Category / Creative, Digital & Cognitive Science

Research website training sessions

Training

 BU’s new research website is an externally facing communications channel. It allows you to add and update research-related content quickly and easily. The site is flexible and accommodates a range of digital media content. You can login with your usual BU username and password and start creating content here.Screen shot of new website

We are hosting a series of 90 minute training sessions, which are open to all BU academic staff, post graduate research students and those supporting researchers in their communications activity.

During the session you will learn the following:

  • Why BU has a new research website
  • How you can upload content to the website
  • How the site can be used most effectively to maximise exposure of BU research.

There are three sessions taking place next month on Talbot Campus and at the Lansdowne. These are hosted by the website designer Matt Northam and me. Sessions are informal and if they fall over lunchtime, do feel free to bring a sandwich!

To book on one of the following sessions please use the links below…

Friday 7 February 2014 12:00-13:30 – S103 Studland House, Lansdowne Campus

Friday 14 February 2014 10:00-11:30 – P131 Poole House, Talbot Campus

Friday 14 February 2014 14:30-16:00 – P131 Poole House, Talbot Campus

If you have any questions about the website or training sessions, please email the research website team.

 

Atrium BRC stand

Emily Loring and I are in the Atrium, Poole House, Talbot Campus today giving out copies of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle (BRC) magazine to academic staff. Do come along and pick up a copy and have a cake with us!

We will be here until 4:30pm today (Tuesday) and again on Thursday between 9am-5pm.

Bournemouth Research Chronicle

Research themes

The third edition of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle (BRC) is now published. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed.

Front cover of the BRC

This is a glossy ‘coffee table’ magazine with some lovely images.  It is aimed at peer researchers and research collaborators, prospective funders and (perhaps most importantly) research users such businesses, government organisations, policy makers and charities.

We all know that communication is an integral part of the link between research and societal impact and this magazine is a great way to get the message heard by the right people.

Content is presented through BU’s eight research themes. This edition provides a snapshot of some of the work BU submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In particular it focuses on the societal impact of our research, which forms a key part of REF2014.

 

DistributionInside cover of the BRC

Every BU academic will receive a copy of the BRC. My colleagues and I will be in the Atrium, Poole House on Tuesday and Thursday next week with a large stash so do pop along, say hello and pick up yours. Otherwise, we’ll put it in the internal post for you.

Throughout January I’ll be sending the BRC to an extensive list of research users, including policy makers, community figures, opinion leaders, businesses and journalists. I will be providing a supply to each School so please do send it to your contacts, collaborators, peers, prospective funders, industry partners or anyone else who has an interest in BU’s research.

R&KEO will keep a larger stock of the BRC. If you would like copies for an event or conference then email me (Sally Gates – Editor) to arrange a delivery.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed and happy reading!

Knowledge Point based annotation for Open Educational Resources

PG research

Our next Creative Technology Research Centre Research Seminar will be presented by Xinglong Ma.

Title: Knowledge Points based annotation for Open Educational Resources

Date: Wednesday 15th January 2014

Time: 2 – 3PM

Venue: P302 LT

Linking Open Data Cloud

Abstract:  In recent years, the emergence of open educational resources (OERs), in particularly Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Edx, Udacity, are making efforts to enhance openness and reuse regardless of demographic constraints. In 2011, the first course, “Introduction to AI”, from Stanford University reached 160,000 enrolments, and in the following years, millions of learners have been involved in the MOOCs. High dropout rates ensued in this self-regulated and self-controlled learning process. In order to encourage seamless learning under the open and reusable learning environment, an innovative approach is proposed based on semanticized Knowledge Points. This talk will discuss the concept of Knowledge Points and suggest the potential values of the Knowledge Points with semantics by comparing them with other annotation approaches.

