Technology and special populations
Online social tools for Higher Education – Journal Club 4.3.2011
Mar 7th
John Murray came along to our session on Friday to discuss some ongoing research that he is conducting on developing social tools for Higher Education. We probably shouldn’t give away the specifics of what he’s doing just now, but there were some points that came up that are relevant to all applications that aim to improve student participation and engagement using online social tools.
One issue that we kept coming back to was that of anonymity – whether or not contributions from students to any social network-based education tool should be done under their own name, or anonymised. I am by no means an expert on the role of anonymity in contributions to online communities, but there has been a great deal written in this area. See this blog for example, and this Journal Article.
Another issue that came up was that we need to carefully consider the incentives that students have to participate in non-compulsory facets of the Higher Education experience. In this respect, we discussed this very interesting work (and this) which uses game-based feedback to inspire student motivation and engagement.
We’re looking forward to seeing how this project develops as it touches on some issues that are of real importance to some of the other work we are doing at LiSC.
Interestingly, last weeks graphical feedback seems to have prompted a huge upsurge in cake buying. We had a total of 5 cakes at the meeting – of which we ate only one. If anyone can suggest a nice solution for organising our ad-hoc cake buying it would be much appreciated.
Mindtrek 2010
Oct 14th
LiSC had a presence again this year at Mindtrek in Tampere, Finland. This nifty little conference blends together games studies, social media and ubicomp along with business talks from industry pros.
We had two papers to present. Firstly, Ben had a paper about “Emergence and Playfulness in Social Games” (free pdf).
Although the paper is about social games exclusively, the appearance of runaway hit Minecraft prompted a change in focus of the presentation. The talk, shown below, talks about emergence in Minecraft and how it relates to the same playfulness with which many players of Social Games such as Farm Town engage.
Mindcraft – or why emergence makes Farmville as important as Minecraft
View more presentations from bkirman.
The presentation was well received – Sebastian Deterding does a great job of placing these points in context, and talking about the importance of “underspecifying” in game design.
The second presentation was Derek’s paper on the “Step Matron” project that tested the effects of social competition on exercise at work. It is called “Motivating physical activity at work: using persuasive social media for competitive step counting” (free pdf).
This presentation also went very well – we were honoured that it was chosen as Best Academic Paper at Mindtrek!
Unfortunately Derek wasn’t able to attend the ceremony, but kindly Ben stepped forward to take the credit and copious liquid rewards.
Kiitos paljon!
Recently Funded ENACT project – enhancing social networks to augment cognitive behavioural therapy
Jul 29th
I have just realised that we have made no mention to the funding that we recently won from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Here’s some official information on what is involved:
Dr. Shaun Lawson, Reader at the Lincoln School of Computing Science, leads the ENACT project team which has secured just under £500K from the EPSRC for a 28-month study to explore the effectiveness of online social networks in improving the uptake, adherence and completion rates of computerised cognitive behavioural therapy. From the EPSRC’s press summary:
The primary hypothesis of the ENACT project is that Computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CCBT) programmes which replicate the interactive structure of online social media will be more effective at engendering user uptake and engagement than CCBT programmes that replicate the structure of traditional one-to-one therapy sessions. In order to examine the effects of enhancing CCBT with elements of online social technology, ENACT will concentrate on the development and enhancement of a CCBT ‘package’ for the treatment of insomnia. Users of the final application will: 1) be able to interact confidentially with and receive support from other users of the service; 2) be able report completion of daily activities via Online Social Networking and mobile phone applications; 3) receive feedback in an engaging manner on targets set and met; and 4) will generally be supported in their completion of the treatment package in a manner that reflects their usage of online social technology, and which fits conveniently into their daily liefstyle.
The multi-disciplinary nature of ENACT reflects the University’s research strengths in both Computing and Healthcare: Prof. Niro Siriwardena, Foundation Professor in Primary Care at Lincoln, brings his national expertise on primary care improvement to the project. In particular, ENACT will draw on Niro’s work on sleep disorders and their treatment, which was developed in the REST (Resources for Effective Sleep Treatment) project funded by the Health Foundation.
Dr. Kevin Morgan from Loughborough University and Dr. Kate Cavanagh from University of Sussex provide expertise on Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive science applications in ICT.
The EPSRCs official description of the project.
The Universitys Press release
Friday 16th July – Technology, Exercise and Health
Jul 19th
This week we had a great discussion based around the idea of using technology to help motivate people to increase the amount of exercise they take on a daily basis. Richard Keegan from the Universitys Department of Sport, Coaching & Exercise Science came along to contribute his expertise on the topic. There appear to be a large number of online games, mobile phone apps and social networking tools that already attempt to address these issues. However, it is a field in whcih technology has the potential to make real, lasting impacts in peoples lives. We are hoping to collaborate with Richard in designing some tools for this specific purpose in the near future.
Appropriately enough, considering we were discussing topics such as dietary behaviour, obesity and diabetes, we had some delicious sugar coated cream buns to go with our coffee.
Friday June 26th – Technology-Enhanced Mental Health Therapy
Jun 28th
This friday we had a different type of journal club – we had a visit from David Coyle – a post-doctoral research fellow working jointly with Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge. David is working in an area directly related to our recently-funded EPSRC project, which is investigating ways of using online social technology to enhance the delivery of mental health interventions. David gave a very interesting talk entitled ‘Designing technologies to support mental health interventions’. Further details of David’s work are available at www.cs.tcd.ie/David.Coyle
After the talk, we sat around as usual and had a chat about the topic (although there was a disgraceful lack of cake – i expect two cakes next week). We discussed a number of papers written by david and his colleagues here and here
Thanks to david and to everyone else who came along and made this a useful and interesting session!
HCI International 2009
Jul 14th
The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction will be held 19-24 July 09, Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA, USA. This conference is an international forum for the dissemination and exchange of information on theoretical, generic and applied areas of HCI.
Laura Daley will present her paper “Asperger Syndrome and Mobile Phone Behaviour” on Thursday 23 July.
Abstract – This paper introduces the idea of using modern technology to work as an assistive tool for adults with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) and Higher-Functioning Autism (HFA) The study investigated the use of mobile phones by a neurotypical control group. Participants reported their pattern of phone use given specific social scenarios. Results showed that participants were more likely to use the text messaging facility on their phone to contact someone rather than call them. It also showed that their choice of communication mode did not differ given different social scenarios and neither did it when the information was given from the recipients’ perspective. Further investigation is described where this information will be compared to a group of AS individuals.