Program

Lecture of Prof Dr Nuno Otero - Linnaeus University

Since September 2011, I am a Senior Lecturer, Department of Media Technology, School of Computer Science, Physics and Mathematics, Linnaeus University, Sweden. Since March 2008 I am a Research Fellow at the Department of Information Systems at University of Minho. I am involved in research projects concerning: (i) the design and development of situated digital displays, (ii) the design and use of external representations in educational activities and (iii) human-robot interactions. In relation to the design of situated digital displays, from a careful consideration of the social context where the artifact is being deployed, we have been investigating how simple interacting techniques coupled with appropriate design of the displays can foster people's appropriation of the technology. Furthermore, we are now exploring how different user-centred methodologies can be employed in different contexts of utilization to facilitate the inclusion of people's views in the design cycle. In what concerns the design and use of external representations in educational activities, I am now particularly interested in investigating how socio-affective factors come to the fore in educational contexts and influence the co-construction and use of external representations “in the wild”. Regarding the investigation of the design of human-robot interactions, I have been particularly interested in understanding how robots can effectively publicize their interaction abilities in order to foster the emergence of common ground with humans and enable communication and joint activity.

Summary of the talk

Recent developments in digital technologies and social media are starting to have an important impact in the education of scientific domains (see, for example, the numerous videos and blogs on scientific matters targeting young learners that populate the Web (TED, Educational Videos, WatchKnowLearn, iTunes U) or the recent initiatives by Youtube or Google supporting the creation and dissemination of videos for schools). In fact, learners are being empowered to create multimedia-learning objects, such as photos, videos, animations, music, models, and interactive data visualizations. These new learning practices have the potential to offer a range of multimedia learning assets that can be leveraged into a “seamless learning” experience across learning environments that many are calling for in our era of increasingly ubiquitous mobile computing.

However, in order to unleash the potential we believe there is an urgent need to better understand how to support students understanding and representational skills through the use of digital media making. In other words, students need to understand what to represent, how to represent and manage/participate/collaborate in the cascade of interactions that result from sharing and disseminating their multimedia creations. Furthermore, students will need to be able to integrate such activities as part of the learning inquiry process and such integration raises new design implications and research challenges regarding the tools to support these educational activities.

In order to explore the problem space, and taking advantage of our involvement in some collaborative research projects, we are now considering the following range of issues:

• Understand current practices and techniques of successful multimedia productions for school contexts.
• Observation of current practices in schools concerning multimedia creation projects and development of supportive guidelines to scaffold such practices taking into consideration the specificities of schools.
• Understand the current the design space of multimedia creation and editing tools suitable for school contexts.
• Create a conceptual framework to inform how to promote interactions and collaborations involving the re-use of multimedia resources within a community of learners.
• Develop a set of suitable interaction tools to foster collaboration activities around the creations in public spaces.

In this talk I will explore the themes referred to above and present our results within two on-going research projects "Let's Go" (aee http://www.celekt.info/projects/show/20) and "JuxtaLearn".