Psychology Research Seminar: Laughing in the face of adversity – the influence of affective state on situation awareness

Venue & date: Thursday 30th January at 4pm in K103 (Kimmeridge House)

Situation awareness can be loosely defined as, ‘knowing what’s going on around you and what to do about it.’   In everyday life we make complex decisions – some good, some bad – on the basis of our awareness of what is going on around us.  Sadly situation awareness can sometimes be sub-optimal leading to catastrophic errors such as road traffic accidents and air crashes.  Such errors often appear to result from a ‘tunnelling down’ with available and useful information being ignored. This attentional tunnelling is widely reported by (amongst others) firefighters, medical staff and military personnel.

Dr Graham Edgar from the Centre for Research in Applied Cognition, Knowledge, Learning and Emotion at the University of Gloucestershire will present his research examining information-use in building and maintaining situation awareness, and the influence that affective state has on that process.

All are welcome and there is no need to book – just come along!

Password? Not another one!

Publishing

The increasing volume of academic activity on the internet coupled with a growing obsession about privacy and data protection means for many academics a rapidly expanding number of online accounts and associated passwords. This is, of course, over and above our regular dose of accounts and passwords as citizens of the virtual world. The average adult in the UK must have at least 25 internet accounts, for the bank/building society, supermarkets, phone companies, social media, airlines, trains, insurance companies, eBay, the website of the parents’ council of your children’s school, your electricity provider, the council tax, etc.

I feel as an academic, the burden is even worse. Every single time another scientific journal invites me to review a paper it opens an on-line account for me. Every time I apply for a grant from a funding body to which I have not previously applied, I am required to set up an account with a new password. When you apply for 20-odd grants every year and review manuscripts for a similar number of different journals the number of accounts and passwords add up rapidly. Then there are the other accounts and passwords related to work for sites such as this BU Research Blog, BRIAN, Survey Monkey, for the university for whom you act as external examiner, for Drop Box, the British Library, ORCIC, ACADEMIA.EDU, ResearchGate, Researchfish, Linkedin, and the list goes on.

These last few months I was reminded how non user friendly some systems are. First, I received new secure email account for my part on a REF sub-panel. The account name chosen for me is different from what I would have chosen and what I am used to at Bournemouth University. The importance of confidentiality for the REF work is clear so my password has to be different from anything I use elsewhere. Secondly, a few weeks later I attempted to put my name done for the tri-annual conference of the International Congress of Midwifery in Prague next year. It turns out you cannot join the conference without opening an on-line account first. The account name was automatically chosen for me and so was the password. Unfortunately, both are impossible to remember, neither the account name nor the password (which was case sensitive) were ones I would have selected personally.

There is some hope as some journals allow you to choose your own account name and password. Elsevier has brought most of its journals into one account, with your own email as the account name and all with the same password. Similarly a group of English-language journals in Nepal called Nepal Journals OnLine (NepJOL) use one account name for all participating journals. For the rest of my account names and passwords I can only follow the advice given by Stephen Fry on an episode of QI: “Write it down somewhere on a piece of paper”. The underlying idea is that the people who try to steal your internet account details sit in a bedsit in London or Hong Kong and won’t come to your office or living room to steal a piece of paper with computer addresses. The people who try to break into your house or office are looking for objects with a street value, such as your TV, phone or laptop, they are generally not interested in a piece of paper with some scribbles on it.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

Cyber Security Seminars: Suggestions for Speakers and Topics

If you have been following my previous posts then you will know that today is the final Cyber Security Seminar for this semester.  We hope you have found the seminar series interesting so far.

We are currently planning the seminars for next semester.  Please get in touch if you have suggestions for potential speakers, or topics you would like to hear more about. Although the budget we have available is modest, we will do our best to accommodate your suggestions.

