Today, virtual reality and immersive environments are lines of research which can be applied to numerous scientific and educational domains. Immersive digital media needs new approaches regarding its interactive and immersive features, which means the design of new narratives and relationships with users. Additionally, ICT (information and communication theory) evolves through more immersive and interactive scenarios, it being necessary to design and conceive new forms of representing information and improving users' interaction with immersive environments. Virtual reality and technologies associated with the virtuality continuum, such as immersive and digital environments, are emerging media. As a medium, this approach may help to build and represent ideas and concepts, as well as developing new languages. This review analyses the cutting-edge expressive, interactive and representative potential of immersive digital technologies. It also considers future possibilities regarding the evolution of these immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, in coming years, in order to apply them to diverse scientific, artistic or informational and educational domains. We conclude that virtual reality is an ensemble of technological innovations, but also a concept, and propose models to link it with the latest in other domains such as UX (user experience), interaction design. This concept can help researchers and developers to design new experiences and conceive new expressive models that can be applied to a wide range of scientific lines of research and educational dynamics.
Citizen science and citizen energy communities are pluralistic terms that refer to a constellation of methods, projects, and outreach activities; however, citizen science and citizen energy communities are rarely, if ever, explicitly aligned. Our searches for “citizen science” and “energy” produced limited results and “citizen science” and “energy communities” produced zero. Therefore, to outline a future direction of citizen science, its potential alliances with energy communities, and their collaborative contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals, we performed a systematic literature review and analysis of “public participation” and “energy communities” using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRIMSA) guidelines. The results show four pathways through which current public participation in energy communities might be more explicitly aligned with citizen science projects: benefits and values, energy practices, intermediaries, and energy citizenship. Each of these pathways could engage citizen scientists in qualitative and quantitative research and increase scientific literacy about energy systems. Our call for citizen science to supplement current forms of participation builds from the “ecologies of participation” framework, itself an extension of co-productionist theories of science and technology studies. We conclude with a discussion of affordances and barriers to the alliances between citizen science and energy communities and their potential contributions to SDGs 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, 13: Climate Action, and 17: Partnerships for the Goals.
The current process of social transformation is driven by the growth of the culture of transparency and accountability, the socio-technological development of the web and the opening of public data. This situation forces the media to rethink their models of social intermediation, converting the growing open data access and user participation into new instruments that facilitate citizen empowerment. Open data can only generate citizen empowerment, facilitate decision-making and democratic action if it can provide valueadded information to the citizens. Therefore, the aim of the research is to analyse the competencies necessary to develop information products created with open data. The study used a qualitative methodology based on two instruments: a survey of data journalism experts (university professors of journalism, journalism professional data, and experts in transparency), and an analysis of selected cases of information products created with open data. The results allow the identification of a series of conceptual, procedural and attitudinal skills needed to perform the tasks of collection, processing, analysis and presentation of data, which are necessary for the development of this type of information product, and which should be integrated into the training of future journalists. Los actuales procesos de transformación social estimulados por el crecimiento de la cultura de transparencia y rendición de cuentas, el desarrollo socio-tecnológico de la web y la apertura de datos públicos, obliga a los medios de comunicación en el entorno digital a reorientar sus modelos de intermediación social, convirtiendo el creciente y complejo acceso a datos abiertos y los flujos de participación en nuevos instrumentos que faciliten el empoderamiento ciudadano. La investigación evalúa cuáles son las competencias profesionales necesarias para el desarrollo de productos informativos multimedia interactivos basados en datos abiertos, considerando que la apertura de datos solo generará empoderamiento ciudadano, facilitará la toma de decisiones y la acción democrática, si estos pueden proporcionar información de valor añadido para la ciudadanía. Para ello, se sigue una metodología cualitativa basada en dos instrumentos: una encuesta a expertos en periodismo de datos, relacionados con la formación superior en Periodismo, la legislación en materia de acceso a la información y los medios de comunicación, y el análisis de una muestra de productos informativos multimedia basados en datos abiertos. Los resultados permiten identificar una serie de competencias conceptuales, procedimentales y actitudinales necesarias para llevar a cabo las tareas de acopio, tratamiento, análisis y presentación de los datos, que son necesarias para el desarrollo de este tipo de productos informativos, y que deberían integrarse en la formación de los futuros comunicadores.
María-Carmen Gertrudis-Casado holds a PhD in communication sciences from the KeywordsOpen data; Public institutions; Transparency; Empowerment; Digital citizenship. ResumenEn el contexto de la puesta en marcha del Portal de la transparencia en España, se evalúan las prácticas de consumo de datos abiertos publicados por las instituciones públicas, que realizan los ciudadanos españoles. A través de una encuesta online, representativa del universo de estudio, y mediante el análisis de estadísticos descriptivos, tablas de contingencia y medidas de asociación para variables nominales, se contrasta el grado de conocimiento sobre la disponibilidad de datos abiertos que ofrecen los organismos públicos, se describe el uso que hacen de éstos, y se identifican las razones que les motivan a utilizarlos. Las principales conclusiones revelan una baja penetración de la cultura de datos abiertos, y cierta desconfianza de la ciudadanía sobre las acciones que realizan las instituciones públicas para favorecer el acceso, uso y reutilización de los datos abiertos, lo que exige un cambio de orientación en las políticas de comunicación y dinamización. Palabras claveDatos abiertos; Organismos públicos; Transparencia; Empoderamiento; Ciudadanía Digital.Gértrudix, Manuel; Gertrudis-Casado, María-Carmen; Álvarez-García, Sergio (2016). "Consumption of public institutions' open data by Spanish citizens". El profesional de la información, v. 25, n. 4, pp. 535-544.
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