Using ICT for school purposes: Is there a student-school disconnect?

Today's students are often portrayed in the literature as enthusiastic and wholehearted users of the Internet for school purposes, in contrast with today's schools, in which the situation is of high ICT access and low use. Via interviews with 25 post-primary students, this study examined student attitudes toward using the Internet for school purposes, revealing the reasoning behind patterns of after school ICT use and underlying perceptions of learning, the teacher's role and the desired role of ICT in schooling. Students were revealed to be ambivalent: they considered the Internet to be easy to use, reducing workload and “fun”, but at the same time “unreliable”, not “serious” enough, and not containing what they “need to know”. Thus, they primarily used it for “unimportant” assignments such as routine homework. Students described their learning goal as getting required “material” into their heads and saw the teachers as an (almost) exclusive authority regarding this required body of information, in line with schooling's information-focused agenda and teacher-centered practices. They were also less than enthusiastic about the integration of ICT into their curriculum. Although there is no apparent disconnect between school and students, it is argued that school should change in order to capitalize on the affordances of ICT and to better prepare students for life in the knowledge age.     

Inventive problem solving based on dialectical negation, using evolutionary algorithms and TRIZ heuristics

The ability to solve inventive problems is at the core of the innovation process; however, the standard procedure to deal with them is to utilize random trial and error, despite the existence of several theories and methods. TRIZ and evolutionary algorithms (EA) have shown results that support the idea that inventiveness can be understood and developed systematically.This article presents a strategy based on dialectical negation in which both approaches converge, creating a new conceptual framework for enhancing computer-aided problem solving. Two basic ideas presented are the inversion of the traditional EA selection (“survival of the fittest”), and the incorporation of new dialectical negation operators in evolutionary algorithms based on TRIZ principles. Two case studies are the starting point to discuss what kind of results can be expected using this “Dialectical Negation Algorithm” (DNA).     

What can be controlled: actionable ICT4D in the case of Palestine

ABSTRACT

A thriving information and communication technology (ICT) economy is an aspiration for developing countries. This research identifies the factors that can motivate or inhibit ICT opportunities in a developing country to grow a sustainable economy. We build an ICT4D decision framework that provides a three-dimensional view based on (1) key factors (e.g. infrastructure, policies), (2) the ICT supply chain, and (3) stakeholders (e.g. industry, government, academia). The framework is applied to the case of Palestine. We use secondary and primary data to understand how both controllable and non-controllable country characteristics have contributed to or inhibited the growth and development of an ICT sector. Results from extensive secondary data sources demonstrate the usability of the framework to analyze the current setting of the ICT sector, in addition to help investigate a range of possible opportunities for action. Then, via a targeted set of interviews with academic, industrial, and governmental sources who are experts in the Palestinian ICT arena, we perform an exploratory study that focuses on key controls and impacts for future development of the ICT economy. The outcomes of this research have the ability to frame and inform economic development decisions that could define the future of the Palestinian state.     

Standardization of user interfaces for lighting controls

Standardization of human-machine interfaces has proved beneficial in a number of technology areas. Lighting control is a home and office technology that is of central importance in energy efficiency and could potentially benefit from standardization, which has proved beneficial in a number of technology domains. User interfaces enable and structure communication to and from devices, however when this communication is not understood, there is increasing loss of amenity to the user - in not getting the services they want - and potential compromise in efficiency. Standard user interfaces can help ensure the best possible outcome for communication.This paper presents a summary of initial research on content for a global standard for lighting control user interfaces. A review of potentially relevant industry standards confirmed that there is no existing standard that covers this topic area, though many standards are related, including those covering symbols, indicators/actuators, generic user interface issues, accessibility, user interface content common to other energy concerns, and terminology. We surveyed many existing products, from simple switches, to those with many buttons, to those using graphic display technology. We describe a classification scheme for the entire ‘form’ of the control, catalogued the use of specific “elements” in the interfaces, and extracted topics (“concepts”) that embody meaning and are represented in collections of interface elements. Finally, we consider plausible paths forward to creating content suitable for a global standard.     

