1,720,965 research outputs found
A different perspective in building tools to collect and share educational resources
No full textUntil now, a large amount of effort has been spent on structuring educational repositories. Standard metadata for learning objects have been provided and large databases have been deployed both from academia and private organizations following mainly a content-centric approach. Vice-versa, a pedagogy-centric approach to the collection and sharing of learning resources still remains under-investigated. In this paper, we provide a different perspective on repositories for education, having as a central point the “educational experience,” i.e. a detailed and structured case study by which teachers and researchers in the educational field can understand where, when and how the digital material was used, and what educational benefits were obtained. We describe a framework by which educational experiences conducted in real classes of all levels of schooling can be gathered and shared. We provide readers with a validation and a qualitative and numerical evaluation of the approach
An EPC-based middleware enabling reusable and flexible mixed reality educational experiences
Full text linkThe world of education is changing substantially to satisfy new needs requested both from teachers and students. A very important role in this changing process is played by emerging hi-technologies, such as mobile phones, tablet computers, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE), and auto-identification (Auto-ID) solutions (e.g. QR code, RFID, NFC). Several attempts to renovate traditional classrooms to enable Mixed Reality (MR) educational experiences are already reported in the literature. Nevertheless, they often lack a middleware able to ease the smart classroom management. This failure is due to poor flexibility in the means of easiness of new technologies configuration and educational methods configurations. In this paper, we present an educational MR middleware based on the EPCglobal standard. The proposed middleware is easy in Auto-ID and CVE technologies configuration; furthermore, it is able to support a competition among different classes of students or schools, by leveraging the EPC Information Services for extracting times and scores. We report also on an experience we made configuring the proposed middleware for a MR educational format called “TIWE Linguistico,” highlighting main benefits obtained considering an Italian high school for strengthening the English language mastery
An Innovative Educational Format Based on a Mixed Reality Environment: A Case Study and Benefit Evaluation
No full textWe are in the midst of an information revolution, in which emerging technologies are creating new products and services that are redefining many aspects of our lives. The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the educational context has allowed leading researchers and practitioners to find new ways of performing learning processes. It is evident that students are naturally attracted by activities that incorporate technology. In this work we propose an innovative competition-based educational format, known as “TIWE Linguistico,” that exploits a Mixed Reality (MR) environment in order to encourage the learning of English as a foreign language. The “TIWE Linguistico” has been used experimentally in an Italian high school and the benefits obtained have been validated by exploiting the FEE (Features Extractions) method
An innovative ICT Architecture supporting the Design and Automatic Generation of Collaborative Session for the Entrepreneurs of the Future
No full textPurpose – Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are computer-based 3D virtual worlds where users can meet and interact with each other in order to perform effectively collaborative work [1]. CVEs are increasingly used in many areas: eLearning [2], eEntertainment [3], eMarketing [4], cultural heritage [5], eMeeting [6], and entrepreneurship [7]. Currently, the development of the 3D environment often lead designers to define action/interaction rules on the basis of the environment facilities offered by it. Then it is needed a design approach, supported by a suited architecture, that let the designers focus the attention over the goals that the collaborative session is aiming.
Design/methodology/approach – We propose an ICT X3D compliant architecture that allows the design and automatic generation of collaborative session for multiple virtual environments. We have been driven by the need to capture all the relevant abstractions embodied in CVEs for several domains, particularly the entrepreneurial domain. .Domain experts can design 3D collaborative experience without any CVE and technological skill because of the choice to use the Theater Metaphor [8] to abstract the CVE concepts. We introduced the concept of modeling primitives, used by different authoring profiles, which are involved in distinct phases of the design process: training designer, trainer/domain expert, CVE engineer.
Originality/value – Comparing our contribution with the state of the art, we can affirm that new is the proposal of a system to generate collaborative sessions compliant with different virtual environments. The many advantages that we can demonstrate are: expressiveness to capture all of the collaborative features needed to support the creative processes of the entrepreneurs of the feature; semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers of entrepreneurship platforms and CVEs engineers, and guidance to enable non-experts to cope with all the relevant aspects of a 3D virtual world.
Practical implications – The growth of CVEs for entrepreneurship (but also for other domains) calls for new concrete tools that enable domain experts and engineers to model and keep under control the design complexity unleashed by technologically heterogeneous 3D virtual worlds.
Two characteristics of our conceptual approach help designers during the modeling phases: abstraction (the metaphor) and separation of concerns (model views). By this ways, trainers and start up incubators in general are free to model the formative experience for the entrepreneurs of the future, designing its objectives and concentrating on the method, without the pain on facing with the technological details
Augmented Reality for Allowing Time Navigation in Cultural Tourism Experiences: A Case Study
No full textIn the past few years, mobile phones have become an increasingly at- tractive platform for augmented reality. This paper describes the development of an interactive visualization system based on Augmented Reality Technolo- gies and the integration into a tourist mobile application for Android. The basic idea is to allow the time navigation of cultural points of interest by means of Augmented Reality. The real scene is enhanced by ancient images to increase the cultural experience of the tourist, who can realistically come back in the past
Rapid Prototyping Internet of Things Solutions Through a Model-Driven Approach: A Case Study in AAL
No full textThe great expansion of the Internet of Things in every aspect of daily life requires expertise and considerable skills in different fields and at different levels to create ad-hoc applications, and deliver suitable user experience. Developers have to deal with heterogeneous technologies, communication formats and protocols. They, in general, ask for new solutions that speed up the prototyping of applications, abstracting the extreme heterogeneity of sensors, actuators and smart objects, which they rely on. To demonstrate how to bridge this gap, here we propose an experience in rapid design and prototyping of an ambient assisted living system that detects the movements of elderly persons in their home, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Our solution is built on top of the WoX (Web of Topics) middleware, a model-driven cloud platform based on the concept of Topic – i.e. an entity containing the value of a feature of interest that we intend to detect – and on its local counterpart, the L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics) that manages local instances of features of interest, allowing mobile applications to collaborate among them, offering and receiving data
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Exploiting an IoT local middleware for the orchestration of mobile device sensors to detect outdoor and indoor user positioning
No full textThanks to the proliferation of mobile technologies that enable devices to use the network for providing (publish) or requiring (subscribe) information according to specific applications aims, the Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered as the biggest challenge that the industry is currently facing. During the last years several application domains for IoT have emerged and among these the Smart Cities. In effect, the IoT is redrawing the Smart Cities in a promising way from the technological, economic, and social perspectives. This represents the background of the work described in the present paper that deals with an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) mobile system able to detect outdoor and indoor user positioning, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Our system exploits an IoT middleware, called WoX (Web of Topics) and its local counterpart L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics). Thanks to its model- driven approach, it is able to allow the communication between mobile applications and a set of heterogeneous sensors, orchestrating access services and communication protocols in a very abstract way
Mobile-IDM: A Design Method for Modeling the New Interaction Style of Mobile ApplicationsEngineering the Web in the Big Data Era
No full textMobile applications (apps) offer designers the opportunity to experi- ment with novel interaction grammars (e.g., gestures, context-aware events), whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. The research panorama only proposes a few design methods for apps, which are mainly released as extensions of existing ones. This, in addition to the short lifecycle that characterizes apps, leads to the risk of inappropriate modeling techniques being adopted. To bridge this gap, we propose a new design method, named Mobile-IDM, to model the interaction between the user and the app from a logical point of view. As it is based upon IDM and Rich-IDM, from which it inherits its design semantics, Mobile-IDM exploits the dialog metaphor to faci- litate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engi- neers to obtain good usability of the interaction. We demonstrate through a case study the simplicity and other advantages of our approach
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