Tapping into Floor Staff: Using the knowledge of floor staff to conduct formative evaluations of exhibits in a Canadian science centre

Most science centres in Canada employ science-educated floor staff to motivate visitorsto have fun while enhancing the educational reach of the exhibits. Although bright andsensitive to visitors’ needs, floor staff are rarely consulted in the planning,implementation, and modification phases of an exhibit. Instead, many developmentteams rely on costly third-party evaluations or skip the front-end and formativeevaluations all together, leading to costly errors that could have been avoided. This studywill seek to reveal a correlation between floor staff’s perception of visitors’ interactionswith an exhibit and visitors’ actual experiences. If a correlation exists, a recommendationcould be made to encourage planning teams to include floor staff in the formative andsummative evaluations of an exhibit. This is especially relevant to science centres withlimited budgets and for whom a divide exists between floor staff and management.In this study, a formative evaluation of one exhibit was conducted, measuring both floorstaff’s perceptions of the visitor experience and visitors’ own perceptions of the exhibit.Floor staff were then trained on visitor evaluation methods. A week later, floor staff andvisitors were surveyed a second time on a different exhibit to determine whether anincrease in accuracy existed.The training session increased the specificity of the motivation and comprehensionresponses and the enthusiasm of the staff, but not their ability to predict observedbehaviours with respect to ergonomics, learning indicators, holding power, and successrates. The results revealed that although floor staff underestimated visitors’ success ratesat the exhibits, staff accurately predicted visitors’ behaviours with respect to holdingpower, ergonomics, learning indicators, motivation and comprehension, both before andafter the staff training.

Wege zur Entdeckung von Communities in Folksonomies

Ein wichtiger Baustein des neu entdeckten World Wide Web - des "Web 2.0" - stellen Folksonomies dar. In diesen Systemen können Benutzer gemeinsam Ressourcen verwalten und mit Schlagwörtern versehen. Die dadurch entstehenden begrifflichen Strukturen stellen ein interessantes Forschungsfeld dar. Dieser Artikel untersucht Ansätze und Wege zur Entdeckung und Strukturierung von Nutzergruppen ("Communities") in Folksonomies.

Trend detection in folksonomies

As the number of resources on the web exceeds by far the number of documents one can track, it becomes increasingly difficult to remain up to date on ones own areas of interest. The problem becomes more severe with the increasing fraction of multimedia data, from which it is difficult to extract some conceptual description of their contents. One way to overcome this problem are social bookmark tools, which are rapidly emerging on the web. In such systems, users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies, and overcome thus the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. As more and more people participate in the effort, the use of a common vocabulary becomes more and more stable. We present an approach for discovering topic-specific trends within folksonomies. It is based on a differential adaptation of the PageRank algorithm to the triadic hypergraph structure of a folksonomy. The approach allows for any kind of data, as it does not rely on the internal structure of the documents. In particular, this allows to consider different data types in the same analysis step. We run experiments on a large-scale real-world snapshot of a social bookmarking system.

Towards a new proposal to evaluate the learning objects quality in learning strategies for education (QEES)

In Computer Science world several proposals have been developed for the assessment of the quality of the digital objects, based on the capabilities and facilities offered by current technologies and the available resources. Years ago researchers and specialists from both educational and technological areas have been committed to the development of strategies that improve the quality of education. At present, in the field of teaching-learning, another important aspect is the need to improve the manner of gaining knowledge and learning in education, which the use of learning strategies is a major advance in the teaching-learning process in institutions of higher education. This paper presents QEES, a proposal for evaluating the quality of the learning objects employed on learning strategies to support students during their education processes by using information extraction techniques and ontologies.

Satellite applications as an ocean and coastal zone management tool: three cases studies

La presente investigación es un estudio de tres aplicaciones de los satélites del océano y las zonas costeras (OCzM). Los sensores de radar que se utilizan en la exploración batimétrica son útiles en la industria de las tuberías de petróleo y en la navegación costera. Térmica y la imagen de radar se han utilizado para detectar indirectamente la distribución de los recursos de las pesquerías de atún y últimamente también otras pesquerías. El sistema de posicionamiento global (GPS) y de comunicaciones de datos de seguimiento de la flota actual de permisos, aunque el enfoque de esta tesis es sobre la flota pesquera. El desarrollo de cualquier sistema de monitoreo de la flota puede seguir el mismo principio.

Voennyi sbornik Obshchestva revnitelei voennykh znani i = Revue publie e par la Socie te des ze lateurs des sciences militaires = Vojni zbornik Drus tva prijatelja vojnih znanja.

Title from t.p.

The letters of Franklin K. Lane, personal and political,

Mode of access: Internet.

Don't Forget to Play: Examining what Play looks like in Museums for Adult Visitors

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

How do we justify knowledge produced within interpretive approaches?

The use of interpretive approaches within management and organizational sciences has increased substantially. However appropriate criteria for justifying research results from interpretive approaches have not developed so rapidly alongside their adaptation. This article examines the potential of common criteria for justifying knowledge produced within interpretive approaches. Based on this investigation, appropriate criteria are identified and a strategy for achieving them is proposed. Finally, an interpretive study of competence in organizations is used to demonstrate how the proposed criteria and strategy can be applied to justify knowledge produced within interpretive approaches.

TU Graz: Course: 707.000 Web Science and Web Technology: Lecture 2: Small World Problem

We will discuss several examples and research efforts related to the small world problem and set the ground for our discussion of network theory and social network analysis. Readings: An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem, J. Travers and S. Milgram Sociometry 32 425-443 (1969) [Protected Access] Optional: The Strength of Weak Ties, M.S. Granovetter The American Journal of Sociology 78 1360--1380 (1973) [Protected Access] Optional: Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network, J. Leskovec and E. Horvitz MSR-TR-2006-186. Microsoft Research, June 2007. [Web Link, the most recent and comprehensive study on the subject!] Originally from: http://kmi.tugraz.at/staff/markus/courses/SS2008/707.000_web-science/

Birding 2.0: Citizen Science and Effective Monitoring in the Web 2.0 World

The amateur birding community has a long and proud tradition of contributing to bird surveys and bird atlases. Coordinated activities such as Breeding Bird Atlases and the Christmas Bird Count are examples of "citizen science" projects. With the advent of technology, Web 2.0 sites such as eBird have been developed to facilitate online sharing of data and thus increase the potential for real-time monitoring. However, as recently articulated in an editorial in this journal and elsewhere, monitoring is best served when based on a priori hypotheses. Harnessing citizen scientists to collect data following a hypothetico-deductive approach carries challenges. Moreover, the use of citizen science in scientific and monitoring studies has raised issues of data accuracy and quality. These issues are compounded when data collection moves into the Web 2.0 world. An examination of the literature from social geography on the concept of "citizen sensors" and volunteered geographic information (VGI) yields thoughtful reflections on the challenges of data quality/data accuracy when applying information from citizen sensors to research and management questions. VGI has been harnessed in a number of contexts, including for environmental and ecological monitoring activities. Here, I argue that conceptualizing a monitoring project as an experiment following the scientific method can further contribute to the use of VGI. I show how principles of experimental design can be applied to monitoring projects to better control for data quality of VGI. This includes suggestions for how citizen sensors can be harnessed to address issues of experimental controls and how to design monitoring projects to increase randomization and replication of sampled data, hence increasing scientific reliability and statistical power.