Notes on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

Notes: Wermeskerken et al. Effects of Instructor Presence in Video Modelling Examples on Attention and Learning

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0700

van Wermeskerken, M., Ravensbergen, S., & van Gog, T. (2018). Effects of instructor presence in video modeling examples on attention and learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 89, 430-438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.038

Does including a video that includes a view of the presenter add (through instructor presence) or detract (through distracting the viewer by forcing them to split attention)? This paper takes a look at a specific design pattern - an instructor presenting some content in a presentation - and uses eye tracking to observe where a viewer’s attention is focused during the video, and tries to assess the impact on learning (using pre/post test scores as a proxy). Is the a deeper connection through social response stronger than the “split attention effect” where viewers are automatically drawn to look at a human face rather than the content in a presentation? Does working memory¹ get messed up by having the instructor visible (but separate from the content)?

Immersive theatre informing VR experiences

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 08:51:17 +0000

But for as popular as immersive theater has become, it hasn't solved its scale problem. Productions like Then She Fell offer incredible intimacy between the actor and viewer, but to do so, they only fill 15 seats a night. That means a year of shows can accommodate less people than a single movie theater for half a day.

A few years ago, creator Jennine Willet was having drinks with 14 creatives at Disney who worked on park attractions. They'd come to see how she crafts plays like Then She Fell. "They were like, I loved that scene with [redacted], how could you make that for 600 people?'" she says. "I think I spit my cosmo. I said, â€˜I think that's a paradox. I don't think you can have intimacy with 600 people.'"In person, that's probably true. In VR? That rules of intimacy can change

Audrey Watters - Attending to the Digital

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 10:31:03 +0000

The transcript from a presentation by Audrey Watters at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. She was invited to talk about digital discourse as part of their launch of a domain-of-ones-own initiative. What a fantastic way to launch such a thing¹. Read the entire thing.

Building on Postman, Chaucer, Caulfield. Nice.

In part, I find that those who want to dismiss such a thing as “digital distraction” tend to minimize the very real impact that new technologies do have on what we see, what we pay attention to. It’s right there in that phrase â€“ “pay attention.” Attention has costs. It is a resource â€“ one involving time and energy, a resource of which we only have a limited amount. Attention has become a commodity, with different companies and technologies bidding for a piece of it.

Charlene Chin - Will this be the classroom of 2050?

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 08:42:37 +0000

Article with question mark in title? Answer likely “no.” But, it’s going to be some classrooms, for sure. An interesting use of computer vision and machine learning to generate metadata about student engagement. This could (should|will) be used for more than just lecturing, and what if students had access to their own data? This could be a powerful tool to support self-reflection on teaching and learning…

In a case of almost-perfect-timing, I presented to the iLab yesterday about some of my ideas for PhD work - looking for ways to help support self-reflection on teaching and learning. I talked about how student teachers use video of their teaching as a tool to learn teaching skills, and how video is basically an opaque blob of media that is extremely time-, labour- and cost-intensive to use for non-trivial projects. I then compared to some of the tools that enable some understanding of teaching and learning interactions in online learning, and that these types of tools are completely unavailable for face-to-face learning. These kinds of technologies can help, as long as they’re not weaponized into a surveillance culture or student assessment tools.

Antti Oulasvirta on reforming CHI

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 08:47:12 +0000

I’m new to the CHI community, and have been involved with only one project that submitted a paper to CHI. I was struck by the cadence - it’s a once-per-year submission deadline that sets the pattern of activity for an entire research lab. That feels weird. Maybe it’s good, though, as it pushes people to publish their work on a regular basis rather than just at the end of a thesis or dissertation project…

consolidating phd notes

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 19:36:52 +0000

I started a new blog site, running the fantastic Known blogging platform on a fresh subdomain running on my webspace at Reclaim Hosting. The intention was to give a place to think out loud about stuff I’m working on or thinking about for my PhD program. I started publishing some stuff, and then realized that having a separate site for that was awkward. There was no real need to separate and disconnect that content from the Day Job™ content from the-rest-of-my-life content.

Ideas on the documentation and interpretation of interactions in a classroom environment

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 16 Jul 2016 19:27:30 +0000

Some rough notes of some ideas I hope to work on, potentially as part of my PhD program.

My Masters degree thesis was based on the use of social network and discourse analysis in an online course to attempt to understand the differences in student activity and interactions in two different online platforms and course designs. Tools like Gephi and NodeXL are available to anyone teaching online, to feed the data (system-generated activity logs, raw discussion text, twitter hashtags, search queries etc.) and get a powerful visualization of how the students interacted. It struck me that the tools are so much richer for online interactions than they are for offline (or blended) face-to-face interactions.

ethnography links

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 10 Jul 2016 22:55:53 +0000

Gathering links on ethnography, microethnography, etc. To help flesh out the ideas around computational microethnography in documenting and analyzing classroom interactions.

