Răzvan Rughiniş

Digital Badges: Signposts and Claims of Achievement

We discuss digital badges in education, focusing on two functions of badge architectures: mapping a learning system and offering a vocabulary to present one’s achievements. We have designed, implemented and evaluated two badge architectures; our research findings support the conclusion that students see these medals less as extrinsic motivations than as signposts that point out relevant learning targets. Also, because trainers and students define badges mainly as fun, locally relevant prizes, there is little concern for how they can be used to communicate merits outside the learning community. Badge architectures can be designed to support local or public reputations; if public visibility is desired, the system should assist holders’ work of claiming merit.

‘In My Shoes’ Interaction Sandbox for a Quest of Accessible Design: Teaching Sighted Students Accessible Design for Blind People

This paper examines current practices in motivating students to design accessible technologies, and proposes an additional method to promote a long-term, steadfast commitment to accessibility. We examine recent reports of teaching accessibility for blind users to sighted students, and we find three types of motivational devices: 1) a ‘web of arguments’ as to morality, legality, and usefulness, 2) empathy, and 3) framing accessibility through mainstreaming. We observe that the challenge of interactional malaise between sighted and blind people is often neglected, and we propose an ‘Interaction Sandbox’ to overcome it. We also put forward an additional way of framing accessible design, in order to position it as a work of autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the ‘Quest’ metaphor. Accessible design is thus introduced as the pursuit of a daring goal against widespread adversity, through mastery, in the company of powerful characters. The Quest is set in motion by bringing students to appreciate the technical wizardry of accessible design, its aesthetics, and the heroism of blind people as skilled navigators of a dangerous world.

Reading with a Touch of Gameplay: Gamified E-Books’ Convergence with Classical Literary Worlds

Gamified e-books extend invitations for young and adult readers to revisit classical literary worlds. We examine ten e-books to discover distinctive rhetorical resources used to enhance the reading experience and achieve convergence with the original literary world. We distinguish between attempts to focus attention on the material world, to create empathy with characters through perception, choice and emotions and, last but not least, to shape the reader’s journey through the medium of text. Our proposed inventory may guide designers in creating gamified e-books that bring literary worlds and characters to life even more vividly.

A touching app voice thinking about ethics of persuasive technology through an analysis of mobile smoking-cessation apps

We study smoking-cessation apps in order to formulate a framework for ethical evaluation, analyzing apps as ‘medium’, ‘market’, and ‘genre’. We center on the value of user autonomy through truthfulness and self-understanding. Smoking-cessation apps usually communicate in an anonymous ‘app voice’, with little presence of professional or other identified voices. Because of the fast-and-frugal communication, truthfulness is problematic. Messages in the ‘quantification’ modules may be read as deceitfully accurate. The app voice frames smoking as a useless, damaging habit indicative of weakness of will, in a ‘cold-turkey’ frame of individual mind-over-body heroism. Thus apps contribute to a stigmatization of smokers and culpabilization of relapses. The potential to support user autonomy through diverse meaningful voices and personalized communication remains yet unused.

Digital Rhetoric in Collaborative Knowledge-Making

We examine the ways in which answers formulated in the Q&A community Quora are aggregated in a collaborative, computer-mediated body of knowledge. Readers’ experiences are shaped by the answer ranking algorithm, a central rhetorical device on Quora. Answer visibility on page is strongly dependent on the number of upvotes, but also on recency and author popularity. Upvotes depend to some extent on wordcount, followers, and use of visual representations, but not on answer’s age. This indicates that readers engage with Quora as a body of stratified information, rather than pursuing unlimited diversity of perspectives: engagement seems to be limited to the top answers, which represent, for practical purposes, Quora’s persuasive statements.

Refreshing Quantification and other Ploys to Give Up the Habit

In this paper we analyze 26 smoking cessation applications on Android OS focusing on how they address their implied users. We identify ‘refreshing quantification’ as a main method, which endorses a portrait of the users as myopic in risk perception, but heroic in their individual pursuit to reach the non-smoker identity. App-created relationships and identities give rise to a temporal order based on contemplating the past and anticipating the future. Users are guided towards an autonomy-centered identity project, which renders them accountable for success or failure in smoking cessation. Users’ experience of smoking cessation is co-constructed in their interaction with the app-coach and with peers. Apps and peers offer diagnoses, advice, labels that populate the world in which the would-be ex-smokers pursue their project.