The Digital Doorway (DD) is a non-standard computer system deployed to promote computer literacy amongst the underpriviledged communities in South Africa. Since its inception there has been no usability evaluation of the software installed on the DD. This study investigate the applicability of standard involved two cycles of design research phases to develop a set of multi-category heuristics for evaluating a selection of interfaces and applications installed on the DD. The heuristic evaluation method was found to be an appropriate method for the evaluating the usability of the software as well as the direct accessibility support provided on the DD. As a triangulation exercise the heuristic evaluation was complementary role of using a combination of evaluation methods. / Computing / M. Sc. (Information Systems)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Philip Doty. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The Digital Doorway (DD) is a non-standard computer system deployed to promote computer literacy amongst the underpriviledged communities in South Africa. Since its inception there has been no usability evaluation of the software installed on the DD. This study investigate the applicability of standard involved two cycles of design research phases to develop a set of multi-category heuristics for evaluating a selection of interfaces and applications installed on the DD. The heuristic evaluation method was found to be an appropriate method for the evaluating the usability of the software as well as the direct accessibility support provided on the DD. As a triangulation exercise the heuristic evaluation was complementary role of using a combination of evaluation methods. / Computing / M. Sc. (Information Systems)

The present study is aimed at analyzing the process of inclusion sociodigital through distribution equipment, from one perspective, ongoing education, provided by one of the projects articulated by public policies directed to Information Technologies in the educational environment. This is a case study in a school of public schools covered by the project One Laptop per Child. In this sense, the objective of this research is to analyze the contributions of ongoing education offered by UCA design for the pedagogical practices of teachers. The specific research objectives are: to analyze and describe the pedagogical practice of teachers in in-service training within the UCA; analyzing tools and methodologies adopted by teachers in their practice, after the implementation of the UCA design and verify |if| and |how| occurred / teaching process in the light of the guidelines of UCA Project occurs. Data analysis revealed the experiences of teachers linked the practice to the laptop as well as the relationship of theory and practice obtained by the process of ongoing education, allowing to know how was the process of inclusion sociodigital. We conclude that involve interesting projects implemented in school to a proposed intervention that maps to the constant review process, which teachers are protagonists, signaling the priority needs in relation to the school context in which they are inserted, which, without doubt provide the best targeting of new teaching practices. / O presente estudo está voltado à análise do processo de inclusão sociodigital por meio da distribuição de equipamentos, sob uma perspectiva de formação continuada em serviço, proporcionada por um dos projetos articulados pelas políticas públicas direcionadas às Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação no meio educacional. Trata-se de um Estudo de Caso em uma das escolas da rede pública estadual contempladas pelo projeto Um Computador por Aluno. Nesse sentido, o objetivo geral desta pesquisa é analisar as contribuições da formação continuada em serviço oferecida pelo Projeto UCA para as práticas pedagógicas dos professores. Os objetivos específicos da pesquisa são: analisar e descrever as prática pedagógicas dos professores em formação em serviço no âmbito do UCA; analisar instrumentos e metodologias adotados pelos professores em sua prática pedagógica, após a implementação do Projeto UCA e verificar se e como ocorreu/ocorre o processo de ensino à luz das diretrizes do Projeto UCA. As análises dos dados revelaram as experiências dos professores atreladas à prática com o laptop, bem como a relação da teoria e da prática obtidos pelo processo da formação continuada em serviço, permitindo conhecer como se deu o processo de inclusão sociodigital entre os envolvidos. Conclui-se que é necessário associar os projetos implementados na escola a uma proposta de intervenção direcionada a um processo de avaliação constante no qual os professores sejam os protagonistas, sinalizando as necessidades prioritárias de acordo com o contexto escolar no qual estão inseridos, o que, sem dúvida, proporcionaria um melhor direcionamento em suas práticas pedagógicas futuras.

Digital divide research has recently begun to address the functional gaps between Internet-connected technologies, specifically mobile and wired devices. This study uses nationally representative survey data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project to address this area of research and explores how smartphone-dependence compared to multi-modal access impacts Internet use among key demographic groups including race, sex, age, income, and education. This study also explores how demographic characteristics and smartphone use interact to affect reliance on smartphones and perceptions of the utility of mobile devices. Results show that race, sex, age, income, and education, exhibit different rates of smartphone-dependence, and also perform different online activities with their smartphones. Minorities and younger users are more likely to be smartphone-dependent and multi-modal users suggesting that these demographic groups are adopting mobile Internet technologies faster than Whites and older individuals. Minorities also use smartphones for more news and information activities than Whites, which contradicts traditional usage gap predictions.

