Augmented optometry training simulator with multi-point haptics

Training of optometrists is traditionally achieved under close supervision of peers and superiors. With the rapid advancement in technology, medical procedures are performed more efficiently and effectively, resulting in faster recovery times and less trauma to the patient. However, application of this technology has made it difficult to effectively demonstrate and teach these manual skills as the education is now a combination of not only the medical procedure but also the use of the technology. In this paper we propose to increase the training capabilities of optometry students through haptically-enabled single-point and multi-point training tools as well as augmented reality techniques. Haptics technology allows a human to touch and feel virtual computer models as though they are real. Through physical connection to the operator, haptic devices are considered to be personal robots that are capable of improving the human-computer interaction with a virtual environment. These devices have played an increasing role in developing expertise, reducing instances of medical error and reducing training costs. A haptically-enabled virtual training environment, integrated with an optometry slit lamp instrument can be used to teach cognitive and manual skills while the system tracks the performance of each individual. These interactions would ideally replicate every aspect of the real procedure, consequently preparing the trainee for every possible scenario, without risking the health of a real patient.

The role of the computer in learning ndjébbana

While Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is being superseded by an integrated approach to language learning and technology, it still has great potential to assist indigenous peoples in becoming print-literate in their own languages. This can also help to combat the disempowerment experienced by indigenous people as their world is penetrated by others with radically different backgrounds. This paper reports on research on an application of CALL implemented among the Kunibídji, a remote, indigenous Australian community. It focuses on the use of talking books in Ndjébbana, a language with only 200 speakers; the books were displayed on touch-screens at various locations in the community. Investigations into the roles of the computer to support language learning and cultural understanding are also reported. The computer was found to be a useful tool in promoting Kunibídji collaboration and cultural transformation.

Why should I present my thesis on computer assisted ndjébbana on dvd?

This paper justifies the presentation of a Phd thesis about Computer Assisted NdjTbbana on a Digital Video Disc (DVD). NdjTbbana is a language spoken by 200 Kunibfdji who are the traditional indigenous Australian landowners of Maningrida in Arnhem Land, Australia. The tools of this study are simple digital talking books that were created in NdjTbbana and then presented on touch screens computers. The data was the interaction around the touch screens that was recorded on digital video. Using DVD technology, the NdjTbbana talking books and the digital video can be integrated into a scholarly text for academics and NdjTbbana narrated report for the Kunibfdji, which can be combined to present a thesis. From a theoretical perspective, a thesis on a DVD can be located in the centre of critical literacy, a critical theory of technology and critical research methodologies. There are also logistical, semiotic and ideological reasons for presenting a thesis on about computer assisted NdjTbbana on DVD. Presenting Computer Assisted NdjTbbana on DVD will link the tools and data of the research with academic discourse to enhance the examination process and will also support the empowerment of the Kunibfdji as they are more informed about the research process.

Talking books for children's home use in a minority Indigenous Australian language context

Members of the Kunibidji community are the traditional owners of the lands and seas around Maningrida, a remote community in Northern Australia. Most of the 200 members of the Kunibidji Community speak Ndjebbana as their first language. This study reports on the complexities of transforming technology to provide Kunibídji children with access to digital texts at home. The printed Ndjebbana texts that were kept at school were transformed to Ndjebbana talking books displayed on touch screen computers in the children's homes. Some results of the children's interaction around these touch screens are presented as well as some quantitative results of the computer viewing in the homes. The processes of rejecting technological determinism, upholding linguistic human rights of speakers of minority languages and viewing technology as practice rather than a set of artefacts are discussed in this paper. The results of this study highlight the need for speakers of minority Indigenous Australian languages to have access to texts in their threatened languages on technologies at home.

A girl like you

A Girl Like You (2012) is a response to a work I made in 2003 titled “Memory + Moments” reflecting on unexpected and unsolicited comments from friends and strangers during my early years… “can I touch your hair?” “you’re very well-spoken” “where do you get your colour?” “are you wearing a bustle?” In 2011 I re-discovered my teenage diaries from 1989-1995. The process of redaction is about coming to terms with my vulnerability through a process of revealing and exposing the internal monologue of a teenage girl, growing up in Hobart during the 80s.

