No description available.

No description available.

Feedback plays an important role in evaluating and developing courses in higher education. Due to inefficient factors, the feedback cycle does not meet its full potential and can therefore be counterproductive. Current evaluation methods typically demand much effort from both students and teachers, when asking for feedback at the end of the course and analyzing the results. Lack of engagement can thus be observed in both parties. Moreover, we can see an increasing trend of ARS used in educational settings, to improve learning quality and enhance the relationship between the presenter and audience. This study’s aim was to make the feedback process more efficient and to explore how to provide insight in lecture quality for continuous course development. To fully understand the target user, a pre-study was conducted to identify design requirements and to investigate which areas to evaluate during the courses and why. The interview sessions resulted in four main dimensions to evaluate; Meaningfulness, comprehension, knowledge and attitude. Based on these dimensions, a feedback tool was developed to gather the feedback data from students in two different cohorts. The tool was developed in a survey format, with the help of an existing ARS. The feedback was then collected after two university lectures during two courses. To explore the potential of providing useful insight to the lecturer, and to facilitate the analytical step of the process, an interactive visualization tool was prototyped to display the data. The visualization tool was evaluated, both in terms of usability and its overall concept, with a total of eight lecturers, two of which were lecturers in the courses used to gather the feedback data. Even though the results show that it might be difficult to draw a single conclusion of the tools’ usability, the users found the concept interesting and were positive towards the idea. The perception of the tool’s intended use varied and is discussed along with future development. / Feedback spelar en viktig roll när det kommer till utvärdering och utveckling av kurser inom högre utbildning. På grund av ineffektiva faktorer uppnår feedbackcykeln inte sin fulla potential och kan därför vara kontraproduktiv. Aktuella utvärderingsmetoder kräver typiskt mycket ansträngning från både elever och lärare och brist på engagemang kan således observeras hos båda parter. Dessutom kan vi se en ökande trend av ARS som används i utbildningsinstitutioner, för att förbättra utbildningskvaliteten samt förhållandet mellan presentatören och publiken. Syftet med studien var att göra feedbackprocessen mer effektiv och undersöka hur man kan ge insikt i föreläsningskvaliteten för kontinuerlig kursutveckling. För att förstå slutanvändaren genomfördes en förundersökning för att identifiera deras begär och för att undersöka vilka områden som ska utvärderas under kurserna och varför. Intervjuerna resulterade i fyra huvuddimensioner att utvärdera och ge insikt inom; Betydelse, förståelse, kunskap och attityd. Baserat på dessa dimensioner utvecklades ett feedbackverktyg. Verktyget var i form av ett formulär och producerades med hjälp av ett befintlig ARS. Feedbackdatan samlades sedan in efter två universitetsföreläsningar under två kurser. För att undersöka möjligheten att ge föreläsaren användbar insikt och för att underlätta det analytiska steget i processen, utvecklades ett interaktivt visualiseringsverktyg. Visualiseringsverktyget utvärderades, både vad gäller användbarhet och dess övergripande koncept, med totalt åtta föreläsare. Även om resultaten visar att det kan vara svårt att dra en enda slutsats av verktygets användbarhet, fann användarna konceptet intressant och var överlag positiva. Uppfattningen av verktygets avsedda användning varierar och diskuteras tillsammans med framtida utveckling.