The aim of this study is to determine whether the targeted university students have a more equal picture regarding Africa than what the Swedish society in general has, which by Sida’s researches has shown to be an oldfangled picture. The research is based on a quantitative method in terms of a survey that in total reached out to 286 responding students at the Linnaeus University in Växjö. The theoretical framework is based on the Digital Divide, Diffusion of Innovation and The model of Newsworthiness. The research discusses the oldfangled picture of Africa that remains within the Swedish society, why it remains and what different characters that is to be blamed for the formation, as well as it presents optional efforts that could be used to update the picture of Africa. The result from the survey shows that neither do Swedish students at the Linnaeus University possesses a more updated picture, even though they are said to belong to a privileged group in the society, in the manner of access to information from both media, education, Internet and other diverse sources. We conclude that there is a gap in the information distribution regarding Africa, what information that is available for the Swedish society is mostly negative and oldfangled. What can be argued to be an optional solution to this remaining problem is a closure of the digital divide, which would provide an important interpersonal communication channel that is missing today. This is further explained in the thesis with support of earlier researches together with theories and result.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

My dissertation examines the presence of the “North of England” in medieval texts, a presence that complicates the recent work of critics who focus upon an emergent nationalism in the Middle Ages. Far removed from the ideological center of the realm in London and derided as a backwards frontier, the North nevertheless maintains a distinctly generative intimacy within the larger realm as the seat of English history—the home of the monk Bede, the “Father of English History”—and as a frontline of defense against Scottish invasion. This often convoluted dynamic of intimacy, I assert, is played out in those literary conversations in which the South derides the North and vice versa—in, for example, the curt admonition of one shepherd that the sheep-stealer Mak in the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherd’s Play stop speaking in a southern tongue: that he “take out his southern tooth and insert a turd.” The North functioned as a contested geography, a literary character, and a spectral presence in the negotiation of a national identity in both canonical and non-canonical texts including Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, William of Malmesbury’s Latin histories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages. We see this contest, further, in the medieval universities wherein students segregated by their “nacion,” northern or southern, engaged in bloody clashes that, while local, nevertheless resonated at the national level. I argue that the outlying North actually operates as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the processes of imagining nation; that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism. My longue durée historicist approach to texts concerned with the North—either through narrative setting, character, author or textual provenance—ultimately uncovers the emerging dialectic of region and nation within the medieval North-South divide and reveals how England’s nationalist impulse found its greatest expression when it was threatened from within by the uncanny figure of the North. / text

Finding the shortest paths in a graph has been studied for a long time, and there are many main memory based algorithms dealing with this problem. Among these, Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm is one of the most commonly used efficient algorithms to the non-negative graphs. Even more efficient algorithms have been developed recently for graphs with particular properties such as the weights of edges fall into a range of integer. All of the mentioned algorithms require the graph totally reside in the main memory. Howevery, for very large graphs, such as the digital maps managed by Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the requirement cannot be satisfied in most cases, so the algorithms mentioned above are not appropriate. My objective in this thesis is to design and evaluate the performance of external memory (disk-based) shortest path algorithms and data structures to solve the shortest path problem in very large digital maps. In particular the following questions are studied:What have other researchers done on the shortest path queries in very large digital maps?What could be improved on the previous works? How efficient are our new shortest paths algorithms on the digital maps, and what factors affect the efficiency? What can be done based on the algorithm? In this thesis, we give a disk-based Dijkstra's-like algorithm to answer shortest path queries based on pre-processing information. Experiments based on our Java implementation are given to show what factors affect the running time of our algorithms.

Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) are NP-complete in general, however, there are many tractable subclasses that rely on the restriction of the structure of their underlying hypergraphs. It is a well-known fact, for instance, that CSPs whose underlying hypergraph is acyclic are tractable. Trying to define “nearly acyclic” hypergraphs led to the definition of various hypergraph decomposition methods. An important member in this class is the hypertree decomposition method, introduced by Gottlob et al. It possesses the property that CSPs falling into this class can be solved efficiently, and that hypergraphs in this class can be recognized efficiently as well. Apart from polynomial tractability, complexity analysis has shown, that both afore-mentioned problems lie in the low complexity class LOGCFL and are thus moreover efficiently parallelizable. A parallel algorithm has been proposed for the “evaluation problem”, however all algorithms for the “recognition problem” presented to date are sequential. The main contribution of this dissertation is the creation of an object oriented programming library including a task scheduler which allows the parallelization of a whole range of computational problems, fulfilling certain complexity-theoretic restrictions. This library merely requires the programmer to provide the implementation of several classes and methods, representing a general alternating algorithm, while the mechanics of the task scheduler remain hidden. In particular, we use this library to create an efficient parallel algorithm, which computes hypertree decompositions of a fixed width. Another result of a more theoretical nature is the definition of a new type of decomposition method, called Balanced Decompositions. Solving CSPs of bounded balanced width and recognizing such hypergraphs is only quasi-polynomial, however still parallelizable to a certain extent. A complexity-theoretic analysis leads to the definition of a new complexity class hierarchy, called the DC-hierarchy, with the first class in this hierarchy, DC1 , precisely capturing the complexity of solving CSPs of bounded balanced width.