Cyber Security Seminar: Approaching the Measurement of User Security Behaviour in Organisations

Our final Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar this semester will take place on Tuesday, 10th December at 5pm. The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-seminar-in-cyber-security-tickets-9688353125

Our speaker will be Dr. Simon Parkin from UCL. Simon is a Senior Research Associate in the Information Security group at University College London, contributing to the Productive Security project within the Research Institute in the Science of Cyber Security (RISCS). He was previously a member of the Innovation Team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Security Services (HP ESS) until mid-2012. From 2007 to 2011, Simon was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University, where he also obtained his PhD. His research interests include: IT-security policy management metrics, models and tools; holistic IT-security management principles, and; IT-security risk management approaches and knowledge formalisation.

Abstract: Individuals working within organisations must complete their tasks, and are often expected to do so using secured IT systems. There can be times when the expectations for productivity and security are in competition, and so how would an organisation measure the outcomes in practice? We will review a series of interdisciplinary research efforts that characterise the human factor in IT-security within large organisations, as part of a holistic view of security. There are furthermore a variety of modelling approaches and frameworks that have emerged and informed this view. We will consider the challenges that remain in affording measurement of the human factor in IT-security within organisations, and some of the changes that are required for such activities to be sustainable and effective.

Media and Information Education in the UK: Recommendations to the European Union

Dr Julian McDougall from BU’s Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) will make recommendations on UK media education at a conference in Paris later this month.

The conference brings together comparative analyses on media and information education from EU member states and Dr McDougall will present the UK report alongside his London School of economics (LSE) research collaborators.

Dr McDougall said: “In the UK report, we have mapped media education provision in the UK against the various EC and EU frameworks and draw a clear conclusion, that the UK is rich with expertise, energy and leadership for media and information education, and to a significant extent is the envy of other European nations in this respect, but deeply entrenched prejudice against ‘media studies’ means that promoting media literacy through schools is continually undermined.”

The report examines the progression of media education through three key phases:

  • Pre-OFCOM: the establishment of Media Studies, Film Studies and other related areas in the curriculum.
  • 1997 – 2011 New Labour Government and OFCOM media literacy intervention with some correspondence to Media Studies
  • Post-OFCOM Coalition Government, discontinuation of media literacy strategies

When examining the current ‘state of play’ in UK media literacy education, Dr McDougall and his colleagues looked at four areas: the study of media in formal secondary and higher education through curriculum subjects such as Media Studies, Film Studies and Media/non-literary textual analysis in English as well as vocational courses; broader, less formal examples of media literacy across the UK curriculum and extra-curricular activities such as literacy education in primary schools and related subjects like Citizenship, Sociology and History; e-safety policies in the school system; and media & information literacy outside of formal education.

Having examined the current scope and provision of UK media education and media literacy, the report identifies a scarcity of funding and training and a contradiction between support for creative industry employability, digital literacy and e-safety and derision towards, neglect of and undermining (through UCAS tariff distinctions, for example) media education where it already exists for thousands of young people.

At the same time, the recent Next Gen Report, well received by policy-makers, fails to locate media education as a context for teaching digital programming and coding. The UK report predicts that the combined effect of proposed secondary curriculum reform and this response to the Next Gen report will place UK media education in further ‘limbo’ between the cultural value afforded to English Literature and Art as academic /creative disciplines for their own sake and the vocational importance of strong media and technological literacy, such as those assumed for games and effects education within the STEM subject cluster, in today’s modern  media-saturated tech-savvy workplace.

Three clear and compelling recommendations are presented from the UK report’s findings:

  • The model of media literacy currently provided by the various EU and EC strategies is too broad in scope and ambition for mainstream education to ‘deliver’ and therein lies a fundamental mismatch between the objectives of media literacy as articulated in policy and the capacity of education as the agent for its development in society
  • To coherently match Media Studies in the UK to the policy objectives for media literacy expressed in European policy, Government funding (for teacher training), support and endorsement for Media Studies is essential
  • Funding should be prioritised for broader research into the capacity for Media Studies in schools and colleges to develop media and information literacy as defined by the European Union.

The conference is hosted by the French National Research Agency project TRANSLIT (convergence between computer, media and information literacies), in association with the European network COST “Transforming Audiences/Transforming Societies.” It takes place on 13-14 December at the Grand Amphi of Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris.

