The information published in newspapers reflects the opinions and viewpoints that society holds on the principal public issues. Some topics can be particularly sensitive to gender biases, such as technology, politics, or sports, where, despite the growing relevance of women, the media tends to focus on men as protagonists and sources of reference. When women do appear, they are not treated equally. Analyzing how the information is presented from a gender perspective is necessary to assess progress toward equality in the journalism sector and society at large. These analyses are very costly to produce due to the time required and the shortage of experts in the field, so they are not as frequent as would be ideal. In this paper, we introduce IRIS, a tool that helps experts identify gender biases in news publications. The tool is designed to process content qualitatively and quantitatively, using variables defined in collaboration with researchers with extensive experience in gender studies. This first version of IRIS aims to capture human expertise and automatically generate a basic report to present analysis results from a gender perspective.

Online hostility in social media, including hate speech, trolling, and cyberbullying, can seriously harm people's mental and physical health, and yet it is often addressed after harm has already occurred. While prior research focused on detecting such behaviors, this study proposes and evaluates a gamified, user-centered approach to prevent and regulate hostile interactions while preserving user agency. To this end, we have designed and developed an innovative gamified algorithm that combines elements such as Corrected Hostility Level (CHL), Politeness Points, green cards, apology and appeal mechanisms, user-selected politeness thresholds, Politeness Badges, and a Positive Reputation Score (PRS). The proposed system enables users to restrict unwanted interactions without requiring the platform to read private messages or impose uniform moderation rules. The proposed methods were implemented in Gegli Social Network, and the evaluation analyzed 36,367 reports concerning 16,167 reported users and 97,818 visits to the politeness panel by 1,478 users. Moreover, the PRS analysis used 132,588 testimonial records and identified 24,151 ranked receivers, showing a strongly right-skewed reputation distribution in which early badge levels were widely reachable and higher badges remained rare. The study results suggest that the gamified mechanisms were associated with reduced hostile interactions, motivated users to apologize to each other for their bad behavior, and personalized their communication by democratically restricting their communication to decide with whom they wanted to communicate, while mostly selecting the most open threshold. This is to encourage safer and more prosocial online behavior. Gender differences in the use of the proposed method were also studied.

In this exploratory research, a gamification approach for crowdsourcing fake account detection in social networks has been proposed and evaluated for the first time. Gamification usually tries to satisfy the users’ psychological needs. However, motivation could also be based on human physiological needs. Among these needs are health, shelter, and clothes. In the gamification world, we can translate them into monetary or cash rewards. We have investigated the effects of both these rewards on users’ motivations in participating and detecting fake accounts by conducting two in-the-wild exploratory experiments and two surveys. The experimental results showed that users prefer physiological rewards over psychological rewards, and an increase in the reward (0.75 euro in this study) resulted in a 365% increase in user participation and a 28.88% decrease in number of accurate reports in the first experiment. Similarly, in the second experiment, we observed that higher monetary rewards resulted in higher user acquisition and higher user engagement, but the quality of the reports was 10% lower than the low monetary rewards. This indicates that physiological rewards can potentially make users over-motivated or, in other words, overgamified. To tackle this problem, we proposed a gamification approach that benefits from both psychological and physiological rewards and gradually increases them. The evaluation results showed a 15% increase in the quality of the reports, a 26% increase in interaction time using the proposed method, and a 19% increase in user acquisition to lower monetary rewards. It also showed a 57% increase in commitment to participating in the survey compared with other groups. Both survey results show that around 40% of the users prefer to receive between 0.50 and 1 euro for their services. Also, women showed more quality responses and commitment in completing the participation than men.

