Gavin McArdle

Virtual reality for collaborative e-learning

In the past, the term e-learning referred to any method of learning that used electronic delivery methods. With the advent of the Internet however, e-learning has evolved and the term is now most commonly used to refer to online courses. A multitude of systems are now available to manage and deliver learning content online. While these have proved popular, they are often single-user learning environments which provide little in the way of interaction or stimulation for the student. As the concept of lifelong learning now becomes a reality and thus more and more people are partaking in online courses, researchers are constantly exploring innovative techniques to motivate online students and enhance the e-learning experience. This article presents our research in this area and the resulting development of CLEV-R, a Collaborative Learning Environment with Virtual Reality. This web-based system uses Virtual Reality (VR) and multimedia and provides communication tools to support collaboration among students. In this article, we describe the features of CLEV-R, its adaptation for mobile devices and present the findings from an initial evaluation.

Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards

Since the mid-1990s a plethora of indicator projects have been developed and adopted by cities seeking to measure and monitor various aspects of urban systems. These have been accompanied by city benchmarking endeavours that seek to compare intra- and inter-urban performance. More recently, the data underpinning such projects have started to become more open to citizens, more real-time in nature generated through sensors and locative/social media, and displayed via interactive visualisations and dashboards that can be accessed via the internet. In this paper, we examine such initiatives arguing that they advance a narrowly conceived but powerful realist epistemology – the city as visualised facts – that is reshaping how managers and citizens come to know and govern cities. We set out how and to what ends indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives are being employed by cities. We argue that whilst these initiatives often seek to make urban processes and performance more transparent and to improve decision making, they are also underpinned by a naive instrumental rationality, are open to manipulation by vested interests, and suffer from often unacknowledged methodological and technical issues. Drawing on our own experience of working on indicator and dashboard projects, we argue for a conceptual re-imaging of such projects as data assemblages – complex, politically-infused, socio-technical systems that, rather than reflecting cities, actively frame and produce them.

What makes Big Data, Big Data? Exploring the ontological characteristics of 26 datasets

Big Data has been variously defined in the literature. In the main, definitions suggest that Big Data possess a suite of key traits: volume, velocity and variety (the 3Vs), but also exhaustivity, resolution, indexicality, relationality, extensionality and scalability. However, these definitions lack ontological clarity, with the term acting as an amorphous, catch-all label for a wide selection of data. In this paper, we consider the question ‘what makes Big Data, Big Data?’, applying Kitchin’s taxonomy of seven Big Data traits to 26 datasets drawn from seven domains, each of which is considered in the literature to constitute Big Data. The results demonstrate that only a handful of datasets possess all seven traits, and some do not possess either volume and/or variety. Instead, there are multiple forms of Big Data. Our analysis reveals that the key definitional boundary markers are the traits of velocity and exhaustivity. We contend that Big Data as an analytical category needs to be unpacked, with the genus of Big Data further delineated and its various species identified. It is only through such ontological work that we will gain conceptual clarity about what constitutes Big Data, formulate how best to make sense of it, and identify how it might be best used to make sense of the world.

RecoMap: an interactive and adaptive map-based recommender

With the growing availability of geo-referenced information on the Web, the problem of spatial information overload has attracted interest both in the commercial and academic world. In order to tackle this issue, personalisation techniques can be used to tailor spatial contents based upon user interests. RecoMap, the system described in this paper, deducts user interests by monitoring user interaction and context to provide personalised spatial recommendations. After an overview of existing recommendation systems within the geospatial domain, the novel approach adopted by RecoMap to produce such recommendations is described. A case study related to a university campus setting is used to outline an application of this technique. Details of the implementation and initial testing of this prototype are provided.

Personalization in adaptive and interactive GIS

With continuous increase of available online spatial data, requirements for the adaptation of spatial content to users context becomes increasingly important. Location-based services (LBS) deliver to the user information specific to a given location preferably using mobile devices. Personalizing the information provided to the user to take into account her/his information preferences and current location, the problem of inundating the user with irrelevant information is avoided. The research presented in this paper introduces an approach which implicitly monitors the users activity and generates a user profile reflecting her/his information preferences based on the interactions of the user with the system, and her/his physical location and movements. The system recognizes the user profile and adapts accordingly both to provide suitable information, and to prioritize the functionality appropriate to the users current context.