Dr McDougall was lead author on the report, entitled Media and Information Education in the UK, alongside his LSE collaborators Professor Sonia Livingstone (Leader of the TRANSLIT/COST Media Literacy Task Force) and Dr Julian Sefton-Green.

Bangkok conference “a big success”

Fusion

Speakers and delegates from 10 mainly Asian countries voted the 1st International Corporate and Marketing Communication in Asia Conference, held in Bangkok on November 18-19, “a big success”

The FIF-supported conference went so well that planning is already under way for the 2014 conference, also to be held at Chulalongkorn University in the Thai capital.

Representing BU at the conference were Prof Tom Watson, a co-organiser, and Dr Ana Adi, both of the Media School. Tom was a second day keynote speaker while Ana presented the outcome of research by her and Nathaniel Hobby on social media monitoring in higher education.

The conference, held at the Faculty of Communication Arts, was opened by the host’s Vice-President, Assoc Prof Dr Sittichai Tudsri. Including the Thai and UK organisers, 30 papers were presented by academics from Australia, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

“The conference especially sought Asian perspectives: alternatives to Anglo-American models of theory, practice and education. In this aspect it succeeded to everyone’s satisfaction,” Prof Watson said. “I believe that several international joint research projects will develop from the 2013 conference, which is also a major step forward.”

He said that delegates had welcomed the conference as filling a major gap in corporate and marketing communication academic discourse in Asia. “This reflected well on BU and I’m grateful for the FIF support that helped us devise and develop the conference. It’s an investment that has long term reputational and research value.”

Already, a Media School team researching CSR has linked with colleagues at Chulalongkorn University and a further connection with an Indonesian researcher may follow soon. The BU-Chula link was confirmed at the conference.

(L-R) Conference organisers Prof Tom Watson and Assoc Prof Jirayudh Sinthuphan with keynote speaker Prof Dr Ansgar Zerfas (Leipzig University)

Augmented Reality Gaming: A New Paradigm for Tourist Experience?

PG research

Our next Creative Technology Research Centre Research Seminar will be presented by Jessika Weber.

Title: Augmented Reality Gaming: A New Paradigm for Tourist Experience?”

Date: Wednesday 4th December 2013

Time: 2 – 3PM

Venue: P302 LT

Abstract:  Location-based Augmented Reality (AR) Games are an innovative way to attract tourists into challenges and interactive gameplay while they are exploring an urban destination or cultural heritage site.  The aim of AR games is to create a deeper level of engagement with the destination by adding a game experience that educates through fun using location-based storytelling, personalised features, and social interaction.  The player location and the context of playing are important dimensions in location-based AR Gameplay.  However, little is known by game designers on how to design location-based Augmented Reality Games in the context of tourism.  This study uses the construct of presence throughout AR gameplay using historical facts and information about a destination and combining them into an interactive engaging gaming experience for tourists.   

Research website training sessions

Training

On Monday many of you will have seen Rebecca Edwards’ blog post giving more information about the new research website. It explains why BU is developing it, when the site will be live, how it will work and addresses some frequently asked questions that have cropped up in discussions.

If you missed this post you can view it here.

The new website will have a host of additional features, making it easier for you to update and add your own content. It provides a considerably improved platform for integrating a wider variety of content, such as image galleries and videos.

Research website screengrabTraining sessions are taking place over the next two months. You can book a session online or contact Rebecca Edwards for more information.

Using the website is surprisingly easy and in the sessions you’ll learn how to upload, edit and tag content. Rather than carrying out training sessions with ‘dummy’ test material, we would like to use the time for you to upload relevant content to your research theme.

We’d be grateful if you could please have something available that you can upload during the training session. Examples could include:

–          New or recent images

–          Videos

–          Details of a new research project

–          Details of successful grant applications

–          A profile of a post graduate researcher

–          Information about planned or recent public engagement activity

Rebecca Edwards or I will be happy to answer any questions in the meantime, so do get in touch. We look forward to seeing you at one of the training sessions.

