Though researchers have discussed adolescents' uses of social media and Web 2.0 texts outside school, little research has analyzed how such texts are used in classrooms. This study examines various perspectives on a group of high school students engaged in blogging as part of two language arts courses over an eight-month period. Research questions focused on how students conceived of and interacted with their readers, how they used structural features of the blogging platform to connect their blogs to one another, and how discourses of freedom of speech online led a few students to transgress school norms. To answer these questions, I studied examples of eighty classroom blogs from my own high school students, conducted interviews with eight students, and maintained researcher field notes. I analyzed this data using a combination of discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, while applying social network analysis to understand how the blogs were connected through the key feature known as Following. My findings suggest that the connectivity offered by Web 2.0 enabled students to reach and communicate with authentic audiences who could recognize and validate their identity performances. Further, I argue that though certain features of Web 2.0 media are incongruous with many conventional classroom norms, teachers should work to bridge those gaps.

Orientador: Antonio Francisco Magnoni / Banca: Marcos Américo / Banca: Glaucia Eneida Davino / Resumo: Discute-se a influência do advento das mídias digitais no processo de criação de roteiros para produções audiovisuais ficcionais brasileiras. Contextualiza-se a relação entre tecnologias e narrativas e também da produção de roteiros audiovisuais. Em seguida, discute-se esta influência a partir de um estudo de caso múltiplo, acompanhado de entrevistas em profundidade com criadores de produções brasileiras para mídias digitais / Abstracts: This discusses the influence of digital media in the process of creating Brazilian fictional screenplays. It adresses the relationship between technologies, narratives, and screenplay production. Then, this subject is approached from a multi-case study and in-depth interview with creators of Brazilian productions / Mestre

Activists are increasingly relying on online tactics and digital tools to address social issues. This shift towards reliance on the Internet has been shown to have salient implications for social movement formation processes; however, the effectiveness of such actions for achieving specific goals remains largely unaddressed. This study explores how the types of Internet activism and digital tools used by activism campaigns relate to success in meeting stated goals. To address these questions, the study builds on an existing framework that distinguishes between four distinct types of Internet activism: brochure-ware, which is oriented towards information distribution; e-mobilizations, which treats digital media merely as a tool for mobilizing individuals offline; online participation, which is characterized by wholly online actions such as e-petitions or virtual protests; and online organizing, where organization of a movement takes place exclusively via the internet with no face-to-face coordination by organizers. Ordinal regression models were conducted utilizing cross-sectional data from the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS), a compilation of information on 426 activism campaigns from around the world that began between 2010 and 2012; additional data regarding the types of Internet activism used was also appended to the GDADS using source materials provided within the data set. The findings suggest that use of the Internet for mobilizing offline actions is negatively associated with campaign success, but that this does not hold true for protest actions organized without use of digital tools. E-petition use was also found to be negatively related to achievement of campaign goals.

Middle school teachers at a school district integrated digital media into the math and literacy curriculum by using programs such as Success Maker and Reading 180 in the classroom. Teachers received training on best practices for integrating digital media in their teaching. No research had been conducted to examine the experiences of these middle school teachers with the integration of digital media into the curriculum. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to address that gap. The research questions focused on teachers' outlooks on digital media as a teaching tool and the instructional strategies they used. The conceptual framework of this study was based on Bandura's social cognitive theory because students may achieve higher levels of academic achievement through the integration of digital media into the curriculum. Purposeful sampling was used to select 6 urban public regular middle schools teachers who taught either math or language arts and had integrated digital media into the curriculum. Face-to-face interviews were conducted. Archival documents on the school district's digital media use were also examined. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed strategies that literacy and math teachers used to individualize instruction, make instruction relevant to students, and integrate digital media throughout their lessons on a daily basis. Study findings may offer insight on instructional strategies that middle school math and literacy teachers may use to integrate digital media into the curriculum. Such knowledge may help students at this school pass standardized tests and graduate.

Pattern is a familiar concept ever present in our daily lives, existing in many material forms, observable in varied states, and able to be created from a diverse range of processes and events. Natural pattern forms, such as biological and chemical patterns, have been extensively studied, often within the digital environment because of its capacity to process large amounts of data which aids investigation of not only their characteristics but their potentiality. However, human designed physical patterns, while having been investigated extensively in terms of their historical, geographic and cultural significance and their aesthetic and/or mathematical characteristics, have not been fully investigated in terms of their evolutionary potential. This project explores one example of human designed physical patterns, crochet lace patterns ??? which have remained largely stable and consistent throughout various technological transformations such as the industrial revolution ??? in order to explore pattern as a process and investigate the potential for these patterns to become emergent. This exploration translated the patterns into the digital environment where, as data, the patterns become available for manipulation using a generative art practice approach. By translating the patterns into a digital environment and engaging with the pattern forms at their systematic core, where crochet pattern instructions and software programming scripts operate similarly as ???code???, this research provided a deeper understanding of the patterns and allowed exploration of whether a pattern???s developmental path can be altered to create new emergent patterns. This research draws on systems theory and systems aesthetics and their application within contemporary generative art practice and informs visual arts in several areas including showing how aesthetic values shift as work becomes cross-disciplinary and enters the digital environment, and how the introduction and location of innovation affects the relationship between the original and its copy.

