Electracy in Praxis: Pedagogical Relays for an Undergraduate Writing Curriculum

The paradigm shift from traditional print literacy to the postmodern fragmentation, nonlinearity, and multimodality of writing for the Internet is realized in Gregory L. Ulmer’s electracy theory. Ulmer’s open invitation to continually invent the theory has resulted in the proliferation of relays, or weak models, by electracy advocates for understanding and applying the theory. Most relays, however, remain theoretical rather than practical for the writing classroom, and electracy instruction remains rare, potentially hindering the theory’s development. In this dissertation, I address the gap in electracy praxis by adapting, developing, and remixing relays for a functional electracy curriculum with first-year writing students in the Virginia Community College System as the target audience. I review existing electracy relays, pedagogical applications, and assessment practices – Ulmer’s and those of electracy advocates – before introducing my own relays, which take the form of modules. My proposed relay modules are designed for adaptability with the goals of introducing digital natives to the logic of new media and guiding instructors to possible implementations of electracy. Each module contains a justification, core competencies and learning outcomes, optional readings, an assignment with supplemental exercises, and assessment criteria. My Playlist, Transduction, and (Sim)ulation relays follow sound backward curricular design principles and emphasize core hallmarks of electracy as juxtaposed alongside literacy. This dissertation encourages the instruction of new media in Ulmer’s postmodern apparatus in which student invention via the articulation of fragments from various semiotic modes stems from and results in new methodologies for and understandings of digital communication.

Avalição de desempenho de protocolos de autenticação para redes sem fio heterogêneas

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Elétrica, 2016.

Teaching Communications, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities with Multimedia: A University-Middle School Service-Learning Project

Se describe el uso de tecnología en forma de presentaciones de multimedia para facilitar la enseñanza de las Normas para el Aprendizaje de una Lengua Extranjera del Concilio Americano para la Enseñanza de Lenguas extranjeras. Las normas abarcan las comunicaciones, las culturas, las conexiones, las comparaciones y las comunidades. El estudiantado universitario aprende a crear, con multimedia, presentaciones sobre un tema cultural en la lengua meta. El componente de aprendizaje por servicio comunitario se fundamenta en las presentaciones creadas para estudiantes de colegio, quienes tienen acceso a las presentaciones en un sitio web de la universidad.A description is provided of how the use of technology in the form of multimedia presentations enhances the teaching of the Five C Standards for Foreign Language Learning of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages: communications, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities. University students learn to create multimedia presentations on a cultural topic in the target language. The service-learning component provides the multimedia presentations for middle-school students who access them from the university website.

Industrial multimedia over factory-floor networks

In this paper we describe a real-time industrial communication network able to support both controlrelated and multimedia traffic. The industrial communication network is based on the PROFIBUS standard, with multimedia capabilities being provided by an adequate integration of TCP/IP protocols into the PROFIBUS stack. From the operational point of view the integration of TCP/IP into PROFIBUS is by itself a challenge, since the master-slave nature of the PROFIBUS MAC makes complex the implementation of the symmetry inherent to IP communications. From the timeliness point of view the challenge is two folded. On one hand the multimedia traffic should not interfere with the timing requirements of the "native" control-related PROFIBUS traffic (typically hard real-time). On the other hand multimedia traffic requires certain levels of quality-of-service to be attained. In this paper we provide a methodology that enables fulfilling the timing requirements for both types of traffic in these real-time industrial LAN. Moreover, we describe suitable algorithms for the scheduling support of concurrent multimedia streams.

Non-uniform printed antenna array for wireless communications in sports arenas

Wireless communications had a great development in the last years and nowadays they are present everywhere, public and private, being increasingly used for different applications. Their application in the business of sports events as a means to improve the experience of the fans at the games is becoming essential, such as sharing messages and multimedia material on social networks. In the stadiums, given the high density of people, the wireless networks require very large data capacity. Hence radio coverage employing many small sized sectors is unavoidable. In this paper, an antenna is designed to operate in the Wi-Fi 5GHz frequency band, with a directive radiation pattern suitable to this kind of applications. Furthermore, despite the large bandwidth and low losses, this antenna has been developed using low cost, off-the-shelf materials without sacrificing quality or performance, essential to mass production. © 2015 EurAAP.