It takes only about 10-30 minutes into a sedentary lecture before audience attention is decreasing. There are different ways to avoid this. One is to use a web-based audience response systems (ARS), where the audience interact with the lecturer through their smartphones, and another is to take short breaks, including physical movements, to re-energize both the body and the brain. In this study, these two methods have been combined and explored. By utilizing the motion sensors that are integrated in almost every smartphone, a physical activity for a lecture audience was created and implemented in the ARS platform Mentimeter. The proof of concept was evaluated in two lectures, based on O’Brien and Toms' model of engagement. The aim was to explore the prerequisites, both in terms of design and implementation, for creating an engaging physical activity within a lecture audience, using smartphone motion sensors to capture movements and a web-based ARS to present the data. The results showed that the proof of concept was perceived as fun and engaging, where important factors for creating engagement were found to be competition and a balanced level of task difficulty. The study showed that feedback is complicated when it comes to motion gesture interactions, and that there are limitations as to what can be done with smartphone motion sensors using web technologies. There is great potential for further research in how to design an energizing lecture activity using smartphones, as well as in exploring the area of feedback in motion gesture interaction. / Efter bara 10-30 minuter på en stillasittande föreläsning börjar publiken tappa i koncentration. Det går undvika på olika sätt. Ett sätt kan vara genom att låta publiken bli mer aktiva i föreläsningen med hjälp av ett webb-baserat röstningsverktyg, där de använder sina smartphones för att interagera med föreläsaren, och ett annat sätt kan vara att ta korta pauser där publiken får röra på sig för att syresätta hjärna och kropp. I den här studien kombinerades dessa två metoder genom att utnyttja rörelsesensorerna som finns inbyggda i de flesta smartphones. En fysisk aktivitet för en föreläsningspublik togs fram och implementerades i ARS-plattformen Mentimeter och konceptet utvärderades sedan under två föreläsningar baserat på O’Brien and Toms' modell för engagemang. Målet var att utforska förutsättningarna, både inom teknik och design, för att skapa en engagerande fysisk aktivitet för en föreläsningspublik, där smartphonens rörelsesensorer används för att fånga rörelse och ett webb-baserat röstningssystem för att presentera data. Resultatet visade att konceptet upplevdes som kul och engagerande, där viktiga faktorer för att skapa engagemang fanns i att ha ett tävlingsmoment och en lagom svårighetsgrad. Studien visade även att feedback är komplicerat när det kommer till rörelseinteraktion, och att det finns begräsningarna i vad som kan göras med rörelsesensorerna i en smartphone med hjälp av webbteknologi. Det finns stor potential för ytterligare undersökningar både inom hur man kan skapa interaktiva aktiviteter på föreläsningar som ger publiken mer energi, men också inom området kring feedback för rörelseinteraktion.

Firstly, in 2019, I played a role of a woman who got married to a married man, later after the series aired to the public the role fired back on me. I observed the audience’s reaction exceeded everyone's expectations. The audience is divided into two parts the first part is the women who expressed their anger in a very aggressive and strong way, and the second part who was exciting to the character. The first part of the audience used several offensive, strong, and insulting words. The audience's reaction was very emotional, and they used all the tools to express their feelings for example, they used social media platforms and verbal violence when they saw me in the street. On the other hand, sometimes the women’s reaction was interesting in my point of view when one of the women personalized the role by imagining her husband betrayed her with the character for real. Secondly, in 2021 an actress from Egypt Mona Zaki pretends to take off her panty in a scene in the film. Although she didn’t take it off, she chose to symbolize the action, the scene fired back badly on her and her personal life as well. The audience couldn't compartmentalize between the acting and her personal life and personality. Therefore, we focus on the audience impact and the way the audience impacts the actress in the situated areas in this research, what would happen when the audience can't distinguish between the role and the actor's real Character?

Celebrity gossip blogs have quickly established themselves as a new media phenomenon that is transforming celebrity culture. This dissertation is an examination of the impact of the technological and textual shifts engendered by new media on the use of gossip as a form of everyday cultural production. Broadly, I investigate the historical role of gossip media texts in celebrity culture and explore how celebrity gossip blogs have reconfigured audience engagements with celebrity culture. Following Gamson’s (1994) approach to celebrity as a cultural phenomenon, I separate celebrity gossip blogs into three elements—texts, producers, and audiences—and examine the interplay between them using ethnographic methods adapted to the new media setting. I begin with an investigation of what is being said about celebrity on gossip blogs, supported by my five–week online fieldwork observation of six heavily–trafficked, commercially–supported celebrity gossip blogs. I focus on visual images and blogger commentary as the key elements of gossip blogs as media texts. I supplement these observations with oral interviews of the producers of these texts, the gossip bloggers. I argue that the blogger, as the primary author of the site, retains authority as a cultural producer of these texts. The final component of this study focuses on the reading and cultural production practices of celebrity gossip blog audiences using data gathered online and through a qualitative survey. I examine the various ways these practices support the emergence of community within these virtual spaces. While I claim that gossip is an active engagement with celebrity culture well suited to new media's emphasis on immediacy and interactivity, I conclude that an active audience is necessarily a resistant one. Blogs can be seen as a space for intervention into celebrity culture that allows bloggers and readers to challenge the power of the media industry to define celebrity culture. However, gossip blogs often uphold oppressive norms, particularly around questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Gossip is an important area of inquiry because it reveals the way women, the predominant audience for and participants on gossip blogs, may be implicated in the normative ideologies forwarded by the celebrity media.

