The social and cultural shaping of educational technology: Toward a social constructivist framework

The Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory offers a useful conceptual framework for examining the social and cultural factors that may contribute to or detract from the successful integration of computer technology into educational environments. This theory, which grew out of studies in the history of technology and the sociology of science, suggests methods for studying the phenomenon of technological development, such as identifying the relevant social groups involved in the development process and the factors that either leave the technology in a state of interpretive flexibility or bring the interpretation of the technology to closure. This paper uses a SCOT approach to explore how personal and institutional beliefs can shape the ways in which technologies are used by teachers and students, and to identify the social, epistemological, cognitive and motivational factors that need to be considered as computer technology becomes an integral part of the educational experience.     

图书馆网站的综合评价方法研究

图书馆网站是现代化图书馆自我展示的窗口,如何科学合理的评价图书馆网站以提高其建设质量显得尤为重要.通过对图书馆网站的分析,建立了其评价指标体系,利用灰色统计的方法来确定模糊测评矩阵,并利用信息论中的熵技术来确定相应评价指标的权重,然后运用模糊方法对网站进行了综合评价,从而为提高图书馆网站建设质量提供了有益的理论参考.     

Computing with the social fabric: The evolution of social intelligence within a cultural framework

Cultural algorithms employ a basic set of knowledge sources, each related to knowledge observed in various animal species. These knowledge sources are then combined to direct the decisions of the individual agents in solving optimization problems using an influence function inspired by the marginal value theorem from population biology. We briefly describe an implementation of this approach, the cultural algorithms toolkit (CAT) in the Repast agent-based simulation environment. Next we introduce the notion of "social fabric" which provides a framework in which the knowledge sources can access the social networks to which individuals can belong. A computational version of the social fabric idea is then implemented as an extension of the influence function in the CAT system. We then apply the enhanced system to a problem in engineering design, the "pressure vessel problem". For this problem, we show that the enhanced system with the social fabric outperforms the CAT system without it. We demonstrate also that the frequency with which the knowledge sources are able to access the network can affect the problem solving process.     

The aesthetic turn in sonification towards a social and cultural medium

The public release of datasets on the internet by government agencies, environmental scientists, political groups and many other organizations has fostered a social practice of data visualization. The audiences have expectations of production values commensurate with their daily experience of professional visual media. At the same time, access to this data has allowed visual designers and artists to apply their skills to what was previously a field dominated by scientists and engineers. The ‘aesthetic turn’ in data visualization has sparked debates between the new wave and older more scientifically grounded schools of thought on the topic. Sonification is not as well known or commonly practiced as visualization. But sound is a naturally affective, aesthetic and cultural medium. The extension of the aesthetic turn to sonification could transform this field from a scientific curiosity and engineering instrument into a popular mass medium. This paper proposes that a design approach can facilitate an aesthetic turn in sonification that integrates aesthetics and functionality by dissolving divisions between scientific and artistic methods. The first section applies the design perspective to the definition of sonification by replacing the linguistic concept of representation with non-verbal concept of functionality. The next section describes applications of the TaDa design method that raised aesthetic issues particular to sonification practice. The final section proposes a pragmatic aesthetics that distinguishes sonification from the auditory sciences and sonic arts. A design perspective may lead to a future where the general public tunes into pop sonifications for listening enjoyment as well as useful information about the world.     

Design and evaluation of a dynamic job search website for non-literate users of Pakistan

ABSTRACT

Among the many available online job searching solutions, very limited are proposed for non-literate users. The available solutions have tested the possibilities using static web pages which are not applicable in the real world for non-literate users because of the dynamism of the real world. In this research, a dynamic job search solution is presented for non-literate users of Pakistan. User Interface (UI) requirements were identified through an extensive literature review. The culturally specific content in the form of hand-drawn sketches, voice feedback, semi-illustrations was identified and incorporated in the job seekers (non-literate) module. The same module was evaluated by the non-literate and semi-literate participants in a field study as per the usability specification defined by ISO-9241-11. The results have shown that non-literate users could search for a job efficiently in the minimum task completion time as compared to the time reported in the previous literature. They were satisfied and motivated to use the website again to search for jobs. The results indicate a potential for designing ICT-based solutions to provide services to the non-literate users in developing countries.     

Segmenting visitors of cultural events: The case of Christmas Market

Market segmentation in tourism makes use of sets of powerful analytical tools for the sake of planning and managing demand-oriented policies. This paper contributes to this strand of literature by segmenting tourists visiting a cultural event. We utilize the Bagged Clustering method, a combination of traditional partitioning and hierarchical techniques, which is proven to be more effective. An ad hoc survey was conducted in 2011 among the Italian visitors of the Christmas Market in Merano, Northern Italy. A total of 802 questionnaires were collected. In discussing the results, marketing and managerial implications are stressed for both policymakers and local organizers.     

