Natureculture design involves complex, more-than-human relationships that challenge conventional forms of representation and evaluation. Transmedia experiences offer a way to engage with this complexity through interconnected media, spaces, narratives, and social interactions. Yet, design and HCI research lack methods to evaluate such experiences holistically. This pictorial introduces the Relational Entanglement Diary (RED), a situated mixed-method evaluation tool designed to assess engagement with transmedia journeys as interconnected trajectories rather than isolated interactions. We present the research-through-design process of developing RED, and its deployment across two natureculture sites, each tailored to local contexts and transmedia configurations. Drawing on participant diaries, observational data, and reflective analysis by the research team, we examine how RED captures the relational and transmedia values it aims to reveal. Our discussion suggests RED provides a flexible approach for evaluating complex transmedia experiences and contributes a methodological advancement for design and HCI research focused on relational and more-than-human engagement.

Mixed Reality games offer new ways to experience cultural heritage spaces, yet their contemporary aesthetics can conflict with the spirit of place of ancient sites. These tensions often limit their deployment in places that might most benefit from the creative reimagining and engagement they afford. Working with the National Trust, we have designed and deployed a mixed reality smartphone game at the Avebury World Heritage Site in Wiltshire, UK; a Neolithic landscape that contains the world's largest prehistoric stone circle. Drawing on an approach we call Polyholomorphism (many whole forms), we bring the player and their device into the experience as creative agents, transforming through different eras of time during the journey. This design invites reflection on technology's changing relationship with place, fostering a sense of belonging to a continuing history. In doing so, it demonstrates how creative design can bridge temporal divides and contribute to more empathetic and transformative encounters with cultural heritage.

Emergent Narratives (EN) are a popular approach in game design where stories naturally emerge from players' interactions with the game world.Story sifting is an EN technique where the player's attention is drawn to particularly interesting narrative patterns, but these story sifting patterns can be complex and difficult to create.To address this, we have developed an event-based rules system that supports composable patterns: building blocks that allow higher-level stories to be constructed from lower level ones.We demonstrate our approach through a simulation (of an alien invasion scenario) alongside a powerful incremental story sifter that curates compound events.We conduct agent ratio and stability testing to demonstrate the system's robustness, and a complexity test to show how the performance of the sifter scales with agent numbers and map size.Our findings show that the system remains stable throughout.Our work demonstrates that an event-based rules approach can effectively support composite patterns, ultimately enabling the curation of more complex EN stories.

This pictorial introduces Natureculture Probes, an innovative tool designed to enhance visitor engagement at heritage sites through participatory methods. Rooted in feminist post-human approaches and post-humanist HCI, these probes aim to bridge nature and culture, offering diverse perspectives on heritage. Developed through an iterative research-through-design approach, the tools include postcards and sensory maps, enabling visitors to document their reflections and sensory experiences. Field tests at two UNESCO heritage sites highlight the probes' potential to capture diverse, contextual data and foster deeper connections with nature and cultural heritage. However, tensions emerged between heritage preservation, public engagement, and technology's role in nature. The study underscores the importance of inclusive, co-designed tools to balance economic, cultural, and environmental entanglements. The findings advocate for adaptive, seasonally varied deployments to better address the diverse needs of heritage visitors and stakeholders, ultimately contributing to more empathetic and sustainable heritage site management and visitor experience design.

This paper explores using rationale-based learning with supervised attention to focus the training of text summarisation models on words and sentences surrounding choice points for Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs). IDNs allow players to interact with the story via choice points, making choices central to these narratives. Exploiting such knowledge about narrative structure during model training can help ensure key narrative information appears in generated summaries of narrative-based text and thus improve the quality of these summaries. We experiment with using word-level and sentence-level rationales indicating the proximity of words and sentences to self-supervised choice points. Our results indicate that rationale-based learning can improve the ability of attention-based text summarisation models to create higher quality summaries that encode key narrative information better for different playthroughs of the same interactive narrative. These results suggest a promising new direction for narrative-based text summarisation models.