Abstract In this article, we have introduced Gamispotify. For the first time, in a social network-based environment, and by benefiting from gamification and crowdsourcing, Gamispotify recommends music to the users based on their personal values. The proposed method has been compared to another published article by conducting two experiments and surveys on 32 application participants. Experimental results indicate that user engagement has significantly increased using the proposed method. Spending time on the application increased by 299.48%, the music play count increased by 150%, and receiving music recommendations increased by 244.41%. Statistical analysis using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test confirmed these improvements were significant (p < 0.05). Moreover, survey results support these findings and show a notable increase in user satisfaction with the proposed music recommendation system compared with the previous work (p = 0.019). It also indicates that the proposed method successfully motivated users to discover new songs (p = 0.043). We have also found that social networking features, recommendations based on personal values, and gamification have positively impacted the users’ motivation to use the music streaming application.

Moving to a responsible engineering educational approach is a trend nowadays since the artifacts created by engineers have an impact on society and the environment. Ethics has become a key learning outcome value by many accreditation bodies, but ethics education can be implemented in many different ways. This paper advocates for an educational approach not only based on the introduction of stand-alone ethics courses but also on pouring values throughout the curriculum in any courses related to creating technologies. We describe here two examples of assignments that follow a microscale embedded ethics approach and active learning tasks to engage students in the exploration of biases and ethical issues concerning user interface design and data visualizations, respectively. The first example has a hidden goal of identifying gender-based biases in websites by applying reverse design thinking techniques on existing websites. The second example uses three different tasks to explore and apply ethics in data integration and visualizations by designing multisensorial visualizations that could serve more diverse audiences, applying value-based design in a final project, and elaborating an essay on existing unethical AI-based tools. Both experiences, which students appreciated, helped to raise awareness of ethical issues and the responsibility of computer science engineers.

This paper briefly overviews the elements that affect user trust, security, and privacy in social media applications. We analyzed how gamification, personalization, decentralization, design, content, transparency, demography, and performance can affect user trust, privacy, and security in social media. Then, we reviewed common approaches hackers use to attack users on social media platforms. Approaches like phishing, social engineering, credential stuffing, malware distributions, fake profiles, catfishing, man-in-the-middle, session hijacking, and cross-site scripting (XSS) were reviewed. Then, we share our experiences facing this type of threat in the Gegli social network and describe how we have tackled these problems. This paper can help social media and other software applications or website developers that benefit from social networking features to familiarize themselves with the common security threats and the approaches that can be used to tackle them.

Abstract Cross-reality media technology creates alternate reality experiences in which the physical and the virtual world are interconnected and influence each other through a network of sensors and actuators. Despite technological advances, the landscape of cross-reality technology as an enabler of alternate reality educational experiences has not been explored yet. The technical expertise required to set up and program such mixed environments is too high to engage the problem owners (i.e. educational experts) in the design process and, hence, user-driven innovation remains challenging. In this paper we explore the co-creation of cross-reality experiences for educational games. We created a no-programming toolkit that provides a visual language and interface abstractions to quickly build prototypes of cross-reality interactions. The toolkit supports experience prototyping and allows designers to coproduce, with educational experts, meaningful scenarios while they create, try out and reconfigure their prototypes. We report on a workshop with 36 educators where the toolkit was used to ideate cross-reality games for education. We discuss use cases of game-based learning applications developed by the participants that follow different pedagogical strategies and combine different physical and virtual spaces and times. We outline implications for the design of cross-reality interactions in educational settings that trigger further research and technological developments.

Immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality afford to enrich the physical environment with a layer of digital information, providing new experiences that can support and improve the daily life of people in their homes. We present insights from a field study with nine families to understand user experience and expectations of Mobile Augmented Reality at home and reveal emerging designs. We deployed a mobile application that provided a contextual representation of the WiFi signal through visualizations integrated in the physical space. Each family lived with the prototype for one week, with a pre- and post-study interview session. We found that Augmented Reality has potential to (1) foster people's autonomy and control (e.g., configuration of technology and problem solving), as well as (2) enhance people's knowledge and awareness about domestic technology (e.g., understanding technical terms and awareness of invisible infrastructures).

