Tag Camp 2005 will be held Oct 28-29th. I would love to attend but it is a little far to travel to San Francisco Palo Alto. I will have to follow online.
Relevance: Since my thesis is on tagging, would be cool to be there.
Technorati tags: tagcamp, tagging
Education Prof designs better learning spaces
My supervisor Samia Khan is on our ubc homepage because of her involvement in designing a space for learning as stated in the UBC public affairs press release. The ICICS building is where my lab is.
“Current research shows that learning is a dynamic and collaborative process,” says Khan. “The part I contributed to the discussion was how students can construct knowledge individually, in groups and with digital technology, and how that learning can be assessed.”
Relevance: What is the role of the environment on learning and how can furniture and architecture foster collaboration? A Collaborative Artefacts Interactive Furniture workshop at EPFL, Switzerland discussed these and related issues last June.
Technorati tags: learning, collaboration,
Taking Stock of Trust Conference
Taking Stock of Trust
ESRC SCARR network and CARR centre, LSE
Rosebery Hall, London, 12 December 2005.
Participation by pre-booking only.
Early Bird price (to October 21): £15
After October 21: £25
Full details at: http://www.kent.ac.uk/scarr/events/trustcontext.htm
Trust and social progress
Professor Lord Layard, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Trust, travel and proximity
Professor John Urry, University of Lancaster
Discussant: Professor Mike Power, CARR, LSE.
Why do people still trust doctors?
Professor Mike Calnan, University of Bristol
Discussant: Professor Chris Hood, University of Oxford.
A psychological approach to understanding how trust is built and lost
Professor Richard Eiser, University of Sheffield and Dr Matthew White, Jena
Discussant: Professor Graham Loomes, University of East Anglia
Trust enables people to collaborate, negotiate and trade under conditions of
uncertainty. The demands placed on trust in a more complex and globalised
economy, where people live more flexible and diverse lives, are growing, at
a time when trust in experts, public authorities and other institutions is
increasingly questioned. This one-day conference will analyse developments
and discuss future directions in trust research.
Relevance: Trust is of relevance for my research in the area of location-based applications and pervasive play. How does trust in one’s position or the position of others change when the system temporarily fails? How does trust relate to user’s expectations about pervasive environments? Does trust enhance collaboration among strangers during game play?
Technorati tags: trust, Collaboration,
Today I am at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland visiting Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin as we are exploring opportunities for collaboration regarding Catch Bob! in our ubicomp group at UBC.
I am glad that I took the opportunity to visit and I am interested to see how we collaborate across different countries and continents.
My laptop has died while I am in Paris. I am getting a system error which is not good. I will try and get this fixed when I get back home.
I’m on my way to Paris for the ECSCW conference. I expect to have internet access and I will blog when I can.
A location-based game called Treasure is described in a paper called Picking Pockets on the Lawn was just presented at UBICOMP 2005. It was co-written by Louise Barkhaus, a post-doc at the Glasgow University that was an exceptional Student Volunteer Chair at CHI 2005.
Playing Treasure involves movement in and out of a wi-fi network, using PDAs to pick up virtual ‘coins’ that may be scattered outside network coverage. Coins have to be uploaded to a server to gain game points, and players can collaborate with teammates to double the points given for an upload. Players can also steal coins from opponents. As they move around, players’ PDAs sample network signal strength and update coverage maps.
Relevance: Similiar to the Live Action Scotland Yard game, I had blogged about earlier,this game takes place in an urban setting. In Treasure, some paired teams played once, others twice, and some played three times.
The ability to steal from other players is not a concept I am aware of in location-based activities. It is interesting from their findings that 2nd and 3rd time players were prone to pickpocket more often.
Would the strategies employed during game play differ on a university campus that is extensively covered with wi-fi such as my university? As participants were recruited in pairs, this suggest team familiarity prior to game play. What finding would you expect with strangers?
