’s disease

At present, there are no quantitative, objective methods for diagnosing the Parkinson disease. Existing methods of quantitative analysis by myograms suffer by inaccuracy and patient strain; electronic tablet analysis is limited to the visible drawing, not including the writing forces and hand movements. In our paper we show how handwriting analysis can be obtained by a new electronic pen and new features of the recorded signals. This gives good results for diagnostics. Keywords: Parkinson diagnosis, electronic pen, automatic handwriting analysi

Digital Ink Technology for e-assessment

Current research has shown that lecturers marking electronic assignments, typically Word documents, are able to provide personalised feedback at a relevant point in a student’s piece of assessment using paper technology such as a Tablet PC. Evaluation through in-depth interview and questionnaire shows that this was important to both students and lecturers alike. Some lecturers have felt that the Tablet PC allows greater creativity in assessment than technologies such as paper and pen and PC and keyboard input device. For example the use of colour linked to learning outcomes and grammar feedback, and the ease with which the eraser can be used for re-editing. It appears that the pedagogy has been extended from the traditional ‘pen and paper’ approach to the use of ‘digital ink technology’. Students said that they liked the personal feel of the electronic hand written feedback. Reflective practice for lecturers was supported through forums and a wiki and was evaluated using virtual ethnography. Lecturers record a flow experience in assessment as either enabling or disabling their creativity in e-assessment. The potential for extending the pedagogy into graphical environments is also evident for such things as annotating graphs and diagrams, mathematical notation and scientific nomenclature

Infancy and education in the writings of Gertrud the Great of Helfta

The German Benedictine nun Gertrud the Great of Heifta c.1256-1302 was one of the most highly educated of medieval women mystics. Unlike most religious women of the Middle Ages, she not only read Latin but also wrote it fluently and prolifically. Latin is the language of almost all her surviving writings: The Herald of God's Loving-Kindness, The Spiritual Exercises and (probably also written by her) The Book of Special Grace. The Herald consists of five books, although only Book 2 comes, quite literally, from the pen of Gertrud herself. The opening describes how she snatched up the writing tablet at her side and wrote the first section under divine inspiration (II, Prologue)

Do we engage the student in e-assessment by personalising lecturers' feedback interventions?

This paper describes the results of an eighteen month study evaluating what students' perceptions were of digital ink feedback on electronic assignments. It was a comparative study with 10 distance learning lecturers, (hereafter referred to as tutors) marking up to a maximum of 600 students' electronic assignments over, two nine month presentations of the UK Open University (OU) course, T175 Networked Living. Assignments were submitted by students over the internet to a centralised web depository called the electronic tutor marked system (eTMA) at the OU, in Microsoft Word. Tutors downloaded these assignments onto their own computers and in this study; half of the assignments were marked and edited using a Personal Computer (PC) with conventional keyboard input, using word processing software. The other half of the assignments were marked using a Tablet PC in which it is possible to create a layer over, the Microsoft Word submission and then write directly onto the screen of the Tablet PC using a pen, as if writing on paper. The hand-written feedback was saved or converted to typed text and then saved. In the first presentation of the course over 67% of students made positive comments about how their tutor had used the Tablet PC in providing feedback. This study also showed that the digital ink technology could help extend pedagogy and is of interest to Higher Education establishments considering on-line submission of assessment

MathBrush: An Experimental Pen-Based Math System

It is widely believed that mathematics will be one of the major applications for Tablet PCs and other pen-based devices. In this paper we discuss many of the issues that make doing mathematics on such pen-based devices a hard task. We give a preliminary description of an experimental system, currently named MathBrush, for working with mathematics using pen-based devices. The system allows a user to enter mathematical expressions with a pen and to then do mathematical computation using a computer algebra system. The system provides a simple and easy way for users to verify the correctness of their handwritten expressions and, if needed, to correct any errors in recognition. Choosing mathematical operations is done making use of context menus, both with input and output expressions