Television watching is a social experience. People watch the same TV programs and they are talking about shows and movies, discussing, analyzing and recommending. With the rise of the SmartTV platforms the domain of Augmented Entertainment is changing. There are new ways to watch and discuss about television shows, to integrate the web experience with the TV one. There is an opportunity to involve the user and make it an active entity during or after the show. A second-screen platform focused on education is an innovative concept. The challenge is to define a coherent environment involving classroom and residential setups, SmartTV and mobile devices, web applications and educational content management systems. The human knowledge sustains the complexity of the society. A man's knowledge development occurs through social interaction, from an early age. It has multiple dimensions, argumentation being an essential component. By argumentation, the knowledge is consolidated and transferred between people. The common debates involve relevant assumptions and conclusions for a problem that needs to be analyzed. Argumentation is essential for the human condition. Each and every day we are confronted with conflicting information and we are forced to deal with the resulting inconsistencies. Often, we weigh and select information according to our personal preferences. For these we have a list of pros and cons for each option and argument. And when we are not sure about the information, we can try to look better for information or advice in order to be able to make a decision. EduSOFA is a second-screen educational platform. It provides a debate like system for encouraging more valuable discussions. Using the platform, the viewer is involved in critical thinking activities, building communities of learning around concepts and educational information. The debate engine is implemented as a multi-agent system similar to a debate tree. The software implementation uses the actors paradigm and it is based on AKKA distributed framework. The debate engine computes automatically, from the debate tree structure, two measures: Degree of Interest and Degree of Confidence.
The development of a second-screen platform focused on education is an innovative concept. The innovation is to provide a consistent educational environment involving the SmartTV platform, mobile devices, web applications and a portal for educational content management systems. A preliminary analyse indicates that the platform will have a major positive effect on online education market. The platform is expected to be used on a daily basis in both the residential and financial institutions and private companies to train employees. The platform can deliver specific educational content for all ages and social categories. It will be used by both consumers and producers of educational content and media trusts. Depending on the type of content, the platform can address various economical and socio-political sectors. This paper presents an interchange format for specifying the multimedia content, format that extends the standard EPUBv3. The EPUBv3 vocabulary has been extended with special tags for describing, cataloging and relating the multimedia content with the television show. By extending the EPUBv3 vocabulary, the educational content could potentialy be visualized on a plethora of devices, from ebook readers to tablets and SmartTVs. During the RO-Twirl European Project, a special viewer was developed for Samsung SmartTVs. Also, a connector has been implemented for the WebLab SOA Platform, exposing the multimedia content to data-mining engines. The potential for an open interchange format for multimedia educational content is great. It could be used in a stand-alone scenario, embeded in SCORM archive or connected with TinCan servers. The proposed format is very versatile. The content could be created manually, using an authoring tool or it could be created automatically with content extracted from different media sources and web services. During the European Ro-TWIRL project, an entire ecosystem of tools has been developed for creating and managing the content in this specific format. Acknowledgements This work is part of the ITEA2 European Project TWIRL - Twinning virtual World Information with Real world data sources
Children and elderly represent segments for which education is extremely important. It is a known fact that they are major consumers of information, especially from television. New technologies like NetTV will facilitate the distribution of multimedia educational content. In the context of the European ITEA2 Guarantee project, we consider it as an opportunity to correlate the educational content with the information received from sensors. The purpose of the educational animation is to educate the behavior. The system will offer multimedia educational content on specific behaviors: behave properly, socialize, rest frequently, check health, verify the merchandises expiration dates, get medication on time, be organized, do not forget to turn off appliances, etc. The content is also a form of communication between the children or elder and family or friends. Through animations, the family could educate and adjust behavior, show love and respect, could encourage communicating using new media channels, or could remember family moments, etc. The educational content has an emotional target. We want to capture the attention and we want the animation to be effective. In order to educate the rest frequently behavior, the system will generate several animations each with a different emotional target. The system will deliver the animations to NetTV or other devices on a regular basis. If the feedback from the sensors is positive, the system will deliver educational animations with a moderate emotional target. If the feedback is negative, such as the elder is not resting enough, the animations will have a higher emotional target. The paper will present an overview of the platform for delivering multimedia educational content in home environment, its role inside Guarantee architecture and how it could be integrated in future Ambient Intelligence solutions.
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