In any standard school class there will be a wide range of learning style preferences. To develop a writing curriculum that meets the needs of each style is a pursuit that has been only superficially explored. This study has addressed some of the issues involved in understanding the writing needs of a wide range of styles. It has accomplished this by the researcher studying one class of ten-year-olds through becoming their full-time teacher for one year. A programme of text production was planned and implemented that took the students from monomodal, handwritten texts, via wordprocessed monomodal and partially multimodal texts, to fully multimodal computer-mediated texts. A weak pedagogical framing was deliberately established as the learning environment, and computer technology was constantly available. By observing the changes over a ten-month period and analysing in detail the learning environment that was the same for all 26 students, it has been possible to see strong patterns emerging from the data. This patterning has been matched with the cognitive styles of the students as assessed by a cognitive styles analysis. Some students, mainly those with a strong imager cognitive style and who were struggling or failing with literacy in the monomodal sense, have been shown to require multimodal scaffolding to successfully communicate with texts.

In any standard school class there will be a wide range of learning style preferences. To develop a writing curriculum that meets the needs of each style is a pursuit that has been only superficially explored. This study has addressed some of the issues involved in understanding the writing needs of a wide range of styles. It has accomplished this by the researcher studying one class of ten-year-olds through becoming their full-time teacher for one year. A programme of text production was planned and implemented that took the students from monomodal, handwritten texts, via wordprocessed monomodal and partially multimodal texts, to fully multimodal computer-mediated texts. A weak pedagogical framing was deliberately established as the learning environment, and computer technology was constantly available. By observing the changes over a ten-month period and analysing in detail the learning environment that was the same for all 26 students, it has been possible to see strong patterns emerging from the data. This patterning has been matched with the cognitive styles of the students as assessed by a cognitive styles analysis. Some students, mainly those with a strong imager cognitive style and who were struggling or failing with literacy in the monomodal sense, have been shown to require multimodal scaffolding to successfully communicate with texts.

<p>Uppsatsen syfte var att belysa hur riktlinjer för lek- och lärspel bör utformas till barn med läs och inlärningssvårigheter. Detta i bakgrund av lärare och specialpedagogers rekommendationer och önskningar. Uppsatsen är ämnad för att behandla användargränssnitt, interaktion, struktur och navigation och motivation. Med dessa som utgångspunkt framställa hur lek- och lärspel ska kunna konstrueras till det bättre för barn med läs och inlärningssvårigheter. För att kunna uppnå vårt syfte genomfördes en kvalitativ undersökning, i form av strukturerade och halvstrukturerade intervjuer samt observationer. 2 lärare och 2 speciellpedagoger från särskolor intervjuades utifrån uppsatsens tematiska ramar. 2 elever observerades från en särskola. Resultatet visade bland annat på att allt bör vara enkelt och att det ska finnas en klarhet i allt. Det får inte vara komplicerat. Det centrala i slutsatserna som framkom var att grafiken har stor betydelse och hur gränssnittet är upplagt gällande knappar etcetera.</p>

<p>Denna uppsats behandlar hur multimedia för lärande designas och används på allmänna kunskapsinstitutioner som museum och Science Centers i Sverige. Syftet med studien var att kartlägga designers förhållningssätt till designprocessen samt till aspekter som lärande, upplevelse och multimedia när en multimedial applikation utformas. Ytterligare syften var att identifiera problem och avslutningsvis utforma och presentera riktlinjer för design av multimedia för allmänna kunskapsinstitutioner. Studien, som antog en kvalitativ ansats, initierades med inledande intervjuer med en extern designer och två utställningsdesigners. Dessa intervjuer vägledde sedan frågeställningarnas utformning till de sex huvudintervjuerna, som hade en semistrukturerad prägel. Det har framgått i studien bland annat att utställningsdesign är en komplex uppgift som sätter höga krav på designgruppen och dess kompetens, och att det från Science Centers sida krävs en högre grad av involvering från discipliner som ny teknik och multimedia men även från interaktionsdesign, IKT och pedagogik. Sammanfattningsvis visar studien att designers ofta tar problemområdet för givet och designar utifrån sina egna intressen och sällan involverar besökaren eller användaren.</p>