Classifying pedestrian movement behaviour from GPS trajectories using visualization and clustering

The quantity and quality of spatial data are increasing rapidly. This is particularly evident in the case of movement data. Devices capable of accurately recording the position of moving entities have become ubiquitous and created an abundance of movement data. Valuable knowledge concerning processes occurring in the physical world can be extracted from these large movement data sets. Geovisual analytics offers powerful techniques to achieve this. This article describes a new geovisual analytics tool specifically designed for movement data. The tool features the classic space-time cube augmented with a novel clustering approach to identify common behaviour. These techniques were used to analyse pedestrian movement in a city environment which revealed the effectiveness of the tool for identifying spatiotemporal patterns.

A comparison of open source geospatial technologies for web mapping

The past decade has witnessed a steady growth of open source software usage in industry and academia, leading to a complex ecosystem of projects. Web and subsequently geographical information systems have become prominent technologies, widely adopted in diverse domains. Within this context, we developed an open source web platform for interoperable GIServices. In order to implement this architecture, 14 projects were selected and analysed, including the client-side libraries and the server-side components. Although other surveys have been conducted in this area, little feedback has been formally obtained from the users and developers concerning their opinion of these tools. A questionnaire was designed to obtain responses from the relevant online communities about a given set of characteristics. This article describes the technologies and reports the results of the survey, providing first-hand information about open source web and geospatial tools.

Assessing the Application of Three-Dimensional Collaborative Technologies within an E-Learning Environment.

Today, the Internet plays a major role in distributing learning material within third level education. Multiple online facilities provide access to educational resources. While early systems relied on webpages, which acted as repositories for learning material, nowadays sophisticated online applications manage and deliver learning resources. Courses that use solely traditional e-learning methods have high attrition rates, which are often attributed to boredom and lack of interaction with others. Indeed static text-based interfaces, where communication with others is often asynchronous, fail to stimulate students. In this article, we present a system which uses stimulating three-dimensional environments to present learning material to students, combined with multi-user and real-time technologies to permit interaction and collaboration between them. The article focuses on presenting results from a user study which indicate that these technologies can be used effectively to resolve several of the issues with existing e-learning systems. The results show that students enjoy interacting in the environment and appreciate the benefits the paradigm brings to e-learning.

A Web-Based Multimedia Virtual Reality Environment for E-Learning

The past decade has seen major advances in the availability of broadband computer access. With this everincreasing connection speed and improved Internet performance more and more web-based applications are becoming available. More complex graphics and multi-media can now be transmitted over the Internet relatively quickly in real-time and with little delay. One area where web-based applications have proved very successful in the past, is within the e-learning paradigm. Traditionally, online learning applications have used a text-based asynchronous format to deliver learning material to end-users. While this has proved successful, it is recognised that the social and collaborative experience plays an important role in education. This paper describes CLEVR, a Collaborative Learning Environment with Virtual Reality. CLEV-R is a web-based application, that takes advantage of an increased connection speed to deliver a real-time Virtual Reality (VR) environment where learning material is augmented through the use of multi-media. The environment mimics the real world where users, represented by avatars, take on various roles in the VR world.

Urban indicators and dashboards: epistemology, contradictions and power/knowledge

The three commentaries to our paper provide some interesting complementarities to our arguments and we would like to thank the authors for taking the time to read and comment on our work. Although coming from quite different perspectives, Mike Batty as an urban modeller and planner and Matt Wilson as a critical geographical information system (GIS) theorist, largely support our concerns around urban indicator and dashboard projects: that they have certain technical and epistemological shortcomings and are often used to support particular interests. Whilst Batty cautions as to how indicators and dashboard might be used, reframed technically and supplemented by more sophisticated modelling, Wilson is more concerned with how such projects are framed socially and economically as tools of capital accumulation. Neither provide analysis with which we particularly disagree. In contrast, Meg Holden and Sara Moreno Pires, while they recognize many of the issues we discuss, provide a critique of our analysis and a defence of indicator and dashboards as presently conceived and practised. Their commentary demonstrates to us how those who have vested a lot of time and effort into indicator and dashboard projects might misread and react to our argument, defending such projects without fully grasping our critique and the alternative epistemology we forwarded, or our own position within the indicator and dashboard landscape. The rest of this response, therefore, concentrates on their commentary.