Ethnography links
Microethnography links

Thinking about documenting and visualizing interactions

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 16:23:22 +0000

Some super-rough sketches of some ideas for documenting and visualizing interactions between people in a learning space. Lots of work left to refine the ideas and then to try implementing them…

some light reading on technology and robots as tutors

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 12:46:28 +0000

Bartneck, C., Kuli, D., Croft, E., & Zoghbi, S. (2008). Measurement Instruments for the Anthropomorphism, Animacy, Likeability, Perceived Intelligence, and Perceived Safety of Robots. International Journal of Social Robotics, 1(1), 71-81. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-008-0001-3
Burgard, W., Cremers, A. B., Fox, D., & HÃƒÂ¤hnel, D. (1998). The interactive museum tour-guide robot. Aaai/Iaai.
Castellano, G., Paiva, A., Kappas, A., Aylett, R., Hastie, H., Barendregt, W., et al. (2013). Towards Empathic Virtual and Robotic Tutors. In Artificial Intelligence in Education (Vol. 7926, pp. 733-736). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39112-5_100
Corrigan, L. J., Peters, C., & Castellano, G. (2013). Identifying Task Engagement: Towards Personalised Interactions with Educational Robots. 2013 Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 655-658. http://doi.org/10.1109/ACII.2013.114
Dautenhahn, K. (2007). Socially intelligent robots: dimensions of human-robot interaction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 679-704. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2006.2004
Ganeshan, K. (2007). Teaching Robots: Robot-Lecturers and Remote Presence (Vol. 2007, pp. 252-260).
Gockley, R., Bruce, A., Forlizzi, J., Michalowski, M., Mundell, A., Rosenthal, S., et al. (2005). Designing robots for long-term social interaction. " On Intelligent Robots “, 1338-1343. http://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2005.1545303
Han, J. (2010). Robot-aided learning and r-learning services.
Han, J., Hyun, E., Kim, M., Cho, H., Kanda, T., & Nomura, T. (2009). The Cross-cultural Acceptance of Tutoring Robots with Augmented Reality Services. Jdcta. http://doi.org/10.1.1.698.6657
Harteveld, C., & Sutherland, S. C. (2015). The Goal of Scoring: Exploring the Role of Game Performance in Educational Games. the 33rd Annual ACM Conference (pp. 2235-2244). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702606
Howley, I., Kanda, T., Hayashi, K., & RosÃƒÂ©, C. (2014). Effects of social presence and social role on help-seeking and learning. the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference (pp. 415-422). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2559636.2559667
Kanda, T., Hirano, T., Eaton, D., & Ishiguro, H. (2004). Interactive Robots as Social Partners and Peer Tutors for Children: A Field Trial. Human-Computer Interaction, 19(1), 61-84. http://doi.org/10.1207/s15327051hci1901&2_4
Kardan, S., & Conati, C. (2015). Providing Adaptive Support in an Interactive Simulation for Learning: An Experimental Evaluation. the 33rd Annual ACM Conference (pp. 3671-3680). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702424
Kennedy, J., Baxter, P., & Belpaeme, T. (2015). The Robot Who Tried Too Hard: Social Behaviour of a Robot Tutor Can Negatively Affect Child Learning. the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference (pp. 67-74). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2696454.2696457
Kenny, P., Hartholt, A., Gratch, J., & Swartout, W. (2007). Building Interactive Virtual Humans for Training Environments. Presented at the Proceedings of I/ “.
Kiesler_soccog_08.pdf. (n.d.). Kiesler_soccog_08.pdf. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from http://sfussell.hci.cornell.edu/pubs/Manuscripts/Kiesler_soccog_08.pdf
Kopp, S., Jung, B., Lessmann, N., & Wachsmuth, I. (2003). Max - A Multimodal Assistant in Virtual Reality Construction. Ki.
Lee, D.-H., & Kim, J.-H. (2010). A framework for an interactive robot-based tutoring system and its application to ball-passing training. 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO) (pp. 573-578). IEEE. http://doi.org/10.1109/ROBIO.2010.5723389
Leyzberg, D., Spaulding, S., & Scassellati, B. (2014). Personalizing robot tutors to individuals’ learning differences. the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference (pp. 423-430). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2559636.2559671
Leyzberg, D., Spaulding, S., Toneva, M., & Scassellati, B. (2012). The physical presence of a robot tutor increases cognitive learning gains.
Lin, R., & Kraus, S. (2010). Can automated agents proficiently negotiate with humans? Communications of the ACM, 53(1), 78-88. http://doi.org/10.1145/1629175.1629199
Mitnik, R., Recabarren, M., Nussbaum, M., & Soto, A. (2009). Collaborative robotic instruction: A graph teaching experience. Computers & Education, 53(2), 330-342. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.02.010
Mubin, O., Stevens, C. J., Shahid, S., Mahmud, A. A., & Dong, J.-J. (2013). A REVIEW OF THE APPLICABILITY OF ROBOTS IN EDUCATION. Technology for Education and Learning, 1(1). http://doi.org/10.2316/Journal.209.2013.1.209-0015
Nkambou, R., Belghith, K., Kabanza, F., & Khan, M. (2005). Supporting Training on a Robotic Simulator using a Flexible Path Planner. AIED.
Nomikou, I., Pitsch, K., & Rohlfing, K. J. (Eds.). (2013). Robot feedback shapes the tutor’s presentation: How a robot’s online gaze strategies lead to micro-adaptation of the human’s conduct. Interaction Studies, 14(2), 268-296. http://doi.org/10.1075/is.14.2.06pit
Peterson, I. (1992). Looking-Glass Worlds. Science News, 141(1), 8-10+15. http://doi.org/10.2307/3976251?ref=search-gateway:0b99b4ee4ada2716135055fafcfc8c8d
Rizzo, A., Lange, B., Buckwalter, J. G., Forbell, E., Kim, J., Sagae, K., et al. (n.d.). SimCoach: an intelligent virtual human system for providing healthcare information and support. International Journal on Disability and Human Development, 10(4). http://doi.org/10.1515/IJDHD.2011.046
Ros, R., Coninx, A., Demiris, Y., Patsis, G., Enescu, V., & Sahli, H. (2014). Behavioral accommodation towards a dance robot tutor. the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference (pp. 278-279). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2559636.2559821
Saerbeck, M., Schut, T., Bartneck, C., & Janse, M. D. (2010). Expressive robots in education: varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor. the 28th international conference (pp. 1613-1622). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753567
Satake, S., Kanda, T., Glas, D. F., Imai, M., Ishiguro, H., & Hagita, N. (2009). How to approach humans?-strategies for social robots to initiate interaction. ” -Robot Interaction ( “, 109-116. http://doi.org/10.1145/1514095.1514117
Serholt, S., Basedow, C. A., Barendregt, W., & Obaid, M. (2014). Comparing a humanoid tutor to a human tutor delivering an instructional task to children. 2014 IEEE-RAS 14th International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2014), 1134-1141. http://doi.org/10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2014.7041511
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Swartout, W. (2010). Lessons Learned from Virtual Humans. AI Magazine, 31(1), 9-20. http://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v31i1.2284
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Yannier, N., Israr, A., Lehman, J. F., & Klatzky, R. L. (2015).Ã‚ FeelSleeve : Haptic Feedback to Enhance Early Reading. the 33rd Annual ACM Conference (pp. 1015-1024). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702396
You, S., Nie, J., Suh, K., & Sundar, S. S. (2011). When the robot criticizes you…: self-serving bias in human-robot interaction. the 6th international conference (pp. 295-296). New York, New York, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/1957656.1957778

