Ornella Mich

Interactive stories and exercises with dynamic feedback for improving reading comprehension skills in deaf children

Deaf children have significant difficulties in comprehending written text. This is mainly due to the hearing loss that prevents them from being exposed to oral language when they were an infant. However, it is also due to the type of educational intervention they are faced with, which accustoms them to decoding single words and isolated sentences, rather than entire texts. This paper presents an evolved version of a literacy web tool for deaf children based on stories and comprehension exercises. Two substantial improvements were made with the respect to the first version of our application. First, the text of the stories is now presented to children in the context of animated web pages. Second, intelligent dynamic feedback is given to the users when resolving the exercises. A preliminary evaluation study with deaf children, as the treatment group, and hearing children, as the control group, assessed the usability and effectiveness of the new system and its graphical interface.

Interactive e-books for children

This one-day workshop is going to bring together top researchers and practitioners working in the area of interactive e-books for children. The goal of the workshop is defining key directions for future research in the design process and implementation of this kind of books. The workshop critically explores opportunities and challenges for making interactive e-books effective for childrens learning and entertainment.

Do animations in enhanced ebooks for children favour the reading comprehension process?: a pilot study

Textual eBooks and enhanced eBooks are becoming an important learning tool. However, very few studies have been performed so far to assess their effectiveness. This paper aims to provide a small contribution to this research area. More specifically, its goal is to study the effects of animated eBooks on the reading comprehension processes in children attending Elementary School. A pilot study was organized with four girls 7-9 years old, who were asked to first read an enhanced story using a tablet PC and then answer ten comprehension questions.

Supporting deaf children's reading skills: the many challenges of text simplification

Deaf children have great difficulties in reading comprehension. In our contribution, we illustrate how we have collected, simplified and presented some stories in order to render them suitable for young Italian deaf readers both from a linguistic and a formal point of view. The aim is to stimulate their pleasure of reading. The experimental data suggest that the approach is effective and that enriching the stories with static and/or animated drawings significantly improves text readability. However, they also clearly point out that textual simplification alone is not enough to meet the needs of the target group and that the story structure itself and its presentation have to be carefully planned.

E-drawings as an evaluation method with deaf children

This paper describes a pilot test on the use of a drawing software program as an evaluation method for experiments with deaf children. As deaf children are visual learners, evaluation methods based on drawings seem to be a good alternative to traditional ones. We tested the effectiveness of such a method with a group of deaf children, all raised orally apparently without any knowledge of sign language, and a few hearing children, from eight to fourteen years old. As a testbed, we evaluated the readability of a set of stories, part of a literacy software tool for deaf children. All participants were relaxed and collaborative during the test. The results are promising.

Micro-political practices in higher education: a challenge to excellence as a rationalising myth?

ABSTRACT Excellence has become a ‘hoorah’ word which is widely used in higher education institutions to legitimate practices related to the recruitment/progression of staff. It can be seen as reflecting an institutionalised belief that such evaluative processes are unaffected by the social characteristics of those who work in them or their relationships with each other. Such views have been challenged by gender theorists and by those researching informal power in state structures. The purpose of this article is to raise the possibility that excellence is an ‘idealised cultural construct’ and a ‘rationalising myth’. Drawing on data from qualitative interviews with 67 men and women, who were candidates or evaluators in recruitment/progression processes in five higher educational institutions (in Ireland, Turkey, Bulgaria, Germany and Italy), it conceptualises and illustrates masculinist, relational and ‘local fit’ micro-political practices that are seen to affect such recruitment/progression. Variation exists by gender and by contextual positioning in the process (i.e. as evaluator/candidate). These practices illustrate the perceived importance of the enactment of informal power. The article suggests that the construct of excellence is used to obscure these practices and to maintain organisational legitimacy in the context of multiple stakeholders with conflicting expectations.

Mobile multimodal interaction for older and younger users: exploring differences and similarities

Since they can integrate a wide range of interactive modalities, multimodal interfaces are considered to improve accessibility for a variety of users, including older adults. However, only few works have actually explored how older adults approach multimodal interaction outside specific contexts and have done so mainly in comparison to much younger users. This study explores how older (65+ years old), middle-aged (55-65 years old) and younger adults (25-35 years old) use mobile multimodal interaction in an everyday activity (i.e. taking photos with a tablet) by using midair gestures and voice commands, and investigates the differences and similarities between the considered age groups. Preliminary findings from a video-analysis show that all groups easily combine the proposed modalities when interacting with a tablet device. Furthermore, compared to younger adults, older and middle-aged adults show similarities in the way they perform gesture and voice commands.

Towards the design of technology for measuring and capturing children's attention on e-learning tasks

Being able to be attentive as necessary on an e-learning task is not always easy for a young student, especially for children affected by Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. To support this category of students, we aim to design a software module able to: (a) automatically detect their level of attention when working on a learning task and, (b) propose suitable stimuli to re-capture their attention on it. This paper describes the first two steps towards this application: (1) the building of an attention model, meant as the base of the software module for automatically measuring the attention level, and (2) the study of a face tracker to measure the attention level in real time. Finally, it proposes some possible stimuli which can be used to re-capture the lost attention.

Design of Multimodal Interaction with Mobile Devices - Challenges for Visually Impaired and Elderly Users

This paper presents two early studies aimed at investigating issues concerning the design of multimodal interaction based on voice commands and mid-air gestures with mobile technology specifically designed for visually impaired and elderly users. These studies have been carried out on a new device allowing enhanced speech recognition (interpreting lip movements) and mid-air gesture interaction on Android devices (smartphone and tablet PC). The initial findings and challenges raised by these novel interaction modalities are discussed. These mainly centre on issues of feedback and feedforward, the avoidance of false positives and point of reference or orientation issues regarding the device and the mid-air gestures.

Designing, Implementing and Evaluating Mid-Air Gestures and Speech-Based Interaction

The goal of this half-day workshop is to investigate effective ways to leverage the recent advances in the automatic recognition of mid-air gestures and speech commands, with a special focus on (but not limited to) interaction with mobile technology and inclusive design for older adults and people with special needs. In particular, the workshop aims to investigate these issues from a multidisciplinary prospective by bringing together experts on interaction design, user experience, usability, accessibility, innovative hardware and software solutions that are related to technology based on mid-air gestures, speech and multi-modal interaction.