Collaborative Design in a Virtual Learning Environment : Three Design Experiments in Textile Teacher Education

The aim of the study was to analyze and facilitate collaborative design in a virtual learning environment (VLE). Discussions of virtual design in design education have typically focused on technological or communication issues, not on pedagogical issues. Yet in order to facilitate collaborative design, it is also necessary to address the pedagogical issues related to the virtual design process. In this study, the progressive inquiry model of collaborative designing was used to give a structural level of facilitation to students working in the VLE. According to this model, all aspects of inquiry, such as creating the design context, constructing a design idea, evaluating the idea, and searching for new information, can be shared in a design community. The study consists of three design projects: 1) designing clothes for premature babies, 2) designing conference bags for an international conference, and 3) designing tactile books for visually impaired children. These design projects constituted a continuum of design experiments, each of which highlighted certain perspectives on collaborative designing. The design experiments were organized so that the participants worked in design teams, both face-to-face and virtually. The first design experiment focused on peer collaboration among textile teacher students in the VLE. The second design experiment took into consideration end-users needs by using a participatory design approach. The third design experiment intensified computer-supported collaboration between students and domain experts. The virtual learning environments, in these design experiments, were designed to support knowledge-building pedagogy and progressive inquiry learning. These environments enabled a detailed recording of all computer-mediated interactions and data related to virtual designing. The data analysis was based on qualitative content analysis of design statements in the VLE. This study indicated four crucial issues concerning collaborative design in the VLE in craft and design education. Firstly, using the collaborative design process in craft and design education gives rise to special challenges of building learning communities, creating appropriate design tasks for them, and providing tools for collaborative activities. Secondly, the progressive inquiry model of collaborative designing can be used as a scaffold support for design thinking and for reflection on the design process. Thirdly, participation and distributed expertise can be facilitated by considering the key stakeholders who are related to the design task or design context, and getting them to participate in virtual designing. Fourthly, in the collaborative design process, it is important that team members create and improve visual and technical ideas together, not just agree or disagree about proposed ideas. Therefore, viewing the VLE as a medium for collaborative construction of the design objects appears crucial in order to understand and facilitate the complex processes in collaborative designing.

R U there yet? using virtual classrooms to transform teaching practice

Access to quality higher education is challenging for many Western Australians that live outside the metropolitan area. In 2010, the School of Education moved to flexible delivery of a fully online Bachelor of Education degree for their non -metropolitan students. The new model of delivery allows access for students from any location provided they have a computer and an internet connection. A number of academic staff had previously used an asynchronous environment to deliver learning modules housed within a learning management system (LMS) but had not used synchronous software with their students. To enhance the learning environment and to provide high quality learning experiences to students learning at a distance, the adoption of synchronous software (Elluminate Live) was introduced. This software is a real-time virtual classroom environment that allows for communication through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and videoconferencing, along with a large number of collaboration tools to engage learners. This research paper reports on the integration of a live e-learning solution into the current LMS environment. Qualitative data were collected from academic staff through informal interviews and participant observation. The findings discuss (i) perceived level of support; (ii) identification of strategies used to create an effective online teacher presence; (iii) the perceived impact on the students' learning outcomes; and (iv) guidelines for professional development to enhance pedagogy within the live e-learning environment.

Mixed reality stories: How creative writers integrate virtual and physical realities

Mixed reality stories (MRS) unfold simultaneously in the physical and the virtual world. Advancements in digital technologies, which are now able to capture more contextual information about our physical environments, are enabling novel ways of blending the two worlds. To explore the process of creating stories from this perspective, we conducted a study with creative writers, in which we asked them to write a MRS script for outdoor running. While we saw instances of intentional connections between physical and virtual worlds in their work, we also observed the use of ambiguity or even deliberate contradiction with available contextual information. In this paper we discuss how these approaches can be beneficial for MRS and propose directions for future work.