Collaborative networked organizations: Status and trends in manufacturing

Collaborative networked organizations represent an important paradigm to help manufacturing companies cope with the challenges of market turbulence. Through collaboration, assisted by ICT, companies extend their “reach ability space” and participate in agile value creation networks. After a brief summary of the main concepts and collaborative forms, this article presents a survey of the recent advances and suggests main research challenges for various focus areas. A list of emerging collaborative forms in different domains and their characterization are introduced. Among these forms, the customer involvement in innovation networks is discussed as a particularly relevant example for manufacturing.     

A cyberphilosophical issue in education: Unethical computer using behavior – The case of prospective teachers

Increased use of technology for instructional purposes has caused some debates about ethical and/or moral use of computers. All teachers, as practitioners of ICT in learning settings, must feel responsible for educating students on “what is right and what is wrong?” of computer use. This study aimed to determine prospective teachers’ unethical computer using behaviors at a faculty of education in Turkey. The results showed that the participating prospective teachers are sensitive to ethical computer use. However, the general mean of the surveys is above the average by a small degree that makes the participants’ judgments of ethical use inconsiderable. It can be concluded that they undermine ethical computer use. Science teachers and computer education teachers’ judgments were less ethical than those of classroom teachers and social sciences teachers. The results also revealed that female candidate teachers were more concerned about ethical issues and that prospective teachers who had up to five years of PC experience considered ethical computer use more than those with five years and beyond. After the survey analysis, the study was completed with qualitative data gathered from semi-structured interviews with nine students.     

Living in the Hutt Space: Immersive process in the Star Wars Role-Play community of Second Life

Immersive virtual settings are evolving to become new “spaces of life”. Humans inhabit these different virtual worlds through their avatars, and tend to gather into communities. However, the behavioral factors underlying the cognitive process of immersion in virtual worlds are still far to be understood. We here investigated these factors using the Star Wars Role-Play community of the virtual setting of Second Life as a model. More specifically, our studies focused on the immersion process in the “Hutt Space”, a portion of the Star Wars Galaxy ruled by the alien species of the Hutts, which combines the trademark aspects of Star Wars universe. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we identified some of the factors which favor the immersion process. Our results suggest that the different behavioral factors contributing to the immersion process can be organized in three structuring dimensions: commitment, cohesion, and coherence. We also unveil a compensatory mechanism between appearance and behavioral factors in creation and maintenance of social groups in virtual worlds. Finally, we point out some of the behavioral aspects of the evolution from passive media engagement (spectators), to active media engagement (actors), and suggest a theoretical framework to investigate how human inhabit immersive virtual spaces.     

A framework for 3D model reconstruction in reverse engineering

We present a framework for 3D model reconstruction, which has potential applications to a spectrum of engineering problems with impacts on rapid design and prototyping, shape analysis, and virtual reality. The framework, composed of four main components, provides a systematic solution to reconstruct geometric model from the surface mesh of an existing object. First, the input mesh is pre-processed to filter out noise. Second, the mesh is partitioned into segments to obtain individual geometric feature patches. Then, two integrated solutions, namely solid feature based strategy and surface feature based strategy, are exploited to reconstruct primitive features from the segmented feature patches. Finally, the modeling operations, such as solid boolean and surface trimming operations, are performed to “assemble” the primitive features into the final model. The concepts of “feature”, “constraint” and “modeling history” are introduced into the entire reconstruction process so that the design intents are retrieved and exhibited in the final model with geometrical accuracy, topological consistency and flexible editability. A variety of industrial parts have been tested to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework.     

awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs

Constraints in our use of communication materials are often socially and historically produced; to ask after the constraints as we teach or compose can help us understand how material choices in producing communications articulate to social practices we may not otherwise wish to reproduce. In this writing, I consider the constraints Gunther Kress often applied to “word” and “image,” questioning their temporal and spatial structures.     

‘Migrating to a new virtual world’: Exploring MMORPG switching through human migration theory

Online gaming has become a popular leisure-time activity. In this study, we enlisted and adapted the Push-Pull-Mooring model, which analyzes human migratory behavior based on the Demographic Migration Theory, to study the game switching of gamers. Data was obtained via an empirical survey of 654 online gamers and then was analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique. The results indicate that the Push-Pull-Mooring model can be extended to explain the switching intentions of online gamers. The “mooring effect” appears to have a stronger influence on the player’s switching intention than the “pull effect”, while the “push effect” appears to have no influence at all. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer possible avenues of exploration for managers of online game providers in order to help them understand their customers better.     

