The role of sketches in supporting near-synchronous remote communication in computer supported collaborative design

This paper presents recent research into the functions and value of sketch outputs during computer supported collaborative design. Sketches made primarily exploiting whiteboard technology are shown to support subjects engaged in remote collaborative design, particularly when constructed in ‘nearsynchronous’ communication. The authors define near-synchronous communication and speculate that it is compatible with the reflective and iterative nature of design activity. There appears to be significant similarities between the making of sketches in near-synchronous remote collaborative design and those made on paper in more traditional face-to-face settings With the current increase in the use of computer supported collaborative working (CSCW) in undergraduate and postgraduate design education it is proposed that sketches and sketching can make important contributions to design learning in this context

Revealing the whiteboard to blind students: An inclusive approach to provide mediation in synchronous e-learning activities

Promoting the inclusion of students with disabilities in e-learning systems has brought many challenges for researchers and educators. The use of synchronous communication tools such as interactive whiteboards has been regarded as an obstacle for inclusive education. In this paper, we present the proposal of an inclusive approach to provide blind students with the possibility to participate in live learning sessions with whiteboard software. The approach is based on the provision of accessible textual descriptions by a live mediator. With the accessible descriptions, students are able to navigate through the elements and explore the content of the class using screen readers. The method used for this study consisted of the implementation of a software prototype within a virtual learning environment and a case study with the participation of a blind student in a live distance class. The results from the case study have shown that this approach can be very effective, and may be a starting point to provide blind students with resources they had previously been deprived from. The proof of concept implemented has shown that many further possibilities may be explored to enhance the interaction of blind users with educational content in whiteboards, and further pedagogical approaches can be investigated from this proposal. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Concurreny based transition refinement for the verification of distributed algorithms

We suggest a new notion of behaviour preserving transition refinement based on partial order semantics. This notion is called transition refinement. We introduced transition refinement for elementary (low-level) Petri Nets earlier. For modelling and verifying complex distributed algorithms, high-level (Algebraic) Petri nets are usually used. In this paper, we define transition refinement for Algebraic Petri Nets. This notion is more powerful than transition refinement for elementary Petri nets because it corresponds to the simultaneous refinement of several transitions in an elementary Petri net. Transition refinement is particularly suitable for refinement steps that increase the degree of distribution of an algorithm, e.g. when synchronous communication is replaced by asynchronous message passing. We study how to prove that a replacement of a transition is a transition refinement.

Petri net model decomposition - a model based approach supporting distributed execution

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica, Especialidade de Sistemas Digitais, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

Desenvolupament d'una aplicació web per a la recollida i classificació d'informació en entorns virtuals d'interacció síncrona

Treball final de carrera sobre el desenvolupament d'una aplicació web que comunica de manera síncrona a membres d'un grup i registra les converses generades en un log classificat per categoria.

From activity to active learning: drawing and dialogue interaction in virtual learning environments for computer-supported collaborative work in design.

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) would appear to be particular effective in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) for active learning. Most research studies looking at computer-supported collaborative design have focused on either synchronous or asynchronous modes of communication, but near-synchronous working has received relatively little attention. Yet it could be argued that near-synchronous communication encourages creative, rhetorical and critical exchanges of ideas, building on each other’s contributions. Furthermore, although many researchers have carried out studies on collaborative design protocol, argumentation and constructive interaction, little is known about the interaction between drawing and dialogue in near-synchronous collaborative design. The paper reports the first stage of an investigation into the requirements for the design and development of interactive systems to support the learning of collaborative design activities. The aim of the study is to understand the collaborative design processes while sketching in a shared white board and audio conferencing media. Empirical data on design processes have been obtained from observation of seven sessions with groups of design students solving an interior space-planning problem of a lounge-diner in a virtual learning environment, Lyceum, an in-house software developed by the Open University to support its students in collaborative learning.

Symmetric Push-Sum Protocol for decentralised aggregation

Gossip (or Epidemic) protocols have emerged as a communication and computation paradigm for large-scale networked systems. These protocols are based on randomised communication, which provides probabilistic guarantees on convergence speed and accuracy. They also provide robustness, scalability, computational and communication efficiency and high stability under disruption. This work presents a novel Gossip protocol named Symmetric Push-Sum Protocol for the computation of global aggregates (e.g., average) in decentralised and asynchronous systems. The proposed approach combines the simplicity of the push-based approach and the efficiency of the push-pull schemes. The push-pull schemes cannot be directly employed in asynchronous systems as they require synchronous paired communication operations to guarantee their accuracy. Although push schemes guarantee accuracy even with asynchronous communication, they suffer from a slower and unstable convergence. Symmetric Push- Sum Protocol does not require synchronous communication and achieves a convergence speed similar to the push-pull schemes, while keeping the accuracy stability of the push scheme. In the experimental analysis, we focus on computing the global average as an important class of node aggregation problems. The results have confirmed that the proposed method inherits the advantages of both other schemes and outperforms well-known state of the art protocols for decentralized Gossip-based aggregation.