Standalone Head-Mounted Displays open up new possibilities to study full-room, bodily interactions in immersive environments. User studies with these devices, however, are complex to design, setup and run, since remote access is required to track the user view and actions, detect errors and perform adjustments during experimental sessions. We designed IXCI as a research support tool to streamline immersive user studies by explicitly addressing these issues. Through a use case, we show how the tool effectively supports the researcher in tasks such as remote debugging, rapid prototyping, run-time parameter configuration, monitoring participants’ progress, providing help to users, recovering from errors and minimizing data loss.

Though virtual reality has been used for more than one decade to support learning, technology is now mature and cheap enough, and students have the required digital fluency to reach real settings. Immersive technologies have also demonstrated that they not only are engaging, but they can also reinforce learning and improve memory. This work presents a preliminary study on the advantages of using an immersive experience to help young students understand genetic editing techniques. We have relied upon the CHIC Immersive Bubble Chart, a VR (Virtual Reality) multi-device visualization of the most relevant topics in the domain. We tested the CHIC Immersive Bubble Chart by asking a group of 29 students to explore the information space by interacting with two different devices: a desktop and a VR headset. The results show that they mainly preferred the VR headset finding it more engaging and useful. As a matter of fact, during the evaluation, the students kept exploring the space even after the assigned time slot.

Building an electronic circuit is an error-prone activity for novice users; many errors can occur, such as incorrect wirings or wrong component values. This work explores the use of Augmented Reality (AR) as a technology to mitigate the issues that arise when users construct circuits. We present a study that investigates the effectiveness, usability, and cognitive load of AR visual instructions for circuit prototyping tasks. A mobile-based, window-on-the-world AR tool is compared to traditional media such as paper-based or monitor-displayed electronic drawings. Results show that superimposing components and instructions through AR reduces the number of errors, allows users to easily troubleshoot them and reduces users' mental workload.

Augmented Reality1 (AR) and Pervasive games can be combined to improve citizens awareness about their urban environment. While AR will provide additional information in situ, pervasive games can be used to implement playable cities that support informal learning about the environment through ludic activities performed physically in the same environment. In this paper, we present a prototype of an AR pervasive game application for an Android device that invites citizens to play and acquire knowledge about their city.

The Virtual Reality (VR) technology offers new possibilities to implement Geographical Information Systems (GIS), allowing the user to visualize and interact with map interfaces in more natural and immersive way. Moreover, they can provide the user with a wide field of view similar to the one obtained when using large displays. In this paper, we present a VR application that allows the user to display and interact with a GIS map using different types of interaction modalities.

Despite the increasing popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, the designers of these type of environments stick lack the necessary support for designing effective and usable interfaces for their creations. This works aim to provide support to VR designers by comparing the efficiency (task completion time and error rate) and usability of four types of menu configurations with different geometry (radial and linear) and position in the world (non-diegetic positions and spatial positions). We present the results of two experiments that suggest that in both non-diegetic and spatial menus the task completion time is smaller on radial menus than linear menus. In the case of error rate and usability, no statistic significant differences between radial and linear menus were found regardless their position in the VR environment.

Building physical spaces interconnected with virtual worlds is a complex task that requires high technical knowledge and hours of programming and, as a matter of fact, is relegated to the work of expert professionals. The goal of this research is to lower the development threshold through the design of an end-user toolkit that provides a visual integrated environment for the rapid prototyping of cross-reality interactions. A user study with 8 participants showed the effectiveness of our approach and uncovered design opportunities and challenges for supporting the development of cross-reality environments.

In this paper we present VR GREP, an immersive End User Development (EUD) tool that supports authoring and modifying general purpose immersive VR environments, without having technical knowledge. The system aims to facilitate exploring the potential of immersive tools to support situated design practices.

The tremendous amount of different input devices and interactive environments envisioned by researchers produces a severe challenge for the development of ubiquitous interaction. Toolkits that support the rapid setup of ubiquitous environments reduce the effort in arranging the technological medium and have the potential to lower prerequisite knowledge and automate low-level programming tasks. In this paper, we present our work-in-progress approach: a toolkit that combines physical and digital components into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies.