This study investigates the impact of the perceptions of antisocial behaviour on the use of the social media platform Twitter. We extend the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) with the Perception of Antisocial Behaviour as a risk factor, and two supporting constructs: Strategic Self-Presentation and Protective Self-Presentation. We call this extended model Technology Acceptance and Use under Risk (TAUR). We investigate two groups via an online questionnaire, contrasting Anglophone countries (the UK, USA, and Canada, 200 responses), with Saudi Arabia (540 responses). In both cases the data shows that the Perception of Antisocial Behaviour impacts Twitter use, but not directly, rather it negatively impacts the influence of other factors such as Behavioural Intention – it also shows that this affects Anglophones more than Saudis. This indicates that future work should differentiate between different cultural groups, and different solutions may be needed to assuage users’ fears in different parts of the world.

With the rising popularity of Virtual Reality (VR), there is also a rising interest in co-located multiplayer experiences, as people want to play VR games together with their friends. As having multiple VR headsets is out of reach to the average consumer, we need to look into different possible ways of including multiple people in this play space. We have created a multi-modal co-located multiplayer VR game, Stuck in Space, that introduces a second player in two ways - one with a PC (the baseline that a lot of current games do), as well as a tracked Phone that can be used as a `window into the virtual world'. We have conducted a user study (n = 24) where we explore the difference in immersion and co-presence between the two versions using two questionnaires (IPQ and NMMoSP), as well as a thematic analysis of the subsequent interview data, from which 5 themes emerged. Surprisingly, we found no significant difference in co-presence or immersion based on the quantitative data. However, the qualitative analysis helps reveal one of the main reasons why that is - maintaining a mental model of the real world while also being in the virtual world makes it harder for the person wearing the headset to immerse themselves and feel co-present. From these themes and sub-themes we theorize that each of the two versions has positives and negatives that cancel each other out in the quantitative data, and for there to be a difference we would need to accentuate or change certain elements of the game. The results show that introducing a second player through a Phone is not detrimental in terms of co-presence and immersion and that it is a viable way of doing so, although certain design considerations would have to be taken into account to minimize the negatives.

Speech recognition systems have improved dramatically over the last few years, however, their performance is significantly degraded for the cases of accented or impaired speech. This work explores domain adversarial neural networks (DANN) for speaker-independent speech recognition on the UAS dataset of dysarthric speech. The classification task on 10 spoken digits is performed using an end-to-end CNN taking raw audio as input. The results are compared to a speaker-adaptive (SA) model as well as speaker-dependent (SD) and multi-task learning models (MTL). The experiments conducted in this paper show that DANN achieves an absolute recognition rate of 74.91% and outperforms the baseline by 12.18%. Additionally, the DANN model achieves comparable results to the SA model's recognition rate of 77.65%. We also observe that when labelled dysarthric speech data is available DANN and MTL perform similarly, but when they are not DANN performs better than MTL.

In today’s Internet, a web user becomes members of multiple social networks due to different types of services provided by each of these networks. This creates an opportunity to make trust decisions that go beyond individual social networks, since these networks provide single perspective of trust. To make trust inference over multiple social networks, these networks need to be consolidated. It is nontrivial as these networks are of heterogeneous nature due to different naming conventions used in these networks. Furthermore, trust metrics extracted from these networks are also varied in nature due to different trust evaluation algorithms used in each of these networks. Heterogeneity of these social networks can be overcome by using semantic technologies as it allows us to represent knowledge using ontologies. Trust data can be consolidated by using such data fusion techniques which not only provide but also preserve trust data integrity from each of the individual social network profiles. The proposed semantic framework is evaluated using two sets of experiments. Through simulations in this work, we analysed various techniques for data fusion. For identifying suitable technique that preserves the integrity of trust consolidated from each of the individual networks, analysis revealed that Weighted Ordered Weighted Averaging parameter best aggregated trust data, and, unlike other techniques, it preserved the integrity of trust from each individual network for varying participant overlap and tie overlap ( p≤0.05 ). Similarly, for experimental analysis, we used findings of the simulation study about the best trust aggregation technique and applied the proposed framework on real-life trust data between participants, which we extracted from pairs of professional social networks. Analysis partially proved our hypothesis about generating better trust values from consolidated multiple heterogeneous networks. We witnessed an improvement in overall results for all the participants who were part of multiple social networks ( p≤0.05 ), while disproving the claim for those existing in nonoverlapping regions of the social networks.

