Understanding expectations with multiple controllers in an augmented reality videogame

Player experiences and expectations are connected. The presumptions players have about how they control their gameplay interactions may shape the way they play and perceive videogames. A successfully engaging player experience might rest on the way controllers meet players' expectations. We studied player interaction with novel controllers on the Sony PlayStation Wonderbook, an augmented reality (AR) gaming system. Our goal was to understand player expectations regarding game controllers in AR game design. Based on this preliminary study, we propose several interaction guidelines for hybrid input from both augmented reality and physical game controllers

Understanding the behavior of workshop facilitators in systems analysis and design projects: Developing theory from process modeling projects

Organizational and technological systems analysis and design practices such as process modeling have received much attention in recent years. However, while knowledge about related artifacts such as models, tools, or grammars has substantially matured, little is known about the actual tasks and interaction activities that are conducted as part of analysis and design acts. In particular, key role of the facilitator has not been researched extensively to date. In this paper, we propose a new conceptual framework that can be used to examine facilitation behaviors in process modeling projects. The framework distinguishes four behavioral styles in facilitation (the driving engineer, the driving artist, the catalyzing engineer, and the catalyzing artist) that a facilitator can adopt. To distinguish between the four styles, we provide a set of ten behavioral anchors that underpin facilitation behaviors. We also report on a preliminary empirical exploration of our framework through interviews with experienced analysts in six modeling cases. Our research provides a conceptual foundation for an emerging theory for describing and explaining different behaviors associated with process modeling facilitation, provides first preliminary empirical results about facilitation in modeling projects, and provides a fertile basis for examining facilitation in other conceptual modeling activities.

The Arab Spring on Twitter: Language Communities in #egypt and #libya

Building on hashtag datasets gathered since January 2011, this paper will compare patterns of Twitter usage during the popular revolution in Egypt and the civil war in Libya. Using custom-made tools for processing ‘big data’ (boyd & Crawford, 2011), we will examine the volume of tweets sent by English-, Arabic-, and mixed-language Twitter users over time, and examine the networks of interaction (variously through @replying, retweeting, or both) between these groups as they developed and shifted over the course of these uprisings. Examining @reply and retweet traffic, we will identify general patterns of information flow between the English- and Arabic-speaking sides of the Twittersphere, and highlight the roles played by key boundary riders connecting both language spheres. Further, we will examine the URLs shared in these hashtags by Twitter participants, to identify the most prominent overall information sources, examine differences in the information diet experienced by English- and Arabic-language users, and investigate whether there are any online sources whose URLs are transcending language boundaries more frequently than others.

Green: Exploring the aestheticized use of chroma-key techniques and technologies in two intermedial productions

Peggy Shaw’s RUFF, (USA 2013) and Queensland Theatre Company’s collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, Total Dik!, (Australia 2013) overtly and evocatively draw on an aestheticized use of the cinematic techniques and technologies of Chroma Key to reveal the tensions in their production and add layers to their performances. In doing so they offer invaluable insight where the filmic and theatrical approaches overlap. This paper draws on Eckersall, Grehan and Scheer’s New Media Dramaturgy (2014) to reposition the frame as a contribution to intermedial theatre and performance practices in light of increasing convergence between seemingly disparate discourses. In RUFF, the scenic environment replicates a chroma-key ‘studio’ which facilitates the reconstruction of memory displaced after a stroke. RUFF uses the screen and projections to recall crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands, and an eclectic line of eccentric family members living inside Shaw. While the show pays tribute to those who have kept her company across decades of theatrical performance, use of non-composited chroma-key technique as a theatrical device and the work’s taciturn revelation of the production process during performance, play a central role in its exploration of the juxtaposition between its reconstructed form and content. In contrast Total Dik! uses real-time green screen compositing during performance as a scenic device. Actors manipulate scale models, refocus cameras and generate scenes within scenes in the construction of the work’s examination of an isolated Dictator. The ‘studio’ is again replicated as a site for (re)construction, only in this case Total Dik! actively seeks to reveal the process of production as the performance plays out. Building on RUFF, and other works such as By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, (2012) and Hotel Modern’s God’s Beard (2012), this work blends a convergence of mobile technologies, models, and green screen capture to explore aspects of transmedia storytelling in a theatrical environment (Jenkins, 2009, 2013). When a green screen is placed on stage, it reads at once as metaphor and challenge to the language of theatre. It becomes, or rather acts, as a ‘sign’ that alludes to the nature of the reconstructed, recomposited, manipulated and controlled. In RUFF and in Total Dik!, it is also a place where as a mode of production and subsequent reveal, it adds weight to performance. These works are informed by Auslander (1999) and Giesenkam (2007) and speak to and echo Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006). This paper’s consideration of the integration of studio technique and live performance as a dynamic approach to multi-layered theatrical production develops our understanding of their combinatory use in a live performance environment.