The advent of digital media has affected the nature of global communications, amplifying the interaction between populations and massively expanding the information load that an audience may be forced to consider. The Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) has proposed a digital strategy for the 2008 Olympics, which will open up a wide range of challenges for information gathering and dissemination. My research project has two related components: The first is an exegesis which sets the context for the project, identifies its main issues and presents a background research plan that, on the one hand, focuses on journalists and their likely orientations to a Digital Media Centre such as the one I propose, and, on the other, seeks to discover in other digital media centres the elements of best practice and innovation that might be adopted for Beijing. The second is a development project to explore and present innovation in Internet-based digital media operations, as exemplified by the challenges presented by the 2008 Olympic Games.

The advent of digital media has affected the nature of global communications, amplifying the interaction between populations and massively expanding the information load that an audience may be forced to consider. The Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) has proposed a digital strategy for the 2008 Olympics, which will open up a wide range of challenges for information gathering and dissemination. My research project has two related components: The first is an exegesis which sets the context for the project, identifies its main issues and presents a background research plan that, on the one hand, focuses on journalists and their likely orientations to a Digital Media Centre such as the one I propose, and, on the other, seeks to discover in other digital media centres the elements of best practice and innovation that might be adopted for Beijing. The second is a development project to explore and present innovation in Internet-based digital media operations, as exemplified by the challenges presented by the 2008 Olympic Games.

An ongoing debate surrounds the question of whether digital media can promote participatory democracy. A qualitative case study was conducted on Barack Obama’s campaign social networking site, my.barackobama.com, in order to investigate the ways in which the website promotes or discourages participatory democracy. For a rich analysis, the case study drew on various relevant theoretical perspectives, including the concepts of participatory democracy and digital democracy. The case study included a content analysis of the website and interviews with members of groups on the site. The study found that my.barackobama.com promoted political knowledge and non-electoral participation, but failed to promote political discussion and community. Consequently, the recommendations highlighted the importance of an online public sphere. The findings of this case study add to the research literature about the political use of digital media, and they also add new information about Barack Obama’s digital media strategies.

This thesis explores the application of vision-based augmented reality in formal and informal educational environments. It focuses on the common practices, concerns, and priorities that developers and content creators in each environment frequently encounter, offering insights into how these experiences are changing with the incorporation of new digital media technologies and the hardware platforms that support them. The research outlined in this thesis uses qualitative methods, assembled around a series of twelve hour-long interviews with highly-experienced educators, developers, researchers, and designers, and analyzed using a grounded theory approach. This thesis introduces original research about the role of computer vision-based augmented reality as an educational medium, a topical discussion in information studies, museum studies, learning sciences, and a number of other fields, and makes a theoretical commitment to addressing the ways that material and virtual objects come to interact meaningfully in a variety of learning environments.

The meaning of term &ldquo / representation&rdquo / has shifted in both relevancy and definition in the discipline of architecture with the introduction of computational design technologies. The assumption of this study is that the selected mode of representation has the power to affect the process of design and even the production of architecture. At the present time, while the discipline is witnessing a change in its tendencies and terminologies, such as from drawing to 3D modeling, from construction to fabrication, and from geometry to topology, it is crucial to look at the &ldquo / conventions&rdquo / of architectural representation that are identified through &ldquo / projections,&rdquo / and particularly the &ldquo / orthographic set&rdquo / . This study aims to challenge the prejudices against the &ldquo / orthographic set&rdquo / that consider it to be an ineffective or inadequate tool for representation in the contemporary practice of architecture following the emergence of &ldquo / digitization&rdquo / . It is the claim of this thesis that the &ldquo / orthographic set&rdquo / is actually a methodology that is still powerful in the visualization of the &ldquo / rational&rdquo / thinking processes of design, and is still a highly pertinent technique in the representation and production of architecture. With the arrival of computational design technologies to the practice of architecture, the &ldquo / visibility&rdquo / of its representations have started to blur / and considering the dialectics between architectural representation and the architectural object, while Modern Architecture can be assessed as the transformation of the orthographic set into a declaration of a stylistic manifesto, in the digital age the question arises of what makes architecture visible, and whether it is possible to come up with a &ldquo / new&rdquo / definition of style.