Narratives form a key component of multimedia knowledge representation on the Web. However, many existing multimedia narrative systems either ignore the narrative qualities of any media, or focus on the literal depicted content ignoring any subtext. Ignoring narrative subtext can lead to erroneous search results, or automatically remixed content that lacks cohesion. We suggest that subtext can be computationally modeled in terms of Tomashevsky’s hierarchy of themes and motifs. These elements can then be used in a semiotic term expansion algorithm, incorporating knowledge of subtext into search and subsequent narrative generation. We present two experimental applications of this technique. In the first, we use our thematic model in the automatic construction of photo montages from Flickr, comparing it to more traditional term expansion based on co-occurrence, and showing that this improves the perceived relevance of images within the montage. In the second, we use the thematic model in order to automatically identify Flickr images to illustrate short stories, where it dampened the perception of unwanted themes (an effect we describe as reducing thematic noise). Our work is among the first in this space, and shows that thematic subtext can be tackled computationally.

A key area in the research agenda of modelling argumentation is to accurately model argumentation on the social web. In this paper we propose additional extensions to our ontology for argumentation on the social web (which integrates elements of the Argument Interchange Format and the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities project) for the purposes of modelling social and rhetorical tactics used in eristic or irrational arguments. We then present a review of these extensions from a panel of experts in the fields of argumentation modelling, web science, philosophy and open and linked data and discuss the value of modelling social argument, the challenges faced to create usable and accurate models and the completeness, clarity and consistency of our proposed additions.

The growth of the web has led to a shift in the news industry and the emergence of novel news services. Due to the importance of news media in society it is important to understand how these systems work and how they are perceived. Previous work has ranked news systems in terms of their openness to user contribution, noting that the most open systems (such as YouTube) are typically not viewed as news systems at all, despite having most of the same functional characteristics. In this paper we explore whether credibility is an appropriate characteristic to explain this perception by presenting the results of a survey of 79 people regarding their credibility assessments of online news websites. We compare this perceived credibility with the openness of the systems as identified in previous work. Results show that there is a modest but significant correlation between the openness of a news system and its credibility, and suggest that credibility is an appropriate if imperfect explanation of the difference in perception of open and closed news systems

The proliferation of Web-based learning objects makes finding and evaluating online resources problematic. While established Learning Analytics methods use Web interaction to evaluate learner engagement, there is uncertainty regarding the appropriateness of these measures. In this paper we propose a method for evaluating pedagogical activity in Web-based comments using a pedagogical framework, and present a preliminary study that assigns a Pedagogical Value (PV) to comments. This has value as it categorises discussion in terms of pedagogical activity rather than Web interaction. Results show that PV is distinct from typical interactional measures, there are negative or insignificant correlations with established Learning Analytics methods, but strong correlations with relevant linguistic indicators of learning, suggesting that the use of pedagogical frameworks may produce more accurate indicators than interaction analysis, and that linguistic rather than interaction analysis has the potential to automatically identify learning behaviour.

As mobile devices are getting more powerful and more affordable the use of online educational multimedia is also getting very prevalent. Limited battery power is nevertheless a major restricting factor as streaming multimedia drains battery power quickly. Many battery efficient multimedia adaptation techniques have been proposed that achieve battery efficiency by lowering presentation quality of entire multimedia. Adaptation is usually done without considering any impact on the information contents of multimedia. In this paper, based on the results of an experimental study, we argue that without considering any negative impact on information contents of multimedia the adaptation may negatively impact the learning process. Some portions of the multimedia that require a higher visual quality for conveying learning information may lose their learning effectiveness in the adapted lowered quality. We report results of our experimental study that indicate that different parts of the same learning multimedia do not have same minimum acceptable quality. This strengthens the position that power-saving adaptation techniques for educational multimedia must be developed that lower the quality of multimedia based on the needs of its individual fragments for successfully conveying learning information.

Using online multimedia content on mobile devices is a power hungry activity and drains battery power very quickly. This poses a big challenge in using mobile devices with limited battery power for learning purposes using online educational multimedia. Multimedia adaptation techniques have been developed that preserve battery power by lowering multimedia quality. These adaptation techniques do not provide users with any power-saving options and the adaptation is done automatically without involvement of users. In this paper, we propose a Learner-Battery Interaction model that suggests involving learners in the adaptation process. The idea is to provide learners with power-saving options and relevant feedback about the form of adapted multimedia in advance. This will help leaners in making informed power-saving decisions for adaptation. We implemented the model in a prototype system and conducted an evaluation in the form of a user study.