Engaging the net generation with evidence-based software engineering through a community-driven web database

Software engineering faculty face the challenge of educating future researchers and industry practitioners regarding the generation of empirical software engineering studies and their use in evidence-based software engineering. In order to engage the Net generation with this topic, we propose development and population of a community-driven Web database containing summaries of empirical software engineering studies. We also present our experience with integrating these activities into a graduate software engineering course. These efforts resulted in the creation of “SEEDS: Software Engineering Evidence Database System”. Graduate students initially populated SEEDS with 216 summaries of empirical software engineering studies. The summaries were randomly sampled and reviewed by industry professionals who found the student-written summaries to be at least as useful as professional-written summaries. In fact, 30% more of the respondents found the student-written summaries to be “very useful”. Motivations, student and instructor-developed prototypes, and assessments of the resulting artifacts will be discussed.     

Stylized ambient displays of digital media collections

The falling cost of digital cameras and camcorders has encouraged the creation of massive collections of personal digital media. However, once captured, this media is infrequently accessed and often lies dormant on users' PCs. We present a system to breathe life into home digital media collections, drawing upon artistic stylization to create a “Digital Ambient Display” that automatically selects, stylizes and transitions between digital contents in a semantically meaningful sequence. We present a novel algorithm based on multi-label graph cut for segmenting video into temporally coherent region maps. These maps are used to both stylize video into cartoons and paintings, and measure visual similarity between frames for smooth sequence transitions. The system automatically structures the media collection into a hierarchical representation based on visual content and semantics. Graph optimization is applied to adaptively sequence content for display in a coarse-to-fine manner, driven by user attention level (detected in real-time by a webcam). Our system is deployed on embedded hardware in the form of a compact digital photo frame. We demonstrate coherent segmentation and stylization over a variety of home videos and photos. We evaluate our media sequencing algorithm via a small-scale user study, indicating that our adaptive display conveys a more compelling media consumption experience than simple linear “slide-shows”.     

Characterization of 3D shape parts for semantic annotation

3D content stored in big databases or shared on the Internet is a precious resource for several applications, but unfortunately it risks being underexploited due to the difficulty of retrieving it efficiently. In this paper we describe a system called the “ShapeAnnotator” through which it is possible to perform non-trivial segmentations of 3D surface meshes and annotate the detected parts through concepts expressed by an ontology. Each part is connected to an instance that can be stored in a knowledge base to ease the retrieval process based on semantics. Through an intuitive interface, users create such instances by simply selecting proper classes in the ontology; attributes and relations with other instances can be computed automatically based on a customizable analysis of the underlying topology and geometry of the parts. We show how our part-based annotation framework can be used in two scenarios, namely for the creation of avatars in emerging Internet-based virtual worlds, and for product design in e-manufacturing.     

Why Teachers Must Learn: Student Innovation as a Driving Factor in the Future of the Web

User innovation is the key to the development and vitality of technology. As Huatong Sun wrote, “expanding the scope of localization practices and linking user localization efforts” to design cycles—including pedagogical design—will help bridge the gap between what teachers/designers create and what skills users/students need and want. This article theorizes the role of modern composition students and teachers as co-constructors of productive spaces for learning critical inquiry based on students’ statuses as digital natives. It focuses on a class of first-year composition students who reshaped an assignment to fit their own needs within the physical classroom and also enacted a shift to a virtual classroom. While doing so, they provided ways for each class member to individualize space within that digital environment, and they focused their project on examining the ways in which social networking forums colonize their daily lives. This article argues that by letting student innovation drive pedagogical practice—just as social media creators let user innovation drive the digital structures they produce—composition teachers can be assured of having a text for critique that blurs the lines between “private” student underlife and “public” classroom practice and legitimizes the creation of student-produced learning spaces. Using critical and cyberfeminist theories as lenses, this article draws conclusions about the future of computer usage in composition pedagogy based on students’ abilities to re-appropriate physical and digital classroom space.     

