NB. Abstracts will be added as they become
available
Autumn
seminars, Spring seminars,
Summer seminars
|
Friday 4h March 2011 Title & Abstract
: " Reducing Mortality
from Bad Software"
See http://harold.thimbleby.net or http://mitpress.com/presson Friday 6th November Title & Abstract : "Digitally Augmenting Traditional
Play Environments" Digitally augmented toys and games are traditional toys or
game pieces equipped with sensing technology, computing power and
communication capabilities. This allows designers to incorporate novel
virtual elements previously only available in video games without
compromising the tangible and social benefits of traditional play objects.
Through this digital augmentation, play environments have the potential to
support users by providing them with context-aware information and services
and thus to enrich play experiences and facilitate playful learning. In this
talk I will present a number of digitally augmented play environments to
demonstrate both the benefits of such an extension as well as the
technological implementation. About the speaker: Friday 27th November Title : " Robots are invading the classroom" Kate is a part-time IT and computing teacher and an Open
University Associate Lecturer in Maths, Computing and Technology amongst
other things. She worked in clinical biochemistry before children and then
moved into education. One day a LEGO set arrived in her class room and
she has been playing ever since. Kate runs a robotics club in school
and school teams compete nationally and internationally in robotic
competitions. She uses her spare time to support other teachers and
schools with robotic activities and is on the international technical
committee for RoboCup. Kate will describe some
of the robotic events that she has been involved with in school, some
possible implications for computing education and will indicate possible
future developments and research areas. She will be bringing some LEGO
with her. Friday
26th February Title
& Abstract : "Design and delivery of game-based learning for medical
education in Second Life" In
view of the current interest taking place in the area of education and
virtual worlds, such as Second Life, many educationalists have began to
explore the benefits of applying game-based learning in these environments.
In this presentation, the elements associated with game-based learning in
virtual worlds will be discussed, focusing on the design process and how
effective game-based learning activities can be achieved following pedagogic
frameworks. Learning using games is seen as a form of driving learners’
motivations and this is reflected in the design and development of the
virtual respiratory ward at Imperial College virtual hospital which will be
presented. About the speaker: Maria’s
background is in Computer Science and Human Factors. Maria is currently
undertaking research in the area of game-based learning in virtual worlds.
She initiated the Imperial College London Second Life region and she is also
currently the technical lead and manager of this project. Her key skills
include instructional design, coordination across distributed teams, business
analysis and project management. She also has an in depth knowledge of
International Learning Standards and their implementation across platforms. Friday 12th March John Woodthorpe (Open University) Title: Using Web 2.0 technologies to support distance learners Abstract: The Open University has a long history of using a range of
technologies to support distance learning. Students have often used signing
up for a course as justification to buy a VCR and more recently, a computer.
For many in the years from 1999 to 2005 their first online purchase was the
set books for the OU's extremely popular online course "You, Your
Computer, and the Net". As the level of familiarity OU students have
with computers and the internet increases, we now find many have a greater
experience of online services and a desire to use them in their courses. This
talk will cover two contrasting attempts to provide an improved degree of
interactivity. Firstly the results of a research project using a social
bookmarking service to integrate student-generated resources into course will
be described. Secondly, a new course in production will use a novel
combination of hardware, programming environment, and online resources to
allow students to experience and design ubiquitous computing devices. The
course will be described and the hardware and software demonstrated. About the speaker: John has worked for
the Open University in many roles over the last 26 years. Starting out as a
demonstrator at Summer School, he has tutored several Technology courses and
one Arts course. He is now a Lecturer in ICTs in Teaching in the
Communication & Systems Department of the Faculty of Mathematics,
Computing and Technology and a COLMSCT Teaching Fellow. Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (UCL) Title: Embodied Interaction and Emotion Abstract: In recent
years, we are assisting to the emergence of technology that involves and requires
its users to be engaged through their body. This has opened the possibility
to better exploit and understand this modality to capture, respond to and
regulate users' affective experience. I will report on our studies aimed at
using this modality to induce and to recognize affective states in users
interacting with technology. In the first part of the talk, I will present a
model of body movement as a modulator of player experience. Through
experiment results, I will show that game controllers affording natural body
movements can change the quality of engagement of the player and can induce a
more emotional experience. In the second part, I will show that technology
can capture the quality of the user's experience. I will present a system
that learns to recognize the affective state of people from their posture.
Whilst successful experiments have been carried out with acted postures, we
are currently testing the system’s ability to detect the more subtle
affective states of a computer game player. Friday 21st May Sally Jordan (Open University) Title:
Short answer free-text e-assessment questions with tailored feedback Abstract: Can computers mark responses of 20 words or so as
accurately as human markers? Can algorithmically-based systems mark as
accurately as linguistically-based systems? The answers to both of these questions is yes and this seminar
will explore (in a non-technical way) work that has been done at the Open
University, resulting in the embedding of short-answer free-text questions
into interactive computer-marked assignments (iCMAs)
used by around 5000 students per year. Evaluation has investigated marking
accuracy, student reaction to the questions and their use of the feedback
provided. The findings have been interesting and, on occasions, surprising. About the speaker: Sally Jordan is a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in Science
at the Open University in the East of England. Her usual reason for visiting
the University of Sussex is for OU residential school! Sally is course team
chair of S104: Exploring Science and S151: Maths for Science and has done her
recent work in e-assessment with funding from two of the OU’s Centres for
Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Friday 11th June Dr Alastair J. Gill (Centre of Research in Social
Simulation, University of Surrey) Title
& Abstract : "Social Information in Computer-Mediated
Communication" Online media increasingly enable us to develop and support
social relationships. Although never easier to exchange richer forms of
media, communication generally remains text-based. My research focuses on the
communication of social information fundamental to understanding others in
text. In particular, my work shows that qualities such as
personality, emotion and trust are characterised linguistically in a
text-based environment (email, blogs, IM), and generally personality and
emotion can be accurately perceived from short snippets of text. There are,
however, some interesting wrinkles present in the results: For example, it is
more important to consider which personality trait or emotion is being
considered, than talking about general accuracies. Similarly, although I have
found increased linguistic similarity relates to trust in dialogue,
automatically generated dialogues including greater similarity were perceived
negatively. I will discuss some of the issues raised by this research, and
conclude the talk by discussing the role of social information in
computer-supported collaboration. About the speaker: Friday 18th June Prof Frederic Fol Leymarie (Goldsmiths, University of London, Computing Dep) Title: Art, Computing, and Perception:
exploring creative processes Abstract: Frederic will report on a few projects
where we mix art and perception by About the speaker: Professor Fol Leymarie
(BEng Montreal, MEng Mcgill,
PhD Brown) is co-director of the MSc Computer Games & Entertainment at
Goldsmiths, University of London. As an expert on 3D graphics modelling he
was instrumental in setting up the SHAPE Lab at Brown University, exploring
virtual reconstructions of archaeological places and artefacts. He continues
that work at the University of London and is also principal investigator on
projects using computers to generate art and evolving three-dimensional
shapes to be used in art, computer games and medical visualisation. Frederic
has initiated several "shape-based" projects mixing the Arts,
Humanities, the Sciences, and Computing. (www.folleymarie.com) |