experimental soundscape, mark II

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:02:18 +0000

I just sat in the atrium and shaped this soundscape as people were walking through, trying to simulate some kind of response to motion. It’s still pretty muddy, but I think there’s something there. The trick will be in getting it to be unobtrusive and ambient while still providing information…

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experimental soundscape

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 31 May 2016 08:40:03 +0000

I played with a few layers of modulating soundscapes - one is a humpback whale track, the other, samples from a Speak-N-Spell. Not sure how annoying this might get in a longer-playing session, but some kind of cool effects that might be useful to be connected to inputs such as location, speed, vector, group size, etc.

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on pretention - simpler is gooder

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 28 May 2016 18:41:14 +0000

I just realized that last post about soundscape app for iOS sounded horribly pretentious. Wow. Not sure I’ll get to Thing Explainer level, but I’m going to try really hard to break out of jargon.

So. What I was meaning to say was that I’m messing around with a cool iOS app for making computer generated sounds (not music, but not noise). I want to try playing with it to see what kinds of sounds I can make with it, and am wondering about how those sounds might be triggered or changed based on signals such as people moving through a room or something else. I started playing with converting movement into signals and that kind of works. Now I need to figure out what to do with that data - what kinds of sounds or visuals might be interesting in response to what people are doing in a space.

Prototyping an atrium-sized theremin

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 27 May 2016 01:23:07 +0000

I’ve been exploring some hacking to prototype a sonification experiment – the idea was to build a way to provide audio biofeedback to shape the soundscape within a space in response to movement and activity. I prototyped a quick mockup using Python and imutils.

It started as a “skunkworks” project idea:

An atrium-sized theremin, so a person (or a few people, or a whole gaggle of people) could make sounds (or, hopefully, music) by moving throughout the atrium. A theremin works by responding to the electrical field in a person – normal-sized theremins respond to hand movements. An atrium-sized theremin might respond to where a person walks or stands in the atrium, or how they move. I have absolutely NO idea how to do this, but think it could be a fun way to gently nudge people to explore motion and position in a space. Bonus points for adding some form of synchronized visualization (light show? Digital image projection? Something else?)

synthetic modulated ambient soundscapes

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 26 May 2016 21:03:00 +0000

Trying out Soundscaper as a way to explore synthetic modulated ambient soundscapes, to see what kinds of sounds might work for algorithmic generation from spatial data…

SoundScaper - An experimental sound mini lab