A study of the relationship between institutional policy,organisational culture and e-learning use in four South African universities

This article investigates the relationship between policy (conceptualised as goals, values and resources), organisational culture and e-learning use. Through both qualitative and quantitative research methods, we gathered data about staff and student perspectives from four diverse South African universities representing a selection of ICT in education policy types (Structured and Unstructured) and organisational cultural types of “collegium, bureaucracy, corporate and enterprise” (McNay, 1995). While our findings show a clear relationship between policy and use of ICTs for teaching and learning, organisational culture is found crucial to policy mediation and the way that e-learning use is embedded within the organisation. We conclude that although a Structured Corporate institutional type enables the attainment of a “critical mass” within e-learning, Unstructured Collegium institutions are better at fostering innovation. Unstructured Bureaucratic institutions are the least enabling of either top down or bottom up e-learning change.     

Conceptualising the link between information systems and resilience: A developing country field study

Resilience—the ability of systems to cope with external shocks and trends—is a topic of increasing interest to research and practice. That growing interest is reflected within information systems (IS), but a structured review of IS literature shows a number of knowledge gaps around the conceptual and empirical application of resilience. This paper investigates what the subdiscipline of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) can contribute; finding that it offers the IS discipline fresh insights that can be built into a new framework of resilience, and an arena within which this new framework can appropriately be field tested. Application of the resilience framework was undertaken through interviews and a survey in an urban community in Costa Rica; benchmarking both community resilience and “e‐resilience” (understood here as the contribution of ICTs to community resilience), and developing from these a set of action priorities. The paper reflects on what can be learned generally from this conceptualisation and operationalisation of resilience. It also reflects on what ICTs contribute to resilience in developing countries and on what this ICT4D‐based research specifically contributes to the identified IS knowledge gaps. This includes identification of a future research agenda on information systems and resilience.     

ICT and learning: Lessons from Australian classrooms

Research into Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools is well into its third decade but there is still a pressing need to better understand how computer-based technologies are influencing learning opportunities, and how the local conditions of schooling impact on teachers’ attempts to integrate these technologies in their classrooms. In this article, we provide some insight into these questions through our research in six diverse public schools in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. We observed classrooms and conducted interviews with teachers and other key stakeholders, such as principals and technology coordinators about the integration of ICT. Our goal was to describe and examine the ways in which teachers, in a range of settings, are utilising ICT in their classroom practices to mediate student’s learning experiences Our findings indicate that ICT is largely being integrated in ways that support and supplement existing classroom practices. From our observations, we believe that successful integration of ICT requires fundamental shifts in the core activities of schools. These shifts include new teaching. The cases described in this article suggest some ways in which these shifts may be initiated and sustained.     

Java and the PAS process

Anyone who thinks standards just happen and the job of creating standards is easy, fun, and a chance to travel to fun places should have had the chance to help standardize Java. The Sun Microsystems director of standards, was given the “opportunity” of responding to the market's (users, providers, partners, competitors) request to make Java a standard. Everyone wanted it, and Java was already well documented, well known, and being tested and deployed all over the world. The first task was to determine which Standards Developing Organization (SDO) to use and which path or standardization process to follow as the specification moves from a Sun contribution to a final international standard. After much discussion inside and outside the company, we decided to go with the ISO/IEC JTC1 PAS procedure. Here, he explains the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) process and, so that this is not just an academic discussion, uses Java as the example of how the process worked and didn't work. The Java experience also serves to demonstrate that developing standards isn't simple; rather it's a complex discipline that seems (at times) to become everyone's favorite target     

MobileAR Browser – A generic architecture for rapid AR-multi-level development

We present our novel generic approach for interfacing web components on mobile devices in order to rapidly develop Augmented Reality (AR) applications using HTML5, JavaScript, X3D and a vision engine. A general concept is presented exposing a generalized abstraction of components that are to be integrated in order to allow the creation of AR capable interfaces on widely available mobile devices.Requirements are given, yielding a set of abstractions, components, and helpful interfaces that allow rapid prototyping, research at application level, as well as commercial applications. A selection of various applications (also commercial) using the developed framework is given, proving the generality of the architecture of our MobileAR Browser.Using this concept a large number of developers can be reached. The system is designed to work with different standards and allows for domain separation of tracking algorithms, render content, interaction and GUI design. This can potentially help groups of developers and researchers with different competences creating their application in parallel, while the declarative content remains exchangeable.