David Díez

Model-Driven Instructional Engineering to Generate Adaptable Learning Materials

The application of software engineering approaches to generate learning material adapted to a specific instructional purpose presents some issues: the use of different models, different abstraction levels, different contexts and development concerns. These can be overcome by a model-driven development approach that provides different levels of automation for instructional engineering.

Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age: Empowering End Users to Improve Their Quality of Life

The International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - Empowering End Users to Improve their Quality of Life (CoPDA) focuses on how ICT can have an impact on “quality of life”, promoting new ways of design that allow us to face these challenges.. The workshop brings together contributions from researchers from a diverse range of interdisciplinary fields. The aim is to establish a community of researchers and practitioners and facilitate the production of a coherent body of work related to this area.

Generative Adaptation and Reuse of Competence Development Programmes.

Instructional engineering provides methods to conduct the design and adaptation of competence development programmes by the combination of diverse learning components (i.e. units of learning, learning activities, learning resources and learning services). It occurs through an established process workflow in which models with diverse levels of abstraction are used to depict such learning components. This paper presents a model-driven generative method used to adapt and reuse a set of learning components for the delivery of a competence development programme concerned with a given learning objective and which serves for a specific instructional context. Editors: Daniel Burgos.

Dual instructional support materials for introductory object-oriented programming: Classes vs. objects

Visualizations are widely used in programming courses but the integration of these software tools into classrooms is not straightforward since there is a lack of information about the real benefits for learning and how to combine them with traditional lectures. We describe in this paper an experiment of using dual instructional support materials (textual and visual programs) in the lab classes in a Java-based CS1 course. The approach consists of two phases: students work the class concept in a traditional programming environment and the object concept in a visual environment as Greenfoot. The experiment shows positive results in terms of concepts understanding in students with no prior programming experience. Therefore we also suggest this as a possible way for integrating visualizations to the course.

Standardizing the narrative of use cases: A controlled vocabulary of web user tasks

Abstract Context For user interfaces design, the use of appropriate terminology in writing use case narratives may determine the effectiveness of the design process, facilitating communication within multidisciplinary web development teams and leading to agreed designs. Objective This paper proposes a user task vocabulary for web user interface design. This vocabulary compiles terms related to the use of web applications, regardless of the application domain, as a way of standardizing the terminology used in the elaboration of use case narrative. The use of the vocabulary would help to reduce misunderstandings within multidisciplinary web development teams. Method The construction of the vocabulary is based on the combination of both committee and empirical approaches. Committee approaches rely on experts in designing web applications, while empirical ones are focused on analyzing content objects, such as interaction design patterns and use case narratives. Results The final version of the monolingual controlled vocabulary of web user tasks compiles a total of 40 tasks; each of them has a key term and a definition of the interaction carried out by users. Additionally, 41 semantic relationships were collected and represented as synonyms. The vocabulary has been assessed through an expert evaluation, proving its correctness and completeness, and an usability evaluation checking the efficacy of the vocabulary. Conclusion The language employed in use case narratives can determine the value of use cases for designing user interfaces. The usage of a controlled vocabulary may allow designers to elaborate unambiguous use case narratives as a way of creating consistent task models for designing web user interfaces.

Sharing your view: A distributed user interface approach for reviewing emergency plans

Emergency planning is an ongoing activity in which a multidisciplinary group of experts intermittently collaborate to define the most appropriate response to risks. One of the most important tasks of emergency planning is the review of plans as a way of maintaining, refining, and improving them. This review of plans is based on exchanging knowledge and experiences in order to take into account different perspectives and generate alternative solutions. An exploratory case study carried out within municipal organizations has disclosed how the application of rigid plan reviewing practices hinders team creativity and, consequently, effective decision-making. This paper presents a computer-based collaborative environment aimed at supporting unstructured team discussion during the post-hoc review of emergency plan. This collaborative environment allows emergency planning team members to share their view in a free manner by interacting with user interface components distributed across several input and output dimensions. The usage of the environment has proved how the application of new interactive technologies can create more dynamic work settings, fostering team creativity.

Studying social technologies and communities of volunteers in emergency management

Communities of volunteers are fundamental agents in the emergency management process. In spite of the unquestionable value that social technologies could bring to such communities of volunteers it is not clear whether they are exploiting all their potential and why. This work presents a qualitative study with volunteers from different emergency communities with the purpose of establishing design challenges to better leverage social technologies that can augment the capabilities of such communities. The results of the study suggest the need to address specific design challenges related to reliability, integrity, and efficient analysis of information. In addition, the integration of multiple interaction mechanisms and shared calendars as well as the design of effective and adaptive messages for crisis communications are also considered important aspects by emergency volunteers.

Envisioning grid vulnerabilities: multi-dimensional visualization for electrical grid planning

Electrical grid planning aims at optimizing the grid through the control of the performance and placement of electrical assets in order to minimize failures or vulnerabilities. With this purpose, grid planners carry out an initial stage of data exploration using a large volume of incident and equipment data collected over extensive time periods. In current practice these tasks are performed manually, which makes it very difficult to recognize patterns and gain insights into the data. In this paper, we propose a parallel multivariate visualization technique as a suitable approach for improving the existing practice. Based on the usage of an interactive visualization tool called BarExam, we demonstrate the feasibility of this visualization technique for displaying the dataset and present example insights that this visualization technique can provide to grid planners.

Instructional Software Analysis: Lessons from Software Development Process Improvement

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.

Bridging the communication gap: a user task vocabulary for multidisciplinary web development team

The design of Web-based systems is specially characterized by the multidisciplinary nature of Web Development Teams (WDTs). Due to this multidisciplinary, WDT members use different terminology that can lead to misunderstanding along the development process and, consequently, affect the resulting design. This problem has been identified during the physical design of websites, characterized by the sharing of ideas and the need of reaching a common understanding of the problem. With the purpose of avoiding misunderstanding among WDT members during this phase, it is proposed a controlled vocabulary of web user task. The definition of the vocabulary is based on the analysis of interaction design patterns. The paper describes the definition process followed for the construction of the user task vocabulary as well as the vocabulary itself. The final version of the controlled vocabulary compiles a total of thirty-four web user tasks and forty-one semantic relationships represented as synonyms. The vocabulary has been assessed through a heuristic evaluation, proving its correctness and completeness.