Landscape and consciousness

Most conceptions of landscape tend to differentiate the term from mere land or territory by way of introducing an  intervening subject. In this respect, landscapes, whether “real” or depicted may be said to involve an encounter between subjectivity and an external space. What is largely absent from landscape literature however is an appreciation of this encounter or interaction in light of a 21st century conversation around consciousness.This paper asks: what is the relationship between consciousness and landscape and how can consciousness studies extend our interpretive and conceptual tools for both theorizing and creating landscapes? To explore this relationship, I draw on a familiar supposition of folk psychology: that experiences with landscape can enable states of heightened consciousness. I do this not to come to any firm conclusions on the matter but rather to address this broader question of relationships in a systematic way. The notion that an experience with a landscape quantitatively alters consciousness also prompts the counterintuitive possibility: that landscape diminishes rather than augments consciousness. In particular I draw on a hypothesis of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC’s) developed by neuroscientist, Susan Greenfield. Greenfield proposes a quantitative model of subjective experience in which the subject’s sense of self exists not merely in on/off states but rather expands or diminishes from moment to moment and develops throughout one’s lifetime. The paper concludes that landscape may be regarded equally as a means by which consciousness is heightened or diminished. More broadly, the paper argues that both landscape and consciousness function as similar kinds of integrating/unifying/ defragmenting machines. They construct and preserve unity but do not necessarily put the subject “in touch” with reality.

Racialised bodies encounter the city: 'long grassers' and asylum seekers in Darwin

The visibility of bodies of colour in public space can engender responses of anxiety, insecurity and discomfort in cities with white majority cultures. Such embodied responses that privilege the invisibility of whiteness have effects if they mark Aboriginal people and asylum seekers who arrive by boat as ‘out of place’ in public spaces of Australian cities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Darwin, I argue, however, that such white spaces are interrupted by habits of touch, multi-sensory events that contribute to fleshy moments of belonging for these racialised bodies that experience dispossession and displacement. Such belonging emerges from the intertwining fleshiness of bodies in a world where we affect and are affected by other bodies and things.

The paper explores two events held in public spaces of suburban Darwin, a weekly painting activity at a beach reserve that engages ‘Long Grassers’, Aboriginal people who live in open spaces, and a cooking session at a community centre that welcomes asylum-seeker families from a detention centre. Felix Ravaisson's philosophy of habit as virtue and spontaneous practice is a starting point for thinking about how haptic knowledges can provide a nuanced understanding of belonging, encounter and ethical engagement in a racially diverse white settler city.

Evanescent

Exhibition of original artworks created in 2013. Evanescent is a new series produced in 2013 which premiered at the Castlemaine State Festival 15-24 March 2013. The series revisits a childhood delight and fascination with the projected image and the natural world. For me then, as it is now, a magnifying glass was a wonder; its simple optics twisted light into abstract comas and sci-fi aberrations; able to compact a whole view into a luminous, paradoxically inverted phantom that could fit literally into the palm of my hand. By curling fingers and thumb around the lens and cupping both hands around the elusive rays, and by peering into the space in which I had trapped them, I fancied that I had entered into the secret workings of the eye. Chrysalis, for example, appears as a scenic projection from a hand-held lens and simultaneously as the litter of the forest floor. It is produced with a makeshift camera-obscura. The nebulous silhouettes of trees, some blurred under the passing clouds of a summer wind resolve here and there into crisp lines curled across the surface of a fallen leaf on which a moth chrysalis adheres. The leaf assumes Brobdingnagian proportions and thickness as the evanescent image shrinks and is foreshortened then dissolves in the enlarged dust and grit. It manifests the unique sight anchored at this fixed point, to reveal what we might see if we were to become vegetable or mineral. Near and far, large and small, superimpose, trigonometrically exact in their adjacency and spatial relations, presenting us with a located point of view.Why? I want to understand more intimately the interior of the natural landscape, rather than any ‘scene’ of human presence, or the context of any cultural landmark. In the steep, bush locations in which I am making these images, my means are necessarily makeshift; my camera and an old manual-aperture lens able to be carried in a backpack with a black T-shirt as a 'dark-tent'. The project is not systematic but intuitive and responsive to prevailing conditions and the effect on the projection caused by sun, shade, weather and situation. I am guided by the response of objects, textures and surfaces to the projected image and how they modulate and map it. This is landscape, but not from a human point of view.

Online motor control in children with developmental coordination disorder: chronometric analysis of double-step reaching performance

Background
Although there are a number of plausible accounts to explain movement clumsiness in children [or developmental coordination disorder (DCD)], the cause(s) of the disorder remain(s) an issue of debate. One aspect of motor control that is particularly important to the fluid expression of skill is rapid online control (ROC). Data on DCD have been conflicting. While some recent work using double-step reaching suggests no difficulty in online control, others suggest deficits (e.g. based on sequential pointing). To help resolve this debate, we suggest two things: use of recent neuro-computational models as a framework for investigating motor control in DCD, and more rigorous investigation of double-step reaching. Our working assumption here is that ROC is only viable through the seamless integration of predictive (or forward) models of movement and feedback-based mechanisms.