Bigger on the Inside

Festival of Learning, Publishing

 

 

 

 

 

The Doctor, his TARDIS-driven adventures, along with companions and iconic monsters, are all over the TV and newspapers. The Inner World of Doctor Who is a new book, just out. Written by Prof Mike Rustin (UEL, Tavsitock Clinic) and Prof. Iain MacRury in the Media School here at BU. This publication offers an accessible account of Doctor Who. It focusses just on the most recent television output – 2005 to 2013 – and examines why the show continues to fascinate us.
The Doctor’s relationships with his companions are to the fore. Various chapters also consider the dramatic meanings of monsters and time travel – linking the show back to ideas about audience experience – and what we might ‘learn’ from Doctor Who. It looks at the complexity of the new Doctor Who in its depictions of the suffering of the Doctor, as well that of his at times vulnerable and dependent companions. A connection is made between TV content and some (but not all) elements in the experience of psychotherapy.
We propose that one way of thinking about the Doctor is to see him as a kind of inadvertent ‘therapist’ – with the TV dramas on screen rendering troubled states of mind and society within a rich cultural frame. Doctor Who extends a fairy-tale and children’s fictional tradition across its contemporary media platforms. As we argue: In Doctor Who everyday life is often revealed to be “Bigger on the inside.”

The 50th anniversary won’t come again and it provided a chastening deadline we’re glad to have met it! The book was inspired by the startling success of the show in recent years. Why does it attract such attention and affection? While thinking about it I  got further daily encouragement from the TARDIS that sits on the ground floor of Weymouth House, courtesy of our former Media School colleague, Dr Andrew Ireland.

The Inner World of Doctor Who is published with Karnac books. It should be of interest to diehard fans. But it is written, too, for people who probably wouldn’t claim the title ‘fan’ but for whom all the fuss about Time Lords and Tardises just now (The Doctor is even on postage stamps!) is provoking the thought: “What’s this all about!?” The Inner World of Doctor Who offers some answers.
 – Written with a colleague, Prof. Mike Rustin, from UEL and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust the book emerges from an enriching collaboration that began in some teaching sessions at the Tavistock clinic on their MA in Psychoanalytic Studies. It has now developed into this book. The book came together quite quickly and has been usefully supported by an AHRC funded network called “Media and the Inner World”. The book is published as part of their new series with Karnac called Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture.
If you are interested the book can be found at http://www.karnacbooks.com/Product.asp?PID=34857 or as an e-book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inner-World-Doctor-Psychoanalytic-Psychoanalysis/dp/1782200835

A Review of Gaming Technologies for Stroke Patients

PG research

Our next Creative Technology Research Centre Research Seminar will be presented by Owen O’Neil.

Title: A Review of Gaming Technologies for Stroke Patients

Date: Wednesday 13th November 2013

Time: 2 – 3PM

Venue: P302 LTCentre For Digital Entertainment

Abstract: Stroke is a global pandemic and the largest cause of severe adult disability in the world. Incidence rates in the UK suggest that over 150,000 suffer a first time stroke, and over 80% of survivors will suffer some form of motor disability. Rehabilitation typically consists of high volumes of motor practice to engage the mechanism of neural plasticity, a form of cortical rewiring that allows the brain to adapt after damage. Meeting the rehabilitation needs for this population through one-to-one physiotherapy care is currently not possible.  There is a growing impetus on research institutions to explore cost-effective methods for increasing access to rehabilitation that may promote improved functional recovery for patients at home and in the clinic. Recent approaches include the use of video game technology as a method of increasing patient engagement and upkeep to rehabilitation programs. Of particular interest is the emergence of low cost commercial off-the-shelf devices such as the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Kinect.  In this presentation we introduce the state-of-the art application of video game technology as a modality of upper limb motor practice. We translate current approaches and technology in the literature that show particular promise to meet the needs of this population.