In this working paper we present the design and setup of a workshop environment that empowers users with tools to create and share digital narratives associated with physical artifacts. The approach focuses on two main design choices: (1) physical embodiment, by having people directly interact with the physical objects we want to augment and, (2) situated social interactions, by offering the possibility to share personal ideas and comment on others, to collaboratively produce stories about augmented objects. We also report about the main evaluation results we got in a workshop in which we studied users needs with respect to tangible interactive experiences in exhibitions of museums.

Software engineering analysis and design methods are mainly guided by objective principles and criteria, whilst design thinking is usually fueled by subjective and people-based criteria like emotions, aesthetics or cultural and personal resonance. Complex interactive systems require a mixed approach where the benefits of both disciplines are respected: engineering and creativity, rationality and emotions, quality-centered and people-centered. This is the main purpose of a software tool, named CoDICE (COdesigning DIgital Cultural Encounters), that is being developed within the meSch EU project that is aimed at co-designing smart objects for enhanced encounters with cultural heritage. CoDICE adds persistence and traceability to the co-design activities and makes it possible to extend ideas discussion beyond collocated meetings. It also provides mechanisms to revisit design products and generate informed design rationale.

Ubiquitous computing combined with web 2.0 technologies might contribute to develop a culture of participation in emergency management (EM) by aligning the efforts and capabilities of official agencies and citizens. For citizen participation to be possible organizations in charge of EM need to realize that involving citizens does not interfere with their protocols and citizens need to be empowered to move beyond the role of passive informants. In this paper we describe how organizations perceive this participation as a step further to understand how to reach a more participative model and the benefits that technology and sociotechnical systems might bring to such model.

The design of the user interfaces for educational games (EGs) poses specific challenges, as this feature does not only have an impact on the game playability but can also be used to reinforce learning or to establish associations between concepts. However, implementing advanced in-game interactions can be an issue due to the wide range of technologies for defining input modalities, actions and events that game designers need to consider. In this working paper, we propose an approach to ease the development of educational games that go one step beyond classical mouse and keyboard interaction and provide interaction alternatives within the same game rationale. Our proposal is based on the integration of a game design model and an ubicomp interaction toolkit that manages heterogeneous devices.

This Studio will involve participants creating interactions with physical and digital elements. They will have the opportunity to use a toolkit we developed that combines physical and digital widgets into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies. Therefore, participants will be able to explore how the toolkit support to physical/digital interaction gives people with low, when no, technical skills the possibility to rapidly prototype interactions among heterogeneous devices, thus blurring the boundaries between the physical and the digital world.

This work aims to explore the benefits and potential uses of Augmented Reality technology for supporting communication in presentations. This article presents the architecture and implementation of an Augmented Presentation Feedback System. The system allows a speaker equipped with an Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Display to display visual cues depicted over the listeners’ heads. These can be used as a way to provide the speaker with continuous, private, and immediate feedback on his or her explanations. The results of a case study conducted showed that the system not only assists the speaker in adapting the content and pace of the explanation to the listener but also helps to better manage their interventions and improve the flow of the presentation.

This work aims to explore the benefits and potential uses of Augmented Reality technology for supporting communication in lectures and presentations. In this paper we present the architecture and implementation of an Augmented Presentation Feedback System (APFs). The system allows a speaker equipped with an Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Display to visualize visual cues depicted over the listeners' heads. These can be used as a way of providing the speaker with continuous, private and immediate feedback on her explanations, so she can adapt the content and pace of the explanation to the specific needs of the listener and improve the flow of the presentation.

Learning scenarios are formally represented through Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs). The IMS-LD is a commonly used EML and several compliant visual editors are being created for the authoring of learning scenarios. However, these editors have a limited level of expressiveness. The LPCEL Editor facilitates the authoring process with a visual tool that includes the mechanisms for a collaborative authoring process while providing a broad level of expressiveness.