Understanding advanced and extended professional practice

The Advanced Pharmacy Practice Framework Steering Committee (now replaced by the Pharmacy Practitioner Development Committee) undertook work to develop an advanced pharmacy practice recognition model. As part of that work, and to assure clarity and consistency in the terminology it uses, the Committee collated the definitions used in literature sources consulted. Most recently, this involved a review of the meaning attributed to the terms ‘advanced’ and ‘extended’ when used in the context of describing aspects of professional practice. Both terms encompass the acquisition of additional expertise. While ‘advanced’ practice involves the acquisition of additional expertise to achieve a higher performance level, ‘extended’ practice relates specifically to scope of practice and involves the acquisition of additional expertise sufficient to provide services or perform tasks that are outside the usual scope of practice of the profession. Performance level operates independently of scope of practice but both must be elucidated to fully describe the professional practice of an individual practitioner.

Template-based circuit understanding

When verifying or reverse-engineering digital circuits, one often wants to identify and understand small components in a larger system. A possible approach is to show that the sub-circuit under investigation is functionally equivalent to a reference implementation. In many cases, this task is difficult as one may not have full information about the mapping between input and output of the two circuits, or because the equivalence depends on settings of control inputs. We propose a template-based approach that automates this process. It extracts a functional description for a low-level combinational circuit by showing it to be equivalent to a reference implementation, while synthesizing an appropriate mapping of input and output signals and setting of control signals. The method relies on solving an exists/forall problem using an SMT solver, and on a pruning technique based on signature computation.

A framework for understanding and generating integrated solutions for residential peak energy demand

Supplying peak energy demand in a cost effective, reliable manner is a critical focus for utilities internationally. Successfully addressing peak energy concerns requires understanding of all the factors that affect electricity demand especially at peak times. This paper is based on past attempts of proposing models designed to aid our understanding of the influences on residential peak energy demand in a systematic and comprehensive way. Our model has been developed through a group model building process as a systems framework of the problem situation to model the complexity within and between systems and indicate how changes in one element might flow on to others. It is comprised of themes (social, technical and change management options) networked together in a way that captures their influence and association with each other and also their influence, association and impact on appliance usage and residential peak energy demand. The real value of the model is in creating awareness, understanding and insight into the complexity of residential peak energy demand and in working with this complexity to identify and integrate the social, technical and change management option themes and their impact on appliance usage and residential energy demand at peak times.