Tag-based user modeling for social multi-device adaptive guides

This paper aims to demonstrate that the principles of adaptation and user modeling, especially social annotation, can be integrated fruitfully with those of the web 2.0 paradigm and thereby enhance in the domain of cultural heritage. We propose a framework for improving recommender systems through exploiting the users tagging activity. We maintain that web 2.0’s participative features can be exploited by adaptive web-based systems in order to enrich and extend the user model, improve social navigation and enrich information from a bottom-up perspective. Thus our approach stresses social annotation as a new and powerful kind of feedback and as a way to infer knowledge about users. The prototype implementation of our framework in the domain of cultural heritage is named iCITY. It is serving to demonstrate the validity of our approach and to highlight the benefits of this approach specifically for cultural heritage. iCITY is an adaptive, social, multi-device recommender guide that provides information about the cultural resources and events promoting the cultural heritage in the city of Torino. Our paper first describes this system and then discusses the results of a set of evaluations that were carried out at different stages of the systems development and aimed at validating the framework and implementation of this specific prototype. In particular, we carried out a heuristic evaluation and two sets of usability tests, aimed at checking the usability of the user interface, specifically of the adaptive behavior of the system. Moreover, we conducted evaluations aimed at investigating the role of tags in the definition of the user model and the impact of tags on the accuracy of recommendations. Our results are encouraging.

Architectural criteria for website evaluation - conceptual framework and empirical validation

With the rapid development of the Internet, many types of websites have been developed. This variety of websites makes it necessary to adopt systemized evaluation criteria with a strong theoretical basis. This study proposes a set of evaluation criteria derived from an architectural perspective which has been used for over a 1000 years in the evaluation of buildings. The six evaluation criteria are internal reliability and external security for structural robustness, useful content and usable navigation for functional utility, and system interface and communication interface for aesthetic appeal. The impacts of the six criteria on user satisfaction and loyalty have been investigated through a large-scale survey. The study results indicate that the six criteria have different impacts on user satisfaction for different types of websites, which can be classified along two dimensions: users' goals and users' activity levels.     

动态网站与静态网站的比较研究

如果网页在服务器端需要执行代码则属于动态网网站,动态网站的网页会随客户端请求的不同返回的网页也不同,也就是说传往客户端的网页是动态生成的。若网页在服务器端不需要执行代码则属于静态网站,此时传往客户端的网页是事先编好存在于服务器上的网页文件,它们是永远不变的。动态网站也可以采用静动结合的原则,适合采用动态网页的地方用动态网页,如果有必要使用静态网页,则可以考虑用静态网页的方法来实现。     

Parallel adaptive simulations of dynamic fracture events

Finite element simulations of dynamic fracture problems usually require very fine discretizations in the vicinity of the propagating stress waves and advancing crack fronts, while coarser meshes can be used in the remainder of the domain. This need for a constantly evolving discretization poses several challenges, especially when the simulation is performed on a parallel computing platform. To address this issue, we present a parallel computational framework developed specifically for unstructured meshes. This framework allows dynamic adaptive refinement and coarsening of finite element meshes and also performs load balancing between processors. We demonstrate the capability of this framework, called ParFUM, using two-dimensional structural dynamic problems involving the propagation of elastodynamic waves and the spontaneous initiation and propagation of cracks through a domain discretized with triangular finite elements.     

The design and evaluation of a computerized adaptive test on mobile devices

The use of computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has expanded rapidly over recent years mainly due to the advances in communication and information technology. Availability of advanced mobile technologies provides several benefits to e-learning by creating an additional channel of access with mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. This paper describes the design issues that were considered for the development and the implementation of a CAT on mobile devices, the computerized adaptive test on mobile devices (CAT-MD). Throughout the development of the system, formative evaluation was an integral part of the design methodology. The recommendations, suggestions and the results of the formative evaluation were used to improve the system in order to make the assessment procedure more effective and efficient. These results of the formative evaluation are also presented here.     

Subjective evaluation of critical success factors for a QoE aware adaptive system

For many years video content delivery has established itself as the killer application. Improving QoE on adaptive streaming is focusing many efforts in the quest for optimized methods and metrics to allow a QoE driven adaptation. Questions such as whether adaptive systems based on Scalable Video Coding improve subjective quality and in which situations or to what degree are still open issues. Tolerance and indifference thresholds for each type of content, conditions or viewer category, with regard to adaptive systems are critical success factors that are yet unresolved. We compare the performance of a complete adaptive system with the traditional, i.e. non-adaptive, approach in subjective terms. Results of surveying 75 participants show that the adaptation improves QoE under most of the evaluated conditions. Tolerance thresholds for triggering adaptation events have been identified. Users accustomed to Internet video are more critical than users that only watch TV. The under 35 year old subset among the available population is generally more satisfied with the adaptive system than the older subset.     