As a result of tremendous enhancements in the capabilities of mobile devices and availability of higher data rate mobile internet, the use of online multimedia learning resources on mobile devices is increasingly becoming popular. Limited Battery Power of mobile devices, however, is still one big challenge in Mobile Learning. High Quality multimedia learning resources are power hungry and if used on mobile devices drain battery power rapidly limiting learning opportunities on the move. Lack of significant improvements in battery capacities has resulted in significant interest in battery power saving techniques. Existing power-saving streaming multimedia adaptation techniques tend to extend battery life by reducing quality of multimedia making them susceptible to information loss. This loss may affect the learning content efficacy and jeopardizes the learning process. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has considered the learning content efficacy in multimedia streaming adaptation mechanism. In this paper, we present MoBELearn system, which is a prototype implementation of our proposed Content Aware Power Saving Educational Multimedia Adaptation (CAPS-EMA) approach. We demonstrate battery efficiency in educational multimedia streaming while keeping the adapted resource suitable for learning. We also describe our semantic metamodel for educational multimedia resource that support our energy efficient adaptation technique.

In this paper we describe the language box, a teaching and learning repository for language teachers based on the eprints framework. Language box differs from other content repositories in that it is designed as a living space, where teachers and lecturers can keep and manage working documents. It is focused around three key services: Hosting materials online, Organizing materials into collections, and sharing them with the community so that they can be exploited, remixed and extended through activities. We believe that our novel approach may help to solve the problem of low user interest in teaching and learning repositories, and can inform others working on teaching and learning repositories in other domains.

Multimedia has become technically easier to create (e.g. recording lectures) but while users can easily bookmark, search, link to, or tag the WHOLE of a podcast or video recording available on the web they cannot easily find, or associate their notes or resources with, PART of that recording. This paper describes the development of a web based application that makes multimedia web resources (e.g. podcasts) easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and other users through the creation of notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronized to any part of the recording.

Collaboration has long been considered an effective approach to learning. However, forming optimal groups can be a time consuming and complex task. Different approaches have been developed to assist teachers allocate students to groups based on a set of constraints. However, existing tools often fail to assign some students to groups creating a problem well known as ldquoorphan studentsrdquo. In this paper we propose a framework for learner group formation, based upon satisfying the constraints of the person forming the groups by reasoning over semantic data about the potential participants. The use of both semantic Web technologies and logic programming proved to increase the satisfaction of the constraints and overcome the orphanspsila problem.

Students whose professional qualifications are gained through work placement-based learning are assessed as to their competency to carryout tasks. These students are usually supported by mentors, qualified practitioners who regularly meet with them and give feedback on their progress. This support can be highly variable, affecting the quality of the studentspsila learning experience. Through a process of co-design the mPLAT project has created a mobile toolkit to connect studentspsila placement experiences with the professional competency model that they are assessed against. The toolkit does this by matching their learning requirements to a placement and producing an action plan that acts as a focus for their reflection and for their meetings with their mentors.

Many approaches to learning and teaching rely upon students working in groups. So far, many Computer-Supported Group Formation systems have been designed to facilitate the formation of optimal groups in learning. However, evaluating the quality of automated group formation is not always well reported. In this paper we propose a metrics framework for evaluating group formation based upon a model for constraint satisfaction-based group formation.

Peer assessment (or peer review) is a popular form of reciprocal assessment where students produce feedback, or grades, for each others work. Peer assessment activities can be extremely varied with participants taking different roles at different stages of the process and materials passing between roles in sophisticated patterns. This variety makes designing peer assessment systems very challenging. In this paper we present a number of peer assessment case studies and show how a simple review cycle can be used as a building block to achieve the more complex cases. We then propose a canonical use case for peer assessment, in which a review plan is used to describe how review cycles can be combined to achieve the required complexity.

Many approaches to learning and teaching rely upon students working in groups. Formation of optimal groups can be a time consuming and complex task, particularly when the list of participants is unknown in advance. In this paper we propose an approach to learner group formation, based upon satisfying the constraints of the person forming the groups by reasoning over possibly incomplete semantic data about the potential participants.