Technorati tags:
mobile, urban, game, cscw, play, ethnography
Mikael Kindborg will be visiting my Human Communication Technologies Lab today. He will be giving a presentation at 1pm in ICICS X736 (7th floor meeting room) about his research in the area of comics and the design of a comic strip programming tool called ComiKit.
Mikael is an Associate Professor in the Programmable Toys Research Group, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden.
(www.ida.liu.se/~mikki/comics)
He works quite heavily with Squeak/Smalltalk and he will also be sharing his thoughts about development tools for interative multimedia software.
Below is a short bio.
———–
Comics and Visual Programming
Mikael Kindborg
mikki@ida.liu.se
www.ida.liu.se/~mikki/comics
Over the last century, comic book artists have developed a visual language that offers several kinds of signs and presentation techniques that are of interest
for visual programming. A comic book, like a program, is a static representation of something dynamic. The difference is that a comic strip looks and feels almost like an animated cartoon, while the source code of a program seldom resembles the visible runtime result.
The medium of comics gives a very direct impression of the action going on in the story. To the comic book reader, the characters in a comic almost look like they are moving and they almost sound as if they are speaking. For programs that consist of interactive graphical objects, comics have the potential to describe the behaviour of the objects in a way that strongly resembles the visual result of running the program.
Using comics for visual programming could make it easier for children, artists, teachers, and others to create interactive multimedia programs, since the source code of the program “looks similar” to the runtime result.
The seminar will introduce the use of the visual language of comics for programming and discuss the design of a comic strip programming tool called ComiKit.
Short bio:
Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Linköping University, Sweden.
1983-1990, Stockholm University: Research on computer-based learning environments visual languages.
1991-1994, Nature’s House (exploratorium/museum): Multimedia development and research.
1995-1996, Enea Data (software company): Development of software for on-line service manuals.
1996-1997, Robot & Raket (advertisement agency): Development of web systems and promotional games.
1998-present, Linköping University: Teaching interactivity and programming, research on visual programming.
Relevance: I used to collect comics and I am interested in seeing how he connects comics with programming.
Technorati Tags: comics, programming
I previously blogged about how there is a movement underway in the UK to look at how popular computer games can be used in the classroom to help students learn.
This BBC Technology article talks about Tim Rylands is a teacher in the UK that uses Myst in the classroom and won this year’s Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) award. It is awarded in the UK for the best use of technology in the class.
To him, the rich, multimedia, immersive games, such as Myst, have huge potential for getting creative.
“They are landscapes that have been written into existence,” he told the BBC News website.
“Myst games are peaceful and mind expanding rather than mind-numbing.”
They encourage children to problem solve, and think creatively and, according to him, the games have a “solid social structure”.
Relevance: As children grow within these environment in which technology is pervasive, new and innovative approaches for learning are needed. I would like to hear more about how games in the playground, the street, the home can teach creativity, learning, and problem solving. Learning just doesn’t occur when you’re holding a no.2 pencil.
Technorati tags: learning, education, games
This is a really cool idea that I wouldn’t mind trying on my campus. Semapedia is a system that combines physical tagging of buildings with wikipedia + flickr.
Using Semacode Nodes, real-world objects such as a museum, a statue or anything that exists in the real-world and which happens to have a Wikipedia.org article written will be tagged with their according Wikipedia article URL. A passer-by can now use his Smartphone and ‘click’ (take a picture and decode the URL) on the Semacode Node in order to obtain the relevant Wikipedia article on the subject that she is standing in front of. The Semacode Node was formerly created and attached by either the owner of the subject or someone else who thinks passer-bys should be able to learn more on the subject using this technology. Create your own Semapedia.org Tag right now!
Relevance: I like the idea of asking for permission to post tags. It also has a cultural focus as museums are being tagged. If this was set up on a university campus here, it may be preferable to try it out with Tablet PCs or PDAs as camera phones aren’t so common. What if people could provide an audio/video link on the wikipedia site that was a brief conversation about their recent experience to the museum?
Technorati tag: Museum, Culture, tagging, wikipedia