During and after crisis situations people are interested in getting knowledge about what happened and in obtaining information regarding damages, victims, and possible repercussions. Social network systems represent powerful sources due to their rapid growth in the last few years and the amount of continuous updated information published by people. Studies confirmed that people are interested in reporting facts during hazards, however due to the wide distribution of information and the lack of mechanisms to re-use it, it is an awkward task to be accomplished. For the above reasons in this paper we present SocialStory, a social platform for helping people to retrieve and filter materials available on the Internet and to compose and share personal experiences about crisis situations.

Third generation devices, such as smartphones, have the possibility of knowing the position of the user. By combining time, position and data in the Cloud it is possible to make smart deductions as to what information the user needs. These deductions can be performed by an automated assistant that have access to the user's e-mail and SMS messages, calendar, phone book, notes, etc., as well as to the position of the user. The assistant can present the information in an "I feel lucky" display on the user's smartphone. These concepts have been evaluated in a case study with a group of students, simulating the output of such an interface.

The application of computer games for learning is a field of growing interest in the education community. Games have proved to be a useful resource to teach concepts, expand perceptions, or develop skills. Typically, young children make use of recognition pattern games. This kind of games helps children to improve their knowledge and recognition skills. However, these games require someone to control the process of the game and provide feedback to the child. This paper presents a game environment based on applying the principles of natural interfaces to the development of education computer games. After realizing the proof-of-concept, we could observe that this environment allows children to interact with the games in an instinctive way seamlessly.

Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs) provide the framework to represent learning processes in a formal fashion. The IMS-LD is a widely used EML and there have been created several tools to facilitate the authoring process of a course for that specification. However, since most of these tools are meant to be IMS-LD complaint they are also restricted by its level of expressiveness. To solve this issue, the LPCEL Editor is presented to facilitate the authoring of a course by means of a visual tool while maintaining a broad level of expressiveness.

The complexity and sophistication of computer games is growing every day, not only in terms of graphical resources and advanced interaction mechanisms but also with regards to their narratives and their rules. In this paper we propose to tackle the complexity related to the rules and narratives of a game design by describing it through combinations of more simple game designs. This approach not only facilitates the description of game designs that are easy to manage and understand but also enables the reuse of game design components, and also allows the designer to respond to established trends in computer games such as the use of "missions" and "mini-games". The proposed approach has been applied to the design and implementation of an educational game (EG) called "Safety Village" of the minigame genre, which aims to help raise children's awareness of emergencies and domestic risks.

One of the most widely used methods for teaching is the lecture. During the last few decades lecturers and students have taken advantage of the progressive introduction of new technology for supporting these lectures. As this trend is very likely to continue, in this paper we will try to foresee some possible technology enriched future lecture scenarios.

In order to enjoy the benefits that the use of computer games may provide for supporting the area of informal education, it is necessary to rely on design models, methods and tools to help reduce the high costs traditionally associated with the development of these kinds of systems. In this paper we present a model which seeks to facilitate the reuse and adaptation of designs of these types of games. The model has supported the implementation of two different games for training children on emergency situations.

Touchless interaction techniques do not require physical contact while interacting with a system so to allow natural interaction with digital information, made tangible in the physical world through pervasive screen displays. In this project we explore the use of Nintendo Wii Remote controller as a touchless interface for interacting with map based applications in large displays environments. A prototype (Don't Touch Me) was developed that allows users to collaborative place multimodal annotations on a map: pictorials, auditives and haptics.

Design patterns document successful solutions to recurrent problems in a specific software development domain. However, finding the patterns you need can be difficult, often requiring the designer to comprehend a long narrative description to understand the benefits, implications and trade-offs of each pattern and of its relationships with others. In this paper we propose a visual notation supported by a software tool that may help to identify patterns that could satisfy a designer’s goals, as well as conveying the positive and negative relations among patterns, including dependencies and collisions among patterns selected for a specific problem. This work extends the concept of Softgoal Interdependency Graphs (SIG) enhancing them with a number of visual clues and interaction capabilities to help designers realize the contributions and trade-offs of their design ideas and the complexity of the solution space they are building up.