Devenir plurilingue : la perspective des littératies multiples

Abstract - English Multiple literacies refers to reading, reading the world and self. This article proposes an understanding of reading that goes beyond its definition in psychology and applied linguistics. This longitudinal project is interested in a conceptualisation of what reading is, how it functions and what it produces in becoming multilingual. Reading is explored through the lens of an empirical study involving five female pupils from senior Kindergarten to Grade 3 observed and interviewed in relation to activities at school and at home. The study took place in Ottawa schools where French is the sole language of instruction. Reading in the context of multiple literacies is conceptualised to disrupt /deterritorialise and to be immanent, offering the potentiality to go beyond what is to what could be. Becoming multilingual is a continuous movement involving networks of rhizomatic connections and reading the world and self. Résumé - Francais Les littératies multiples se réfèrent à la lecture, la lecture du monde et la lecture de soi. Cet article propose une compréhension de la lecture qui dépasse sa définition usuelle en psychologie et en linguistique appliquée. Ce projet longitudinal porte sur la conceptualisation de la lecture, son fonctionnement et ce qu’elle produit dans le devenir plurilingue. La lecture est examinée selon l’optique d’une étude empirique durant laquelle cinq écolières du jardin d’enfants à la 3e année étaient observées et interviewées par rapport à des activités à l’école et à la maison. L’étude a eu lieu dans des écoles d’Ottawa dont la seule langue d’enseignement est le français. Dans le contexte des littératies multiples, la lecture est conceptualisée comme étant perturbatrice/déterritorialisante et immanente. Elle offre la potentialité d’aller au-delà de ce qui est vers ce qui pourrait être. Devenir plurilingue est un mouvement continu faisant appel à des réseaux de connexions rhizomatiques et à la lecture du monde et de soi.

Understanding classroom trouble through regulative gravity and instructional elasticity

This paper aims to develop a more nuanced analytic vocabulary to typify how and where classroom trouble can manifest in pedagogic discourse. It draws on classroom ethnographies conducted in non-academic secondary school pathways and alternative programs in Australian communities with high youth unemployment, where the policy of ‘earning or learning’ till age 17 has effectively extended compulsory schooling. Three concepts are developed and exemplified: ‘regulative flares’, being moments when teachers resort to explicitly reasserting the lesson’s social order; ‘moral gravity’ to describe the degree to which the moral order underpinning the regulative discourse is tied to the immediate context or beyond; and ‘instructional elasticity’ to account for trouble originating in the instructional register.

The Ex/centric fixations project # 2 - Memory, language and polyvocal performative writing

In this paper, Bree Hadley discusses The Ex/centric Fixations Project, a practice-led research project which explores the inadequacy of language as a technology for expressing human experiences of difference, discrimination or marginalisation within mainstream cultures. The project asks questions about the way experience, memory and the public discourses available to express them are bound together, about the silences, failures and falsehoods embedded in any effort to convey human experience via public discourses, and about how these failures might form the basis of a performative writing method. It has, to date, focused on developing a method that expresses experience through improvised, intertextual and discontinous collages of language drawn from a variety of public discourses. Aesthetically, this method works with what Hans Theis Lehmann (Postdramatic Theatre p. 17) calls a “textual variant” of the postdramatic “in which language appears not as the speech of characters – if there are still definable characters at all – but as an autonomous theatricality” (Ibid. 18). It is defined by what Lehmann, following Julia Kristeva, calls a “polylogue”, which presents experience as a conflicted, discontinuous and circular phenomenon, akin to a musical fugue, to break away from “an order centred on one logos” (Ibid. 32). The texts function simultaneously as a series of parts, and as wholes, interwoven voices seeming almost to connect, almost to respond to each other, and almost to tell – or challenging each other’s telling – of a story. In this paper, Hadley offers a performative demonstration, together with descriptions of the way spectators respond, including the way their playful, polyvocal texture impacts on engagement, and the way the presence or non-presence of performing bodies to which the experiences depicted can be attached impacts on engagement. She suggests that the improvised, intertextual and experimental enactments of self embodied in the texts encourage spectators to engage at an emotional level, and make-meaning based primarily on memories they recall in the moment, and thus has the potential to counter the risk that people may read depictions of experiences radically different from their own in reductive, essentialised ways.

Scaffolding understanding of tables and graphs

The literacy demands of tables and graphs are different from those of prose texts such as narrative. This paper draws from part of a qualitative case study which sought to investigate strategies that scaffold and enhance the teaching and learning of varied representations in text. As indicated in the paper, the method focused on the teaching and learning of tables and graphs with use of Freebody and Luke's (1990) four resources model from literacy education.