A articulação língua-cultura na coconstrução da competência intercultural em uma parceria de Teletandem (Português/Espanhol)

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

Corpos modernos e vigorexia na rede social virtual: ideais midiáticos e suas influências na imagem corporal masculina

Pós-graduação em Desenvolvimento Humano e Tecnologias - IBRC

Relacionamentos humanos mediados pelo computador: as experiências de intermautas cadastros no site de comunidades UOL K

Os sites de comunidades têm atraído grande número de pessoas. Elas passam a se relacionar à distância, utilizando para isso recursos como envio de recados e mensagens e trocam informações sobre si através da auto-descrição (perfil) e do uso de imagens, ambos abertos ao público. A experiência de possuir uma página pessoal neste tipo de ambiente e se relacionar com pessoas através dela se constitui o objeto desta pesquisa a qual foi realizada com base na metodologia qualitativa. Foram entrevistados 16 usuários da rede de relacionamentos UOL K, pertencente ao UOL (Universo OnLine), considerado o principal portal de conteúdo e provedor pago de acesso à Internet do Brasil. A análise dos resultados destacou os seguintes aspectos: o site possibilita tanto fazer novos contatos quanto manter contatos feitos anteriormente, há uma tendência a fazer novos contatos, a língua escrita é utilizada tanto para se comunicar como para refletir acerca de si mesmo, o anonimato é favorecido pela comunicação à distância e causa receio de se decepcionar com o outro, as experiências são vistas como reais mesmo ocorrendo num ambiente virtual, “estar online” pode ser prazeroso e não significa desprender-se do mundo offline, a afiliação às comunidades é freqüente e tem como base objetivos comuns, o uso da foto é, graças aos recursos do site, um elo entre a comunicação sincrônica (bate-papo) e a comunicação assincrônica (UOL K), há uma ênfase na sexualidade e, por fim, os usuários se vêem na necessidade constante de rever e relativizar conceitos como próximo e distante, público e privado, estar ou não online. Conclui-se que, mesmo não tendo o hábito de marcar encontros face a face, os usuários são capazes de se relacionar virtualmente de forma genuína, trocar afetos, formar vínculos e manter uma vida online na qual o comunicar-se encontra seu sentido em si mesmo, podendo não haver outro objetivo a não ser o de estar em contato.

A autonomia no contexto Teletandem institucinal integrado

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Representatividade das redes sociais no processo educacional: potencialidades dos grupos virtuais como ferramentas de ensino-aprendizagem no Ensino Médio

One tool that has been in evidence, especially among young people, is Facebook. It can be classified as a synchronous communication tool that allows communities of people with similar interests to discuss and exchange experiences in real time, promoting the sharing of information and the creation of collective knowledge, even if they being in different parts of the globe. In this paper we show that Facebook can be used as an educational tool to aid the work done in the classroom and the impact of creating closed groups in online social networking for educational purposes. The survey was conducted with a group of students at a private school in Bauru/SP. We investigated the interaction profile of students with a closed group created on Facebook and through a questionnaire analyzed whether students use virtual environments for personal or educational. The survey reveals students perceptions about relevant aspects and the potential use of this tool as teaching-learning strategy

A methodology for formally modeling and analyzing software architecture of mobile agent systems

A methodology for formally modeling and analyzing software architecture of mobile agent systems provides a solid basis to develop high quality mobile agent systems, and the methodology is helpful to study other distributed and concurrent systems as well. However, it is a challenge to provide the methodology because of the agent mobility in mobile agent systems.^ The methodology was defined from two essential parts of software architecture: a formalism to define the architectural models and an analysis method to formally verify system properties. The formalism is two-layer Predicate/Transition (PrT) nets extended with dynamic channels, and the analysis method is a hierarchical approach to verify models on different levels. The two-layer modeling formalism smoothly transforms physical models of mobile agent systems into their architectural models. Dynamic channels facilitate the synchronous communication between nets, and they naturally capture the dynamic architecture configuration and agent mobility of mobile agent systems. Component properties are verified based on transformed individual components, system properties are checked in a simplified system model, and interaction properties are analyzed on models composing from involved nets. Based on the formalism and the analysis method, this researcher formally modeled and analyzed a software architecture of mobile agent systems, and designed an architectural model of a medical information processing system based on mobile agents. The model checking tool SPIN was used to verify system properties such as reachability, concurrency and safety of the medical information processing system. ^ From successful modeling and analyzing the software architecture of mobile agent systems, the conclusion is that PrT nets extended with channels are a powerful tool to model mobile agent systems, and the hierarchical analysis method provides a rigorous foundation for the modeling tool. The hierarchical analysis method not only reduces the complexity of the analysis, but also expands the application scope of model checking techniques. The results of formally modeling and analyzing the software architecture of the medical information processing system show that model checking is an effective and an efficient way to verify software architecture. Moreover, this system shows a high level of flexibility, efficiency and low cost of mobile agent technologies. ^

Asynchronous Messaging for OSGi

OSGi is a popular Java-based platform, which has its roots in the area of embedded systems. However, nowadays it is used more and more in enterprise systems. To fit this new application area, OSGi has recently been extended with the Remote Services specification. This specification enables distribution, which OSGi was previously lacking. However, the specification provides means for synchronous communication only and leaves out asynchronous communication. As an attempt to fill a gap in this field, we propose, implement and evaluate an approach for the integration of asynchronous messaging into OSGi.