Aim
The aim of this chronometric study was to explore ROC in children with DCD using a double-step reaching paradigm. We predicted slower online adjustments in DCD based on the argument that these children manifest a core difficulty in predictive control.

Methods
Participants were a group of 17 children with DCD and 27 typically developing children aged between 7 and 12 years. Visual targets were presented on a 17-inch LCD touch screen, inclined to an angle of 15° from horizontal. The children were instructed to press each target as it appeared as quickly and accurately as possible. For 80% of the trials, the central target location remained unchanged for the duration of the movement (non-jump trials), while for the remaining 20% of trials, the target jumped at movement onset to one of the two peripheral locations (jump trials). Reaction time (RT), movement time (MT) and reaching errors were recorded.

Results
For both groups, RT did not vary according to trial condition, while children with DCD were slower to initiate movement. Further, the MT of children with DCD was prolonged to a far greater extent on jump trials relative to controls, with a large effect size. As well, children with DCD committed significantly more errors, notably a reduced ability to inhibit central responses on jump trials.

Conclusion
Our findings help reconcile some disparate findings in the literature using similar tasks. The pattern of performance in children with DCD suggests impairment in the ability to make rapid online adjustments that are based on a predictive (or internal) model of the action. These results pave the way for future kinematic investigation.

Sensing the story: structure and improvisation in writing for performance.

This article discusses the process of writing through devising in performance. It takes as a case study Apart of and A Part From in which muscle and sense memory – touch, smell, taste, sound and sight – were the points of departure for a contemporary performance piece on migration and identity. This was a practice-as-research project aimed to better understand the artist’s body (myself) in improvisation with memory fragments. Working from a non-verbal frame the writing experience began as actions in space, then new memories in my body, to maps on paper, to key word and some staging patterns, to systematic capturing of the textual, rhythmic and spatial structures in the emerging 30-minute performance. Various objects were incorporated to give aesthetic coherence of the piece. The article reports on the processes of writing in action, the writing and performing as lived experience and how the writing emerged from the spaces in between – self and other, self and object, self and space, present self and past self.

Is there an app for that? Looking at possibilities and challenges of digital tools for literacy education

 Portable electronic devices such as the iPad are increasingly taking a place in contemporary childhood experiences including those of schooling (O'Mara & Laidlaw, 2011). As digital media theorists suggest, such new tools invite both "hope and fear" (Gee and Hayes, 2011, p.4), consistent with literacy innovations across history. In both Canada and Australia, educational stakeholders are looking to touch screen devices as having much promise, particularly within literacy education. This paper presentation examines the possibilities as well as the challenges and imagines the future of such digital tools within literacy education, looking at experiences and perspectives in Canada and Australia.
We take a qualitative ecological mode of inquiry approach to our data collection and analysis, drawing on complexity thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to bring our multiple points of view together as diversely positioned educators. Within our individual sites, each author has collected data as a part of longer-term research projects. In this paper presentation we compare and contrast these data sets, attending to significant intersections and juxtaposing issues of culture and globalization. Within this mode of inquiry we value the particularity of the individual contexts, and locate them alongside one another in a larger bricolage (Johnson, 2010).
We examined observational data, documents and artifacts using Freebody and Luke's (1990) four resources model and the further adaptions of this model (see e.g. Luke & Freebody, 1999) to understand how touch screen devices are being used and positioned as literacy tools. We have engaged in collaborative data analysis, often working 'together' using digital tools ourselves to enable collective conversations. For example, we have used Facetime on iPads and laptops, Skype and email to facilitate collective analyses. We applied iterative and recursive analyses to uncover reoccurring themes both within and across sites and artifacts.
As our paper will elaborate, mobile touch screen devices such as iPads are widely being taken up in educational settings, and regarded as having the possibility to shift teaching and learning in new directions, as "paradigm breakers" (p. 4, Gov't of AB, 2011). As personal, mobile devices, these tools present challenges that require educators to think differently about learning and teaching. Our paper also addresses the opportunities and affordances that iPads might offer to learners, as having the potential for students to engage in playful exploration, and in the role of designers, creators, and producers, rather than as passive recipients.