Society’s expectations and assistance for children with special needs is rooted in its cultural, societal, and political backdrop. Previous work on the role of culture on assistive or adaptive technology design for children with special needs identified a three-part framework: lifestyle, socio-technical infrastructure, and monetary and informational resources. Through our work in India, we proposed a fourth dimension to this framework: socio-technical aspirations. We defined socio-technical aspirations as the individual- or community-driven ambition and desire to own or use a specific technology for personal benefit or societal acceptance or both. In Finland, we interviewed four parents of children enrolled in a rehabilitation program, with the aim to understand their expectations from and current usage of technology. Findings from Finland reveal a desire for technology for children with special needs to be more engaging than what is currently available. We also identified several attributes that can contribute to socio-technical aspirations in a given context, including but not limited to: the level of inclusiveness supported in the school, which directly affects how technology is viewed with respect to the social acceptance it provides; the socio-technical aspirations of the child and how they are perceived and met by the parents and teachers; and previous technology experience of the various stakeholders involved in raising a child with special needs, which determines their attitude toward technology for not only for themselves but also for the child. In this article, we validate the dimension of socio-technical aspirations to strengthen our case for incorporating stakeholder’s socio-technical aspirations for technology designed or adapted for children with special needs.
Sonification with musical characteristics can engage users, and this dynamic carries value as a mediator between data and human perception, analysis, and interpretation. A user engagement study has been designed to measure engagement levels from conditions within primarily melodic, rhythmic, and chordal contexts. This paper reports findings from the melodic portion of the study, and states the challenges of using musical characteristics in sonifications via the perspective of form and function – a long standing debate in Human-Computer Interaction. These results can guide the design of more complex sonifications of multivariable data suitable for real life use.
Tracking the location of people and their mobile devices creates opportunities for new and exciting ways of interacting with public technology. For instance, users can transfer content from public displays to their mobile device without touching it, because location tracking allows automatic recognition of the target device. However, many uncertainties remain regarding how users feel about interactive displays that track them and their mobile devices, and whether their experiences vary based on the setting. To close this research gap, we conducted a 24-participant user study. Our results suggest that users are largely willing -even excited -to adopt novel location-tracking systems. However, users expect control over when and where they are tracked, and want the system to be transparent about its ownership and data collection. Moreover, the deployment setting plays a much bigger role on people's willingness to use interactive displays when location tracking is involved. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Ubiquitous and mobile computing; • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy.
Government and NGO schools catering to children from low-income urban environments are increasingly introducing technology in the Indian classroom. However, one of the challenges is convincing low-literate parents the potential benefits of technology in education. In this study, we aim to uncover the concerns and expectations of low-income low-literate parents towards educational technology for their children, through semi-structured interviews. This is an extension of our ongoing work in designing sustainable educational technology models for low-literate urban populations.
Voice-based services offer major business opportunities in developing areas such as India and Africa. In these areas mobile phones have become very popular, and their usage is increasing all the time. In this project, we study the deployment of voice-based mobile educational services for developing countries. Our study is based on a Spoken Web technology developed by IBM Research Labs, and our focus is on India's Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). It is being built as a service that runs on the telecom infrastructure similar to World Wide Web that runs as a service on the Internet infrastructure. Spoken Web proposes to build an alternate web for the underprivileged population that is yet untouched by the enormous benefits of Internet and World Wide Web. In this research project RuralVoice we also investigate how Finnish service and technology companies can co-create novel services for this challenging target population in three educational areas i.e. agriculture, healthcare and entrepreneurship education.
Today, university pedagogues in Finland are keen on applying flipped learning techniques to improve education and learning outcomes. In accordance, assessment moves to a more formative and flipped direction as well. Flipped learning implies assessment to be continuous, yet controversially, resources in education are decreasing. The dilemma can be partly solved by increasing self-, peer-, and automatic assessment, and in addition, the exploitation of learning analytics. Tampere University has addressed these pedagogical demands and challenges in computer science courses by developing a learning management system called WETO. This supports flipped learning techniques in a resource-wise way by enhancing assessment with new peer-review options, self reflection, and negotiations. This chapter highlights the proven and functional practices of formative assessment based on an introductory computer science course supported by WETO. It discusses further development needs and opportunities of learning management systems from this viewpoint.
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