Bits and bumps: Understanding gender in contemporary physical comedy

This study investigates how the gender of a performer affects the way they produce physical comedy in a theatrical context, framed through Kristeva's theory of abjection and Butler's notion of gender as performance. As a thesis by creative work, it produced an original piece of theatre, The Furze Family Variety Hour, which featured a male/ female comic duo, where the female performer enjoyed an equal share of the punch lines. The study generates a new understanding of how the body operates in physical comedy, namely, a system of bodily registers, as well as a new understanding of the female grotesque comic body.

Affordances of ICTs: an environmental study of a French language unit offered at university level

This project investigates the integration of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) into educational settings by closely looking at the uptake of the perceived affordances offered by ICTs by students enrolled in a French language course at Queensland University of Technology. This cross-disciplinary research uses the theoretical concepts of: Ecological Psychology (Gibson, 1979; Good, 2007; Reed, 1996); Ecological Linguistics (Greeno, 1994; Leather & van Dam, 2003; van Lier 2000, 2003, 2004a, 2004b); Design (Norman, 1988, 1999); Software Design/ Human-Computer Interaction (Hartson, 2003; McGrenere & Ho, 2000); Learning Design (Conole & Dyke, 2004a, 2004b; Laurillard et al. 2000;); Education (Kirschner, 2002; Salomon, 1993; Wijekumar et al., 2006) and Educational Psychology (Greeno, 1994). In order to investigate this subject, the following research questions, rooted in the theoretical foundations of the thesis, were formulated: (1) What are the learners’ attitudes towards the ICT tools used in the project?; (2) What are the affordances offered by ICTs used in a specific French language course at university level from the perspective of the teacher and from the perspective of language learners?; (3) What affordances offered by ICT tools used by the teacher within the specific teaching and learning environment have been taken up by learners?; and (4) What factors influence the uptake by learners of the affordances created by ICT tools used by the teacher within the specific teaching and learning environment? The teaching phase of this project, conducted between 2006 and 2008, used Action Research procedures (Hopkins, 2002; McNiff & Whitehead, 2002; van Lier 1994) as a research framework. The data were collected using the following combination of qualitative and quantitative methods: (1) questionnaires administered to students (Hopkins, 2002; McNiff & Whitehead, 2002) using Likert-scale questions, open questions, yes/no questions; (2) partnership classroom observations of research participants conducted by Research Participant Advocates (Hopkins, 2002; McNiff & Whitehead, 2002); and (3) a focus group with volunteering students who participated in the unit (semi-structured interview) (Hopkins, 2002; McNiff & Whitehead, 2002). The data analysis confirms the importance of a careful examination of the teaching and learning environment and reveals differences in the ways in which the opportunities for an action offered by the ICTs were perceived by teacher and students, which impacted on the uptake of affordances. The author applied the model of affordance, as described by Good (2007), to explain these differences and to investigate their consequences. In conclusion, the teacher-researcher considers that the discrepancies in perceiving the affordances result from the disparities between the frames of reference and the functional contexts of the teacher-researcher and students. Based on the results of the data analysis, a series of recommendations is formulated supporting calls for careful analysis of frames of reference and the functional contexts of all participants in the learning and teaching process. The author also suggests a modified model of affordance, outlining the important characteristics of its constituents.

Medical semantic similarity with a neural language model

Advances in neural network language models have demonstrated that these models can effectively learn representations of words meaning. In this paper, we explore a variation of neural language models that can learn on concepts taken from structured ontologies and extracted from free-text, rather than directly from terms in free-text. This model is employed for the task of measuring semantic similarity between medical concepts, a task that is central to a number of techniques in medical informatics and information retrieval. The model is built with two medical corpora (journal abstracts and patient records) and empirically validated on two ground-truth datasets of human-judged concept pairs assessed by medical professionals. Empirically, our approach correlates closely with expert human assessors ($\approx$ 0.9) and outperforms a number of state-of-the-art benchmarks for medical semantic similarity. The demonstrated superiority of this model for providing an effective semantic similarity measure is promising in that this may translate into effectiveness gains for techniques in medical information retrieval and medical informatics (e.g., query expansion and literature-based discovery).