There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

Online video lectures have been considered an instructional media for various pedagogic approaches, such as the flipped classroom and open online courses In comparison to other instructional media, online video affords the opportunity for recording student clickstream patterns within a video lecture Video analytics within lecture videos may provide insights into student learning performance and inform the improvement of video-assisted teaching tactics Nevertheless, video analytics are not accessible to learning stakeholders, such as researchers and educators, mainly because online video platforms do not broadly share the interactions of the users with their systems For this purpose, we have designed an open-access video analytics system for use in a video-assisted course In this paper, we present a longitudinal study, which provides valuable insights through the lens of the collected video analytics In particular, we found that there is a relationship between video navigation (repeated views) and the level of cognition/thinking required for a specific video segment Our results indicated that learning performance progress was slightly improved and stabilized after the third week of the video-assisted course We also found that attitudes regarding easiness, usability, usefulness, and acceptance of this type of course remained at the same levels throughout the course Finally, we triangulate analytics from diverse sources, discuss them, and provide the lessons learned for further development and refinement of video-assisted courses and practices

/pdf/making-sense-of-video-analytics-lessons-learned-from-49o2s34r38.pdf

Making Sense of Video Analytics: Lessons Learned from Clickstream Interactions, Attitudes, and Learning Outcome in a Video-Assisted Course.

Previous research on the social impact of communication technologies has followed two distinct directions and has considered independently either the interpersonal communication or the mass communication. In this context, the human–computer interaction aspects of integrated media and social communication are examined. The design of “Social TV” systems that support interpersonal communication, which is motivated by mass media consumption and which takes place within colocated groups or over distance, is explored. In terms of the temporal dimension, Social TV might be synchronous, which happens in real time, or asynchronous, which happens with a time difference. This article provides an overview of research findings and outlines evaluation methods and user requirements for usability and sociability in interactive TV.

Introduction to Social TV: Enhancing the Shared Experience with Interactive TV

This article investigates the uses and gratifications of the popular social networking site Facebook. In the exploratory stage, 70 users generated phrases to describe the manner they used Facebook. Interestingly, some users not only described the uses, but also mentioned how they perceive these uses. These phrases were coded into 14 items and clustered into four factors. The principal component analysis that was conducted in the third stage of the study, which was addressed to 222 Facebook users, verified the validity of the four factors: Social Connection, Social Network Surfing, Wasting Time and Using Applications. Previous user studies on Facebook have examined the immediate social effects of this popular social networking site, but they have not regarded emerging uses of the platform, such as gaming and applications, which do have a social component as a feature and not as a core principle. The ‘Wasting Time’ factor and the growth of ‘Using Applications’ factor indicate that Facebook has already becom...

/pdf/using-facebook-out-of-habit-1spa17xbaj.pdf

Using Facebook out of habit

At first glance, the notion of social interactive television seems to be a tautology. Television watching has always been a social activity. People watch television together in their living rooms, and outside their homes they talk about last night's football match; and even call each other to recommend an interesting program. Unfortunately, until recently, research on social interactive television has been scarce. One limiting factor for the development of innovative services for the home is the interactive technology behind user interaction, which was limited to the remote control. Fortunately, a number of studies concentrate on extending interactive methods, for example by using contextual information. This article reviews the state of the art in these two directions: the social aspects of television and user interaction. We conclude with a research agenda for further research, which might transform current interactive television services into shared experiences.

Social television and user interaction

During the last few years, the focus of computer science education (CSE) in primary and secondary schools (shortly K-12) have reached a significant turning point. This study reviews the published papers on the field of K-12 computing education in order to summarize the findings, guide future studies and give reflections for the major achievements in the area of CSE in K-12 schools. 47 peer-reviewed articles were collected from a systematic literature search and analyzed, based on a categorization of their main elements. Programming tools, educational context, and instructional methods are the main examined categories of this research. Results of this survey show the direction of CSE in schools research during the last years and summarized the benefits as well as the challenges. In particular, we analyzed the selected papers from the perspective of the various instructional methods aiming at introducing and enhancing learning, using several programming tools and educational context in K-12 CSE. Despite the challenges, the findings suggest that implementing computing lessons in K-12 education could be an enjoyable and effective learning experience. In addition, we suggest ways to facilitate deep learning and deal with various implications of the formal and informal education. Encouraging students to create their own projects or solve problems should be a significant part of the learning process.

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

Papers

Making Sense of Video Analytics: Lessons Learned from Clickstream Interactions, Attitudes, and Learning Outcome in a Video-Assisted Course.

Introduction to Social TV: Enhancing the Shared Experience with Interactive TV

Using Facebook out of habit

Social television and user interaction

Computing education in K-12 schools: A review of the literature