notes on D'Arcy Norman dot net

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

contact@darcynorman.net (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

contact@darcynorman.net (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.

Audrey Watters - Attending to the Digital

contact@darcynorman.net (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.

Charlene Chin - Will this be the classroom of 2050?

contact@darcynorman.net (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.

Antti Oulasvirta on reforming CHI

contact@darcynorman.net (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

contact@darcynorman.net (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

contact@darcynorman.net (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.

ethnography links

contact@darcynorman.net (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

contact@darcynorman.net (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

contact@darcynorman.net (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.

experimental soundscape, mark II

contact@darcynorman.net (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… Your browser does not support the audio element.

experimental soundscape

contact@darcynorman.net (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. Your browser does not support the audio element.

on pretention - simpler is gooder

contact@darcynorman.net (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.

synthetic modulated ambient soundscapes

contact@darcynorman.net (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

prototyping atrium-sized theramin

contact@darcynorman.net (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 26 May 2016 15:56:29 +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.