Resource usage monitoring for KVM based virtual machines

Realization of cloud computing has been possible due to availability of virtualization technologies on commodity platforms. Measuring resource usage on the virtualized servers is difficult because of the fact that the performance counters used for resource accounting are not virtualized. Hence, many of the prevalent virtualization technologies like Xen, VMware, KVM etc., use host specific CPU usage monitoring, which is coarse grained. In this paper, we present a performance monitoring tool for KVM based virtualized machines, which measures the CPU overhead incurred by the hypervisor on behalf of the virtual machine along-with the CPU usage of virtual machine itself. This fine-grained resource usage information, provided by the above tool, can be used for diverse situations like resource provisioning to support performance associated QoS requirements, identification of bottlenecks during VM placements, resource profiling of applications in cloud environments, etc. We demonstrate a use case of this tool by measuring the performance of web-servers hosted on a KVM based virtualized server.

Desarrollo de una herramienta virtual destinada al diseño de una plataforma robótica reconfigurable.

[ES]Este proyecto tiene como objeto aumentar el conocimiento concerniente a mecanismos robóticos reconfigurables, así como ponerlo en práctica. Estos mecanismos pueden lograr rápidas transiciones y son capaces de adaptarse a sí mismos a muchos entornos diferentes, conduciendo a una reducción de costes y requerimientos de espacio. Para ello, se estudia el estado del arte, de manera que se pueda reunir información sobre las principales aplicaciones y oportunidades que este campo ofrece en diferentes áreas. A continuación, se requiere llevar a cabo un análisis cinemático de un robot específico, y junto a métodos de planificación de trayectorias, su implementación en un software gráfico para simular su movimiento. La herramienta de software “Matlab” va a ser la que permitirá llevar a cabo toda la programación y representación a lo largo de todo el proyecto.

Se(r) um leitor em um ambiente virtual e aprendizagem: a utilização do insólito como estratégia de leitura e escrita no ensino superior

Este trabalho relata as estratégias e atividades realizadas em disciplinas semipresenciais desenvolvidas durante os períodos letivos de 2008 a 2012 com alunos dos cursos de Administração e de Ciências Contábeis, no ambiente virtual de aprendizagem Moodle. As disciplinas foram desenvolvidas segundo os princípios das abordagens colaborativas de aprendizagem com o objetivo de examinar as possibilidades de uso dos insólitos como estratégia de leitura e escrita. Buscou-se ainda apontar a aplicabilidade das estratégias didáticas descritas como forma de aprimorar as competências de leitura e escrita em alunos ingressantes no ensino superior e fornecer subsídios para a continuação da pesquisa. O trabalho mantém uma relação interdiscursiva com a obra Se um Viajante numa Noite de Inverno, de ítalo Calvino (1982), o que lhe possibilita não somente a titulação dos capítulos, mas também a construção sutil de uma presença que os perpassa. Do autor, retira também seis propostas ( leveza, rapidez, exatidão, visibilidade, multiplicidade e consistência) capazes de aprimorar a qualidade da comunicação em ambientes informáticos. Busca, ainda, na produção teórica de Michael Serres, um conceito singular de comunicação, algo capaz de transcender a substancialidade e de compreender e estimular a construção da presencialidade por meio de trocas e relações em ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem. Em vista disso, a pesquisa apoia-se na construção -reflexão- reconstrução de oficinas on-line que utilizam o insólito - concebido como algo surpreendente e propiciador de desestabilização - na construção de estratégias propiciadoras de aprimoramento da leitura e da produção textual de estudantes universitários. Recorre também às pesquisas desenvolvidas por Mikhail Bakhtin, Ângela Kleiman, Carla Coscarelli e Vilson Leffa, contribuições decisivas tanto na elaboração das oficinas on-line, quanto na reflexão que se tece ao longo da pesquisa. Por fim, busca apoio nos estudos sobre Estilos de Aprendizagem e na aplicação do Teste de Cloze para o aprimoramento das reflexões construídas

The assembly of computational models for the collaborative development of virtual prototypes