Communications with QoS in IoT&Cloud environment

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia de Telecomunicações e Informática

Blind channel estimation for multi-rate multicarrier DS/CDMA communications

Multi-rate multicarrier DS/CDMA is a potentially attractive multiple access method for future wireless communications networks that must support multimedia, and thus multi-rate, traffic. Several receiver structures exist for single-rate multicarrier systems, but little has been reported on multi-rate multicarrier systems. Considering that high-performance detection such as coherent demodulation needs the explicit knowledge of the channel, based on the finite-length chip waveform truncation, this paper proposes a subspace-based scheme for timing and channel estimation in multi-rate multicarrier DS/CDMA systems, which is applicable to both multicode and variable spreading factor systems. The performance of the proposed scheme for these two multi-rate systems is validated via numerical simulations. The effects of the finite-length chip waveform truncation on the performance of the proposed scheme is also analyzed theoretically.

Blind channel acquisition and channel estimation for multi-rate multicarrier DS-CDMA communications

Multi-rate multicarrier DS-CDMA is a potentially attractive multiple access method for future wireless networks that must support multimedia, and thus multi-rate, traffic. Considering that high performance detection such as coherent demodulation needs the explicit knowledge of the channel, this paper proposes a subspace-based blind adaptive algorithm for timing acquisition and channel estimation in asynchronous multirate multicarrier DS-CDMA systems, which is applicable to both multicode and variable spreading factor systems.

Defining user perception of distributed multimedia quality

This article presents the results of a study that explored the human side of the multimedia experience. We propose a model that assesses quality variation from three distinct levels: the network, the media and the content levels; and from two views: the technical and the user perspective. By facilitating parameter variation at each of the quality levels and from each of the perspectives, we were able to examine their impact on user quality perception. Results show that a significant reduction in frame rate does not proportionally reduce the user's understanding of the presentation independent of technical parameters, that multimedia content type significantly impacts user information assimilation, user level of enjoyment, and user perception of quality, and that the device display type impacts user information assimilation and user perception of quality. Finally, to ensure the transfer of information, low-level abstraction (network-level) parameters, such as delay and jitter, should be adapted; to maintain the user's level of enjoyment, high-level abstraction quality parameters (content-level), such as the appropriate use of display screens, should be adapted.

Adaptive wireless multimedia communication systems

In recent years, due to the rapid convergence of multimedia services, Internet and wireless communications, there has been a growing trend of heterogeneity (in terms of channel bandwidths, mobility levels of terminals, end-user quality-of-service (QoS) requirements) for emerging integrated wired/wireless networks. Moreover, in nowadays systems, a multitude of users coexists within the same network, each of them with his own QoS requirement and bandwidth availability. In this framework, embedded source coding allowing partial decoding at various resolution is an appealing technique for multimedia transmissions. This dissertation includes my PhD research, mainly devoted to the study of embedded multimedia bitstreams in heterogenous networks, developed at the University of Bologna, advised by Prof. O. Andrisano and Prof. A. Conti, and at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where I spent eighteen months as a visiting scholar, advised by Prof. L. B. Milstein and Prof. P. C. Cosman. In order to improve the multimedia transmission quality over wireless channels, joint source and channel coding optimization is investigated in a 2D time-frequency resource block for an OFDM system. We show that knowing the order of diversity in time and/or frequency domain can assist image (video) coding in selecting optimal channel code rates (source and channel code rates). Then, adaptive modulation techniques, aimed at maximizing the spectral efficiency, are investigated as another possible solution for improving multimedia transmissions. For both slow and fast adaptive modulations, the effects of imperfect channel estimation errors are evaluated, showing that the fast technique, optimal in ideal systems, might be outperformed by the slow adaptive modulation, when a real test case is considered. Finally, the effects of co-channel interference and approximated bit error probability (BEP) are evaluated in adaptive modulation techniques, providing new decision regions concepts, and showing how the widely used BEP approximations lead to a substantial loss in the overall performance.