The aim of this article is to produce an alternative view of the adaptive hypermedia (AH) domain from a contextually-aware open hypermedia (OH) perspective. We believe that a wide range of AH techniques can be supported with a small number of OH structures, which can be combined together to create more complex effects, possibly simplifying the development of new AH systems. In this work we reexamine Brusilovsky's taxonomy of AH techniques from a structural OH perspective. We also show that it is possible to identify and model common structures across the taxonomy of adaptive techniques. An agent-based adaptive hypermedia system called HA 3 L is presented, which uses these OH structures to provide a straightforward implementation of a variety of adaptive hypermedia techniques. This enables us to reflect on the structural equivalence of many of the techniques, demonstrates the advantages of the OH approach, and can inform the design of future adaptive hypermedia systems.

A key challenge in co-designing UbiComp is that users may have limited understanding or experience of these technologies. While the value of situated co-design activities for promoting understanding is known, the role of time is less well researched. Here we describe and reflect on a range of co-design activities carried out with the curators of an historic English manor house to create novel visitor tours. We show how an ensemble of situated co-design activities over time led to the unfolding of user understanding around issues of content, technology and user experience, in turn leading to a progressive re-imagining of practice. This points to the importance of time and variety of in-situ activities to help people engage as co-designers in creating novel UbiComp-enabled experiences.

Fieldtrips, traditionally associated with science, history and geography teaching, have long been used to support children’s learning by allowing them to engage with environments first-hand. Recently, ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) has been used to enhance fieldtrips in these educational areas by augmenting environments with a range of instruments, devices and sensors. However, the sorts of interaction design that UbiComp makes possible have the potential not just to enhance the value of educational techniques in known application areas, but also to expand the application of those techniques into new areas of curriculum. We report on a UbiComp-supported fieldtrip to support creative writing, associated with the learning of literacy skills. We discuss how the fieldtrip, designed and run in the grounds of a historic English country house with Year 5 UK schoolchildren, engendered interactions which changed both the processes and products of creative writing, with benefits for both teachers and children.

Assessment is one of the more established areas of e-learning, but it cannot be described as mature due to the disparate nature of the tools and standards available. As part of our efforts within the FREMA project to create a reference model for assessment we have produced a database of existing resources. As a way of presenting that database we have also developed concept maps that describe the domain and place the resources in context. In this paper we present the process concept map and an initial analysis of the resources behind the map in an effort to map the e- Learning Assessment landscape and show where most development effort has been spent.

In this paper we describe an investigation into the requirements for and the use of in-situ authoring in the creation of location based pervasive and UbiComp experiences. We will focus on the co-design process with users that resulted in a novel visitor experience to a historic country estate. This has informed the design of new, in-situ, authoring tools supplemented with tools for retrospective revisiting and reorganization of content. An initial trial of these new tools will be discussed and conclusions drawn as to the appropriateness of such tools. Further enhancements as part of future trials will also be described.

In this paper, we examine the semantic aspects of learning from both pedagogical and technological points of view. We suggest that if semantics are to fulfil their potential in the learning domain, then a paradigm shift in perspective is necessary from information based content delivery to knowledge based, context-aware collaborative learning services. We propose a semantics driven knowledge life cycle that characterises the key phases in managing semantics and knowledge, and show how this can be applied to the learning domain.

In this paper we suggest that if semantics are to fulfil their potential in the learning domain then a paradigm shift in perspective is necessary from information based content delivery to knowledge based, context-aware collaborative learning services. We propose a semantics driven knowledge life cycle that characterises the key phases in managing semantics and knowledge, and show how this can be applied to the learning domain.

VOEU is a virtual university which we designed, implemented and deployed in the Wessex Region of the UK for use by higher surgical trainees in the orthopaedic domain. A particularly original part of this virtual university is the virtual research environment (VRE) which provides the infrastructure to support trainee surgeons in carrying out and publishing research and clinical trails. The current implementation of the VRE is tightly coupled, but we are now engaged in a new project to redeploy the VRE as loosely coupled grid services. This paper describes the VRE, and discusses the advantages that will be achieved by implementing it as grid services.

Many analytical or computational applications especially legacy systems create documents and display screens in response to user queries "dynamically" or in "real time". These "virtual documents" do not exist in advance and thus hypermedia features must be generated "just in time" - automatically and dynamically. Additionally the hypermedia features may have to cause target documents to be generated or re-generated. This paper focuses on the specific challenges faced in hypermedia support for virtual documents of dynamic hypermedia functionality dynamic regeneration and dynamic anchor re-identification and re-location. It presents a prototype called JHE (Just-in-time Hypermedia Engine) to support just-in-time hypermedia across third party applications with dynamic content and discusses issues prompted by this research.