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The purpose of this thesis is to explore the design of a multimedia extension Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) for a reconfigurable processor. An Extendable Multimedia Module (EM3) was designed as an optional module for X32V. X32V is a prototype configurable processor simulator developed at Oregon State University by John Mark Matson and Dr. Ben Lee. The EM3 ISA uses Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) type instructions to improve the performance of multimedia applications on X32V such as MPEG-4. Two benchmarks based on certain stages of MPEG-4 decompression were developed to test the initial performance enhancements of EM3. The results of these benchmark tests indicate a several fold improvement in clock cycles and the number of instructions executed. This improvement demonstrates the performance increase of X32V and illustrates the effectiveness of SIMD type multimedia extensions. / Graduation date: 2004

The multimedia capabilities of computers have recently become the focus of computer developers due to the increasing demand for advanced computer graphics and new media capabilities, such as video conferencing, 3-D visualization, and animation. To support these multimedia capabilities, specialized graphics hardware, such as MPEG encoding/decoding card, 3-D graphics card, video card, and sound card, are widely used today, but the price of a separate board is expensive. Therefore, the processor must be redesigned from the ground up to handle new media applications. Although these multimedia functions are typically consist of simple operations, their sheer volume of computation creates a flood of data. To support such large volumes of multimedia data computation, Sun Microsystems implemented a specialized instruction set, called VIS[Trademark] (Visual Instruction Set), which is Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) style of instruction. The basic concept behind VIS is to break the pipeline of the Floating Point Unit (FPU) into two or four parallel pipelines to perform four or eight separate 16-bit or 8-bit integer additions in one cycle, instead of one floating-point addition. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in South Korea has researched a 64-bit multimedia enhanced on-chip multiprocessor named Raptor, which has quad processors and shares a common Graphics Control Unit (GCU). Raptor implements multimedia support directly on the processor using specialized instructions, GCU Instructions, which are variant of VIS instructions, and hardware supports. Each processor of Raptor executes multimedia applications independently and the independent streams or threads of multimedia instructions compute for and share a single GCU. The major theme of this thesis is to design the GCU architecture and to simulate it. The GCU can simultaneously execute the independent instruction streams from four General Processors (GP) and resolves the dependencies among the instructions dynamically. / Graduation date: 1998

Immersive Fictions: Modern Narrative, New Media, Mixed Reality presents an approach to narrative fiction that responds to the expanded role of virtual environments in contemporary life. Despite the growing number of daily activities mediated by digital technologies, the virtual is still widely characterized as the opposite of the real. The pervasiveness of this perspective is demonstrated in the frequent use of immersion metaphors to describe virtual environments. I argue that this practice perpetuates an ontological binary that obscures the ways in which the virtual enters and participates in a wired culture. Immersive Fictions reimagines the relationship between media and its users in this context in order to trace the circuits of interaction running across the supposed boundary between the virtual and real. Because the expectation that media-generated environments be "immersive" proceeds from the long tradition of describing a reader's experience of being "lost in a book," this dissertation takes the form of a comparative study of videogames and print literature and relies on an interdisciplinary approach combining new media studies and literary criticism. I demonstrate how print works such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and videogames such as Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Silicon Knight's Eternal Darkness, CyberConnect2's .hack//Infection position their audience not as vicarious visitors to non-actual worlds, but as book readers or game players. Their embodied engagement then becomes itself a site of the fiction as the conflicts animating these narratives are shown to be active in the material task and cultural significance of reading and play. As a result, I argue for a new understanding of "realism," exemplified by Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare series and Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, which addresses the virtualities of fiction, not in terms of their representational or even immersive capacities, but with regard to how they situate their audience in the context of the social, political, and ethical forces bearing on their interactions with the virtual.

This thesis examines the struggle between the camps of narratology and ludology over video game narrative and what that struggle means for the existence of emergent narratives in video games. It argues that emergent narratives are clear and present in current video games but too stringent definitions can complicate their recognition. Emergent narratives are not flights of fancy but definable and repeatable narrative structures. / Video games can sustain a range of narrative structural possibilities, both unconventional and traditional, but perhaps the most interesting of these possibilities is an emergent narrative. Narrative emergence encompasses narrative structures where a player's choices drive and shape the events of the particular game's storyline. Video games support such narratives as the result of an interactive exchange between the computer game and its player. This thesis analyzes these interactive narrative exchanges as they occur in Tale of Tales' The Path, Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, and other recent game titles in contrast with choices and structures from more traditional games. / Furthermore, this thesis discusses, with help from Psychoanalytic theory, why players seek out and play through emergent narratives. This structure's entrancing power embodies the strengths of narratives from mediums over. Players play to satisfy their own curiosity for knowing the end and feeling out death. When gamers play through emergent narratives, they play for a narrative and a final conclusion of their own making.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: Playout buffer; rate selection; streaming multimedia; wireless networks; bandwith estimation. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-202).