The aim of this work is to support educators in the design process of computer game based learning experiences for teaching children about the risks of emergency. As an educational experience can be tailored to different student needs, the risk characteristics of emergency at hand, and the educational purpose of the experience, the proposed model includes the necessary elements to provide all this information. In this way the teacher can specify the requirements of the educational experience, and based on this information to propose possible configurations of the elements of the game.

E-Learning Systems have evolved moving from self-contained simple static contents, to the design and execution of learning scenarios described by Educational Modelling Languages (EML) and the integration of web services. But also carrying with implications such as dealing with long-lived learning activities and finishing activities without accomplishing their learning objectives. Advanced Transactional Models (ATM) relax some of the basic ACID transaction properties so applications may handle in a reliable way, several types of long-lived activities and compensation activities. An EML execution engine must implement different ATMs in order to provide different levels of transaction support to deal with the diverse types of learning activities.

Educational Modelling Languages such as IMS LD, LAMS and LPCEL can be used to describe a learning process, but they depict different degrees of expressiveness to represent learning flows. This paper present an evaluation of the expressiveness of these languages based over the analysis of different Workflow Control Patterns including Basic Control Flow, Advanced Branching and Synchronization, and Iteration; outlining the learning process design issues.

The communication and the collaboration in a multi-disciplinary team can be diminished due to the different specification tools and languages used by the diverse members of the team. The MODUWEB approach tackles this problem allowing the integration of different design perspectives through model-driven development (MDD) techniques. Such integration is completely transparent to the users of the modeling languages, that is, the designers of the Web-based educational systems, and in this way their productivity is not affected. This paper describes a prototype of a system which implements the MODUWEB approach to combine two domain specific languages dealing with different perspectives of the design of a Web-based educational system: IMS learning design for educational design and Labyrinth for Web design.

In this work we present a system to encode location based information extracted from a media collection (the Flickr tagging system) into a single 2D physical label. This information is clustered by using locations metadata (geotags) and key-words (tags) associated to pictures. Our system helps two types of users: the user authoring the physical label and the final user who retrieves up-to-date information scanning the label with his/her camera phone. Preliminary results for a given seed word (the tag Napoli) on 3000 photographs are presented, together with some ad-hoc weighting factors that help in finding significant pictures (representing places) that can be associated to a specific area.

In this paper, we discuss the use of visual representations of web design patterns to help end-users and casual developers to identify the patterns they can apply in a specific project. The main goal is to promote design knowledge reuse by facilitating the identification of the right patterns, taking into account that these users have little or no knowledge about web design, and certainly not about design patterns, and that each pattern might include some trade-offs users should consider to make more rational decisions.

The development of a learning system based on integrating a number of learning services needs both a technological platform to support the system as well as a methodology that manages the development process. Such technological platform is provided by the Service Oriented Learning Architecture (SOLA) that defines an architecture style guiding several aspects of deploying units of learning that are packaged as services. The purpose of this paper is to review the SOLA concept and present a specific methodology, based on analysing instructional domains, to complement the SOLA approach. The method here proposed addresses the identification and classification of learning services to facilitate the integration of such services.

The didactic material reusability, understood as its capability to be used in different learning situations or in diverse knowledge domains, is one of its most desirable features. It depends, among other factors, on the use of semantic annotations to describe relevant material characteristics, which can improve its localization and retrieval. In spite of the recognized value of semantic annotations, they are usually considered as optional. In this paper we describe the mechanism proposed in the MD2 approach to automatically generate semantic annotations within the didactic material development. Such mechanism tries to relieve users (developers) from the complexity of material’s annotation and intends to obtain materials with some reasonable degree of reusability.