In the context of collaborative product development, new requirements need to be accommodated for Virtual Prototyping Simulation (VPS), such as distributed processing and the integration of models created using different tools or languages. Existing solutions focus mainly on the implementation of distributed processing, but this paper explores the issues of combining different models (some of which may be proprietary) developed in different software environments. In this paper, we discuss several approaches for developing VPS, and suggest how it can best be integrated into the design process. An approach is developed to improve collaborative work in a VPS development by combining disparate computational models. Specifically, a system framework is proposed to separate the system-level modeling from the computational infrastructure. The implementation of a simple prototype demonstrates that such a paradigm is viable and thus provides a new means for distributed VPS development. © 2009 by ASME.

Integrated fire and evacuation in maritime environments

When designing a new passenger ship or modifying an existing design, how do we ensure that the proposed design and crew emergency procedures are safe from an evacuation resulting from fire or other incident? In the wake of major maritime disasters such as the Scandinavian Star, Herald of Free Enterprise, Estonia and in light of the growth in the numbers of high density high-speed ferries and large capacity cruise ships, issues concerning the evacuation of passengers and crew at sea are receiving renewed interest. Fire and evacuation models with features such as the ability to realistically simulate the spread of fire and fire suppression systems and the human response to fire sas well as the capability to model human performance in heeled orientations linked to a virtual reality environment that produces realistic visualisations of modelled scenarios are now available and can be used to aid the engineer in assessing ship design and procedures. This paper describes the maritmeEXODUS ship evacuation and the SMARTFIRE fire simulation model and provides an example application demonstrating the use of the models in performing fire and evacuation analysis for a large passenger ship partially based on the requirements of MSC circular 1033. The fire simulations include the action of a water mist system.

A heuristic model for the simulation of the deformation of elastic and spongy material for virtual reality applications

This paper presents a practical algorithm for the simulation of interactive deformation in a 3D polygonal mesh model. The algorithm combines the conventional simulation of deformation using a spring-mass-damping model, solved by explicit numerical integration, with a set of heuristics to describe certain features of the transient behaviour, to increase the speed and stability of solution. In particular, this algorithm was designed to be used in the simulation of synthetic environments where it is necessary to model realistically, in real time, the effect on non-rigid surfaces being touched, pushed, pulled or squashed. Such objects can be solid or hollow, and have plastic, elastic or fabric-like properties. The algorithm is presented in an integrated form including collision detection and adaptive refinement so that it may be used in a self-contained way as part of a simulation loop to include human interface devices that capture data and render a realistic stereoscopic image in real time. The algorithm is designed to be used with polygonal mesh models representing complex topology, such as the human anatomy in a virtual-surgery training simulator. The paper evaluates the model behaviour qualitatively and then concludes with some examples of the use of the algorithm.

Performance models of storage contention in cloud environments

We propose simple models to predict the performance degradation of disk requests due to storage device contention in consolidated virtualized environments. Model parameters can be deduced from measurements obtained inside Virtual Machines (VMs) from a system where a single VM accesses a remote storage server. The parameterized model can then be used to predict the effect of storage contention when multiple VMs are consolidated on the same server. We first propose a trace-driven approach that evaluates a queueing network with fair share scheduling using simulation. The model parameters consider Virtual Machine Monitor level disk access optimizations and rely on a calibration technique. We further present a measurement-based approach that allows a distinct characterization of read/write performance attributes. In particular, we define simple linear prediction models for I/O request mean response times, throughputs and read/write mixes, as well as a simulation model for predicting response time distributions. We found our models to be effective in predicting such quantities across a range of synthetic and emulated application workloads. 