This study investigates the transitioning terms of lesbian visibility and identity in the distinctive spatio-temporal context of Northampton, Massachusetts in the 1980s. Drawing on interviews with a diversified sampling of lesbian-, bisexual-, and queeridentified participants, I consider the coalescing of two lesbian communal formations – a social community and a social audience – as mediating sites for the interrelations between subculture and dominant culture. Informed by the literatures and methods of queer theory, cultural studies, and feminist film criticism, I examine the 1980s queer crossover from lesbian subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation by the end of the decade. The 1980s crossover was a constellation of interlocking factors manifested through the entrance into national visibility of gay liberatory and feminist politics, the incorporation of overt lesbian sexuality into Hollywood and independent films, and the surfacing of the conservative and feminist backlashes alongside “Reaganomics.” These converged in an anti-lesbian backlash produced in Northampton in the 1980s through the interrelations between the rapid revitalization of the city’s downtown and the increasing visibility and concentration of the lesbian population. The emergence into public visibility of a lesbian social community and a lesbian social audience in 1980s Northampton prefigured questions about the desirability of a goal of cultural assimilation for lesbian and gay people along with concerns about the role of consumption in the assimilative process that were to become important to LGBT politics in the 1990s and 2000s. In this project, I consider the multidimensional and conflictual aspects of assimilation as well as the gender-specificities of lesbian film consumption and the lesbian Sex Wars as part of the crossover from subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation. In spite of the strides in the acceptance of the lesbian population in Northampton in the 1980s, I argue that such changes were laden with tensions negotiated through the contradictions between appearances of tolerance and acceptance versus experiences of discrimination and violence. The constellation of factors that manifested in the 1980s queer crossover provided symbolic materials not only for a realignment of lesbian subjectivity, but also for a realignment of heterosexual subjectivity.

This study examines how professional storytellers negotiated a new storytelling stage—the videoconference platform—as they pivoted their careers during mandated shutdowns due to COVID-19. An examination of the literature reveals extremely limited research involving either professional storytellers or live virtual storytelling. After interviewing five professional storytellers, I analyzed their stories through narrative inquiry. Analysis revealed that the storytellers negotiated the limitations and affordances of Zoom and adapted their storytelling to successfully connect with their audiences. Through crafting a narrative of their stories, I was able to represent their emotions, unique experiences, and abilities to adapt to the online environment. Their stories document significant changes in the art of storytelling during a historic era. This research reveals how storytellers can master the techniques of online storytelling and effectively tell stories to synchronous virtual audiences.

This research investigates the impact of transmedia storytelling through a case study of Arcane, a Netflix TV show set in the League of Legends universe. Grounded in the combination of transmedia storytelling theory, audience engagement theory and reception theory, we utilised semi-structured interviews to probe and understand viewer perceptions. Participants, composed of Arcane viewers who have played the League of Legends game and those who have not, provided wide-ranging insights. Findings reveal that not only previous experiences with the League of Legends universe affected participants’ engagement and reception of Arcane, but also that Arcane enriched the audience's perception of the League of Legends. This enhancement stemmed from the show's in-depth storytelling and character development, amplifying viewer understanding and emotional connection. These results highlight transmedia storytelling's potential to shape audience perceptions, offering vital cues for gaming and television content creators.

Models of the need-driven information search and the information appraisal process were formed from a comprehensive literature review of factors affecting perceived credibility and trust in online information. The social component of online credibility has not, to date, been thoroughly researched. This component's impact on the development of the perceived credibility of online information was examined in two experiments. In the first experiment, the impact of positive, mixed, and negative social feedback on the development of the perceived credibility of a web page was evaluated. In the second experiment, the effect of social feedback on credibility was examined under two levels of motivation for information use to investigate whether social feedback becomes less important as motivation to obtain quality information increases. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that type of feedback can influence perceived web page credibility. Pages with negative audience feedback received the lowest credibility ratings, while pages with positive audience feedback received the highest credibility ratings. Pages with mixed or no audience feedback received higher credibility ratings than pages with negative feedback, but lower credibility ratings than pages with positive feedback. In Experiment 2, high motivation did not impact the number of web page elements participants reported that they used to determine credibility. High motivation for information use also did not reduce the impact of audience feedback on perceived credibility.