Pere Freixa

Promotion of creative activity in children with severe autism through visuals in an interactive multisensory environment

Autism is a developmental disorder which presents disability in communication and socialisation and a lack of imagination. To promote creativity, exploration and enjoyment in low functioning autistic children that have no verbal communication, we propose MEDIATE, an interactive environment that generates real time visual, aural and vibrotactile stimuli. This paper focuses on the design of interaction with visuals within MEDIATE. The design is guided by the objectives of giving children a sense of agency and enhance non repetitive actions. Other guidelines of this design include natural interaction, use of non invasive technology and non representational visuals. This visual interaction (together with sound and vibrotacile) allows the children to enjoy MEDIATE and be creative within this environment.

Wikipedia en la Universidad: cambios en la percepción de valor con la creación de contenidos

Wikipedia es un recurso muy utilizado por estudiantes universitarios, pero no esta necesariamente bien valorado en terminos de fiabilidad, ni tampoco es visto como un entorno en el que hacer aportaciones de contenido. Este articulo presenta un proyecto de docencia e investigacion que consiste en proponer que los estudiantes editen o creen articulos para la Wikipedia, y en comprobar si la experiencia modifica su valoracion de la misma. Se realizo la experiencia en la Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Espana) y la Universidad de Nis (Serbia) con un total de 240 alumnos. Editaron articulos y respondieron dos cuestionarios, uno antes y otro despues de la experiencia. Se compararon las respuestas mediante una serie de pruebas T para muestras emparejadas, a partir de las cuales pudimos comprobar que los datos mostraban un cambio significativo en su percepcion sobre la fiabilidad y la utilidad de la Wikipedia y sobre la probabilidad de encontrar informacion falsa en ella. Tambien cambio su apreciacion de la tarea de editar articulos, que se valoro como interesante y represento un reto. En cambio, su valoracion del prestigio social de la Wikipedia, tanto en el contexto universitario como el general, no vario significativamente. Adicionalmente, las preguntas abiertas y el feedback informal permitieron recoger informaciones muy valiosas respecto a la valoracion del conjunto de la experiencia

Interaction in Digital News Media: Trends, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

The binomial formed by interactivity and the digital news media has enabled us to tackle the study of interactive texts, the digital media and its ecosystem from a range of different perspectives. These different vantage points, moreover, offer a broad and complete overview of the complexity of contemporary communication, in which, often, the limits between emitters and receivers have become blurred, in which texts have acquired considerable dynamism and mutability, and where systems rather than analyzing, collecting, and managing information have become actors in their own right. All this has meant that ways of thinking about the media, in terms of its profitability and its need for legal protection, are in constant transformation and the subject of continuing debate. Interactivity is today an essential concept for understanding a media that is characterized by the constant flow of inputs and outputs from all the agents and actors that participate in it, exchanges that have come to define the media itself: the information that is transmitted, stored, and processed, and the processes that feed each other to offer a system that allows the user to experiment with and participate in the information as well as to form part of it.

Content Access, Storytelling, and Interactive Media

New interactive feature journalism explores the boundaries between storytelling and direct data access. This chapter examines the use of interactive resources in online journalism and describes the evolution undergone by the media in recent years, as interactivity has come to be considered an essential element in the construction of user meaning. This vision of interaction as a primarily storytelling element involves recognizing its rhetorical value and the fundamental role that the reader plays in the completion and elaboration of the journalistic message in sequences of disrupted narrative. These new forms of storytelling are revolutionizing basic concepts of interactive documentary, including the role of stories and the user’s direct access to primary information. Assigning centrality to interaction results in transformations that affect the entire information system. Interactive documentaries and structured journalism offer alternative ways of perceiving the role of information insofar as they allow us to rethink relations between information—what are perceived as data, the different actors associated with it: professionals, reporting communities, the media, and the audience, and, ultimately, the text itself, understood in a very broad sense as multimedia, mutable, modifiable, expandable, and transmedia.

Wikipedia in Higher Education: Changes in Perceived Value through Content Contribution.

Wikipedia is a widely used resource by university students, but it is not necessarily regarded as being reliable and trustworthy by them, nor is it seen as a context in which to make content contributions. This paper presents a teaching and research project that consisted in having students edit or create Wikipedia articles and testing whether or not this experience changed their perceived value of the platform. We conducted our experience at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and University of Niš (Niš, Serbia) with a total number of 240 students. These students edited articles and answered two questionnaires, one before and one after the exercise. We compared the pre and post experience answers to the questionnaires with a series of paired samples t-tests, through which our data showed that students did significantly change their perception of reliability and usefulness, and of likeliness of finding false information on Wikipedia. Their appreciation of the task of writing Wikipedia articles, in terms of it being interesting and challenge also increased. They did not significantly change, however, their judgement on the social value of the platform, neither in the university nor in the general context. In addition, the open questions and informal feedback allowed us to gather valuable insights towards the evaluation of the overall experience. RESUMEN Wikipedia es un recurso muy utilizado por estudiantes universitarios, pero no está necesariamente bien valorado en términos de fiabilidad, ni tampoco es visto como un entorno en el que hacer aportaciones de contenido. Este artículo presenta un proyecto de docencia e investigación que consiste en proponer que los estudiantes editen o creen artículos para la Wikipedia, y en comprobar si la experiencia modifica su valoración de la misma. Se realizó la experiencia en la Universidad Pompeu Fabra (España) y la Universidad de Niš (Serbia) con un total de 240 alumnos. Editaron artículos y respondieron dos cuestionarios, uno antes y otro después de la experiencia. Se compararon las respuestas mediante una serie de pruebas T para muestras emparejadas, a partir de las cuales pudimos comprobar que los datos mostraban un cambio significativo en su percepción sobre la fiabilidad y la utilidad de la Wikipedia y sobre la probabilidad de encontrar información falsa en ella. También cambió su apreciación de la tarea de editar artículos, que se valoró como interesante y representó un reto. En cambio, su valoración del prestigio social de la Wikipedia, tanto en el contexto universitario como el general, no varió significativamente. Adicionalmente, las preguntas abiertas y el feedback informal permitieron recoger informaciones muy valiosas respecto a la valoración del conjunto de la experiencia.