Evaluation is one of the most important activities in the didactic materials creation since it allows developers to check if the features of created material satisfy all the requirements established at begin of its development and if that material can be an effective support to achieve the educational goals of a particular instructional situation. Its results provide relevant information for the material redesign in such cases when those requirements or educational goals are not satisfied. In this paper we describe an approach to evaluate IMS LD-based materials during their development and deployment in an educational process.

Educational Modeling Languages (EML) are currently used to design and specify complex learning process that adapt the demands of a particular learning setting. LPCEL (Learning Process Composition and Execution Language) is a formal language used to specify complex learning scenarios. From a software architectural point-of-view, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) provide an important approach in order to implement dynamically learning environments from diverse, distributed and heterogeneous learning resources and services, these can be hardly synchronized and coordinated through an EML specification. Based upon SOA principles, Grid-Computing offer a powerful environment to use of resources such as processing power, disk storage, applications and data. This work presents a grid-based architectural framework that enable the dynamic and unanticipated composition of distributed learning services.

This work aims to provide the instructors of learning process specified by means of an educational language (EML) with a mechanism to modify the process definition during runtime. The paper presents the results of some experiments carried out as part of the evaluation of the envisaged solution. The core ofthe proposed solution is a model which allows the instructor to describe variations of the original learning process design, as well as to evaluate and monitor the process progress. The model is complemented with a method which organizes the performance of the instructor actions supported by the model, and a mechanism to allow its application on running instances of the process. To state the suitability of the proposed method and the expressivity of the adaptation model, the solution has been applied on three different scenarios. Three real learning processes supported on Moodle platforms have been replicated on Unit of Learning (UoL) versions described by means of IMS Learning Design(IMS LD). The adaptations and monitorizations performed by the instructors in the Moodle versions have been described using the adaptation model elements and applied to UoLs following the proposed method guidelines.

Specifying the access policy of a Web system is a relevant design concern that is often dismissed or postponed until the implementation. ADM-RBAC (Ariadne development method with role-based access control) is a model-driven approach for Web systems that supports the specification of access control policies in an integrated way and at two abstraction levels. At the conceptual level a number of visual models specify the access policy in a way that is similar to the userspsila point of view. At the detailed level, models are oriented towards providing enough details to generate prototypes in an automatic or semiautomatic way. In this paper we describe the visual models of ADM-RBAC and their empirical evaluation.

Instructional software can be defined as any computer program used for instruction. As a means to optimise the development process of instructional software, different authors have defined a range of methods based on Software Engineering. However, the use of a method does not guarantee the validity and quality of the product developed; hence, a series of Software Process Improvement (SPI) approaches aimed to improve and guarantee the development process that have arisen. The purpose of this paper is to review the aforementioned approaches and to apply them to the analysis phase of the instructional software development process. The analysis phase aims to define the conditions and needs of the project in order to solve uncertainties in early stages of the process.

Evaluation is one of the most important activities in the didactic materials development since it allows developers to check if the properties of obtained material satisfy all the requirements established at begin of its development and if that material can be an effective support to achieve the educational goals of any instructional situation. Its results are crucial data for the material redesign in such cases when those requirements or educational goals are not satisfied. Here we describe our vision of evaluation in the MD2 development approach that proposes to assess the didactic materials based on their pedagogical utility and usability.

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an appropriate paradigm for web development since interoperability and flexibility are required to cope with implementation technologies and functionalities that are in permanent evolution. In this paper, we describe and illustrate the MDD process of the ADM (Ariadne Development Method) hypermedia/web engineering method. The two cornerstones of the ADM are the Labyrinth++ meta-meta-model, which formalizes the core constructs used within all the design meta-models, and the meta-meta-model specification as an ontology that provides semantics and reasoning not only for model transformations but also for consistency checking and model validation. These features have been essential in the development of a CASE tool, called AriadneTool that supports the different abstract levels of modeling, model transformations as well as the generation of light prototypes in different web implementation technologies.