Touching at a Distance: Resistance, Tactility, Proxemics and the Development of a Hybrid Virtual/Physical Performance System

This is a paper about resistance and affordance as they relate to music-making in the most extended sense, and perhaps about empathy if this is understood as a capacity to ‘read’ the resistances and affordances of objects, bodies, people and environments. It proceeds from a set of broad working assumptions which inform one individual’s musical practice, via a description a musical-instrument making project which is a hybrid of physical and virtual elements and is designed to test those assumptions, to a speculative finale in which it is suggested that musicking might, in some circumstances, be regarded in itself as a form of resistance. It moves from the intimate and personal, through what might be regarded as local concerns to more global observation, prefiguring the structure of the performance system it describes: the Virtual-Physical Feedback flute

IO Performance Prediction in Consolidated Virtualized Environments

We propose a trace-driven approach to predict the performance degradation of disk request response times due to storage device contention in consolidated virtualized environments. Our performance model evaluates a queueing network with fair share scheduling using trace-driven simulation. The model parameters can be deduced from measurements obtained inside Virtual Machines (VMs) from a system where a single VM accesses a remote storage server. The parameterized model can then be used to predict the effect of storage contention when multiple VMs are consolidated on the same virtualized server. The model parameter estimation relies on a search technique that tries to estimate the splitting and merging of blocks at the the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) level in the case of multiple competing VMs. Simulation experiments based on traces of the Postmark and FFSB disk benchmarks show that our model is able to accurately predict the impact of workload consolidation on VM disk IO response times.

Automated Methods for Virtual Maintainability & Aerospace Maintenance Planning

Abstract. Modern business practices in engineering are increasingly turning to post manufacture service provision in an attempt to generate additional revenue streams and ensure commercial sustainability. Maintainability has always been a consideration during the design process but in the past it has been generally considered to be of tertiary importance behind manufacturability and primary product function in terms of design priorities. The need to draw whole life considerations into concurrent engineering (CE) practice has encouraged companies to address issues such as maintenance, earlier in the design process giving equal importance to all aspects of the product lifecycle. The consideration of design for maintainability (DFM) early in the design process has the potential to significantly reduce maintenance costs, and improve overall running efficiencies as well as safety levels. However a lack of simulation tools still hinders the adaptation of CE to include practical elements of design and therefore further research is required to develop methods by which ‘hands on’ activities such as maintenance can be fully assessed and optimised as concepts develop. Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to address this issue but the application of these traditionally high cost systems can require complex infrastructure and their use has typically focused on aesthetic aspects of mature designs. This paper examines the application of cost effective VR technology to the rapid assessment of aircraft interior inspection during conceptual design. It focuses on the integration of VR hardware with a typical desktop engineering system and examines the challenges with data transfer, graphics quality and the development of practical user functions within the VR environment. Conclusions drawn to date indicate that the system has the potential to improve maintenance planning through the provision of a usable environment for inspection which is available as soon as preliminary structural models are generated as part of the conceptual design process. Challenges still exist in the efficient transfer of data between the CAD and VR environments as well as the quantification of any benefits that result from the proposed approach. The result of this research will help to improve product maintainability, reduce product development cycle times and lower maintenance costs.

Desenvolvimento de um ambiente virtual de aprendizagem em regime de b-learning num curso de educação e formação de operadores de informática

Trabalho de projeto de mestrado, Educação (Área de Especialização em Educação e Tecnologias Digitais), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação, 2014

Virtual power players demand response programs management based on locational marginal prices

Power systems have been suffering huge changes mainly due to the substantial increase of distributed generation and to the operation in competitive environments. Virtual power players can aggregate a diversity of players, namely generators and consumers, and a diversity of energy resources, including electricity generation based on several technologies, storage and demand response. Resource management gains an increasing relevance in this competitive context, while demand side active role provides managers with increased demand elasticity. This makes demand response use more interesting and flexible, giving rise to a wide range of new opportunities.This paper proposes a methodology for managing demand response programs in the scope of virtual power players. The proposed method is based on the calculation of locational marginal prices (LMP). The evaluation of the impact of using demand response specific programs on the LMP value supports the manager decision concerning demand response use. The proposed method has been computationally implemented and its application is illustrated in this paper using a 32 bus network with intensive use of distributed generation.