Infoweb: An adaptive information filtering system for the cultural heritage domain

This paper presents a system developed for adaptive retrieval and the filtering of documents belonging to digital libraries available on the Web. This system, called InfoWeb, is currently in operation on the ENEA (National Entity for Alternative Energy) digital library Web site reserved to the cultural heritage and environment domain. InfoWeb records the user information needs in a user model, created through a representation, which extends the traditional vector space model and takes the form of a semantic network consisting of co-occurrences between index terms. The initial user model is built on the basis of stereotypes, developed through a clustering of the collection by using specific documents as a starting point. The user's query can be expanded in an adaptive way, using the user model formulated by the user himself. The system has been tested on the entire collection comprising about 14,000 documents in HTML/text format. The results of the experiments are satisfactory both in terms of performance and in terms of the system's ability to adapt itself to the user's shifting interests.     

Experimental evaluation of a multivariable adaptive nonlinear predictive controller

A new multivariable adaptive nonlinear predictive controller is designed using a general nonlinear input-output model and variable transformations. The controller is similar in form to typical linear predictive controllers can be tuned analogously or by specifying a single parameters for each controlled variable. In addition, the design procedure is computationally efficient. The new controller is compared to a multi-loop proportional-integral (PI) controller with one-way static decoupling and to an adaptive linear predictive controller through tests on a simulated nonlinear distillation column. The new controller performed well in an experimental application to a multicomponent distillation column.     

An evaluation of adaptive sampling

Selected adaptive sampling control laws are compared with periodic sampling for five different inputs. It is shown that 1) aperiodic sampling is not always more efficient than periodic sampling, and 2) if the input and statistics of the input disturbance are not known a priori, then the best sampling efficiency is obtained using periodic sampling.     

Matching of social events and users: a two-way selection perspective

Recent years have witnessed a growing trend that offline social events are organized via online platforms. Along this line, large efforts have been devoted to recommending appropriate social events for users. However, most prior arts only pay attention to the selections of users, while the selections of events (organizers), which lead to the “two-way selection” process, are usually ignored. Intuitively, distinguishing the two-way selections in historical attendances can help us better understand the social event participation and decision making process in a holistic manner. To that end, in this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework for social event participation analysis. To be specific, by adapting the classic Gale-Shapley algorithm for stable matching, we design utility functions for both users and event organizers, and then solve two layers of optimization tasks to estimate parameters, i.e., capturing user profiling for event selection, as well as event rules for attender selection. Experimental results on real-world data set validate that our method can effectively predict the event invitation and acceptance, compared with the combinations of one-way-selection baselines. This phenomenon clearly demonstrates the hypothesis that two-way selection process could better reflect the decision making of social event participation.

     

Understanding affective commitment in social virtual worlds: The role of cultural tightness

Understanding how cultural differences affect the formation of users’ affective commitment (ACO) to social virtual world (SVW) services is a critical but understudied issue. Using a novel, norm-based cultural approach, we introduce cultural tightness (CT) to capture cultural differences in users’ collective environment and postulate a model that investigates the contingent effects of CT on the relationships between ACO and its drivers. A two-level analysis of survey data gathered from 400 field users of an influential SVW service and secondary data of CT reveals that the effects of satisfaction, calculative commitment, and subjective norm on ACO are contingent on CT.     

Efficient profile aggregation and policy evaluation in a middleware for adaptive mobile applications

There is a large consensus on the need for a middleware to efficiently support adaptation in pervasive and mobile computing. Advanced forms of adaptation require the aggregation of context data and the evaluation of policy rules that are typically provided by multiple sources. This paper addresses the problem of designing the reasoning core of a middleware that supports these tasks, while guaranteeing very low response times as required by mobile applications. Technically, the paper presents strategies to deal with conflicting rules, algorithms that implement the strategies, and algorithms that detect and solve potential rule cycles. A detailed experimental analysis supports the theoretical results and shows the applicability of the resulting middleware in large-scale applications.     

ACEP: an adaptive strategy for proactive and elastic processing of complex events

The Journal of Supercomputing - The execution of complex event processing (CEP) applications on a set of clustered homogenous computing nodes is latency-sensitive, especially when workload...     

Manifestations of user personality in website choice and behaviour on online social networks

Individual differences in personality affect users’ online activities as much as they do in the offline world. This work, based on a sample of over a third of a million users, examines how users’ behaviour in the online environment, captured by their website choices and Facebook profile features, relates to their personality, as measured by the standard Five Factor Model personality questionnaire. Results show that there are psychologically meaningful links between users’ personalities, their website preferences and Facebook profile features. We show how website audiences differ in terms of their personality, present the relationships between personality and Facebook profile features, and show how an individual’s personality can be predicted from Facebook profile features. We conclude that predicting a user’s personality profile can be applied to personalize content, optimize search results, and improve online advertising.