The contemporary education has begun to observe constructivist position as important in understanding diversity in education. Instructional design on technology (IDT) presents important challenges to integrate principles, models and techniques inspired by this new perspective emerging in educational technology. The complex learning process (CLP) is a vision that can be suitable to facilitate this aim. In order to face these challenges, it is essential to integrate new technology-supported learning. Our vision is focused on the development of learning process composition and execution languages (LPCEL), which can facilitate the design, composition and execution of CLP. This work presents an overview of LPCEL specification, so that it can be a reference for the development of related technologies

A complex learning process (CLP) is understood as the result of the dynamic and unanticipated integration of diverse pedagogical approaches in a learning process, based on the collaboration between instructors and learners. Educational modeling languages are used to specify and design learning processes that can be adaptable to the demands of a particular pedagogical context. Based upon IMS service-oriented architectural principles, a framework for learning process composition and execution is presented. The objective of that framework is to enable the dynamic and unanticipated composition of distributed learning services. This is guided by a case study of how this framework can be implemented in a complex learning scenario.

Educational models are subject to a constant evolution and permanent technological developments, with new visions and learning models emerging to face them. These usually include diverse didactic strategies into the learning process. Learning management systems currently evolve towards distributed learning object systems with decentralized execution and integration with heterogeneous applications. The notion of a centralized repository of learning objects should change onto distributed communities of learning objects producers and consumers. In this paper, we present a learning Web services framework to support the integration of newer, complex learning processes and the dynamic generation of content-based communities of interest.

Technological innovations can be important factors for change. The Internet is one such and it has modified the way people live and interact. In education, the effect of this change is visible in the way educational materials are designed, developed and distributed, and in the roles played by the teacher/designer, the student and the content provider. Learning objects technology and supporting tools now permits the generation of on-line educational materials. We present a framework for the generation, integration and reuse of learning objects, intended to (a) resolve the limitations of existing tools (b) provide interoperability between learning objects, and (c) provide mechanisms to compose new learning objects from old.

Educational systems have to be assessed to determine whether their user interface, didactic method, instructional materials and interaction mechanisms help users reach their learning and teaching goals. With this purpose, educational developers need to rely on a set of clear, concrete and measurable quality criteria. In this paper, the authors propose an evaluation framework made up of a number of criteria to test the utility and usability of educational hypermedia systems. They also discuss that measuring these criteria entails different forms of imprecision and uncertainty, that call for the user of representation formalisms like fuzzy set theory. The framework presented here is aimed not only at helping educational developers to evaluate their systems, but also to provide them with some guidance to address educational requirements during the design process.

Existing approaches to ontological support in courseware are focused on the annotation of hypermedia nodes or contents, while links are described only by classifying them into a set of predefined types. In this work, we describe the concept of Learning-Link as an independent and reusable learning resource that can be annotated with terms defined in a link ontology. The computational semantics of that ontology, combined with fuzziness to specify graded relations, enables the implementation of extended adaptive behaviors that entail inferences and approximate reasoning.

Despite the existence of software engineering methods for hypermedia development, this process is not as systematic as it could be expected and, in fact, the "hypermedia software crisis" still remains. This situation can be attributed to the scarce dissemination of methods for hypermedia. In this context, we present our experience teaching a software engineering method for hypermedia, called Ariadne, which is used to develop hypermedia applications following a user-centered approach.

Hypermedia applications can be defined as collections of interactive and multimedia documents that are organized as a hypertext net. The development of hypermedia applications poses specific problems, such as the need for modeling sophisticated navigational structures, interactive behaviors, and harmonic presentations involving the synchronization of contents. Moreover, the increasing popularity of Internet based systems has put stress on the lack of mechanisms to formally specify security policies when designing hypermedia applications. Traditional design models and methodologies are not suitable for hypermedia applications and the up-to-now developed hypermedia oriented models do not cover the whole set of design needs. In this context, we present Labyrinth, a hypermedia oriented model providing formal elements to describe the static structure and dynamic behavior of this kind of nonlinear, multisensory, and interactive applications.

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.