Distributed Cognition in E-Inclusion

The digital divide describes the fact that the world can be divided into people who do and people who don't have access to - and the capability to use - modern information technology. E-inclusion is a social movement whose goal is to end this divide.The biggest hinderance for people who fail to utilize technology despite availability is the lack of literacy and the inconsistency that digital interfaces have with the socio-environment of the user. This research attempts to study the importance of ethnography and awareness of the context in which an illiterate or disabled individual responds to digital interfaces. The papers involved in this study range from current research in introducing technology in developing countries to the developement of context-aware tools that facilitate cognition and learning of new technology. The focus of this study it to understand existing approaches and discover opportunities where distributed cognition can be employed to facilite future research.

List of Papers

Pawar, U. S., Pal, J. (accepted, 2006). Multiple mice for computers in education in developing countries, IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, 2006.

Rangaswamy, N. and K. Toyama. (2005) Sociology of ICTs: the Myth of the Hybernating Village. HCI International 2005 (Las Vegas), July 2005.

Lieberman, H. and Selker, T. (2000). Out of context: Computer systems that adapt to, and learn from, context. IBM Systems Journal Vol. 39, Nos. 3 & 4, pp. 617-632.

Adams, R., Langdon, P. and Clarkson, P.J. (2002). A systematic basis for developing cognitive assessment methods for assistive technology. In -Keates, S., Langdon, P., Clarkson, P.J. and Robinson, P. (Eds.). 52-62. London: Springer Verlag.

Giovanni Moura de Holanda,Juliano Castilho Dall'Antonia (2006), An Approach for e-inclusion:Bringing illiterates and disabled people into play. Journal of Technology Management and Innovation

Gerhard Fischer, Ernesto Arias, Stefan Carmien, Hal Eden,Andrew Gorman, Shin’ichi Konomi, James Sullivan.(2004)Supporting Collaboration and Distributed Cognition in Context-Aware Pervasive Computing Environments. HCI Consortium "Computing Off the Desktop"

Medhi, I., Sagar, A. and Toyama K. (2006) Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Berkeley, USA), May 2006

gWeather

Here you go!

gWeather

The component flow diagram from the presentation

The code currently works only for the locations of San Jose, San Fransisco, Beverly Hills, La Jolla and San Diego. Enter the zip code of every city in the location. Right now we are able to retrieve 3-day weather information. This will be updated to over a week's info. I'm planning to work on this through the summer and I'll keep my updates posted here!

will miss this course :-(

Progress

I am now able to parse hourly data comfortably! I have written a script to display weather icon and temperature in the "event box". Only work left is to loop the code for every event box*. I am also yet to write the function that takes the city name/zip code and retrieves the latitude and longitude co-ordinates. So far I have been hard-coding the values for eventbox and geographic co-ordinates. The dirty work is over but some fine-tuning is needed.

As we have already decided that we will display weather information for for events in "My Calendar", I don't have to worry about "Busy" event states, for which we won't get the event location.


*event box : the gCal element that presents the event details.

Theory of Design and My Dilemma!

I found this quote in Brian Sooy's Blog

"Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you've done, then they know exactly what they want, but it's not what you did."

In this project, I play the dual roles of both the developer and the user. As a user, I had high demands and expectations, for what the script should do! As the developer, I need to be more wary of the infinite loops that my code could get into! When I triumphantly managed to parse the XML from www.weather.com, and moved on to the next milestone, I realized that the XML that I parsed was utterly useless and I provided me only the current weather! Here is the link to a sample RSS feed (for La Jolla). What I need is hourly forecast and weather.com can only provide that in a dynamic wepage (link). I would then have to perform a series of getElementById() and compare the strings to the times I want. This becomes very complicated as the html elements I need do not have IDs.


An alternative source (provided by Kelly) is Weather.gov. This provides an Experimental National Digital Forecast Database XML, that can provide hourly information (in three hour blocks). The request/response process is made possible by the NDFD XML Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) server. The server is updated hourly. Hitch: One needs to provide the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of the location (not zipcode, not city name!). Fortunately for us, Geocode provides the latitude and longitude co-ordinates given the zipcode or city name.

NDFD XML contains forecasts for any combination of the following meteorological parameters, including Max/Min Temperature, 3 hourly Temperature etc. The NDFDgen() function is accessed by Client to retrieve the parameters and it requires some user supplied input such as Latitude, Longitude, Start and End-Time. However when I tested the function, it returned weather information for a date in 1970!

The National Weather Service has also announced that it would provide Rss feeds (making life easier for everyone!), but as luck would have it, it would be released on June 6th 2006, two days before our presentation!!


So now, I aim to spend a few more caffeine-stimuated hours tonight fixing this situation and hope that by dawn, I can provide and inter-connect between gCal supplied date and time information and weather.gov database. If this gets to work then I guess I'd just have to go to bed!

The Blank Keyboard!!

For those who type with their eyes' closed!!!

http://www.daskeyboard.com/

Project Updates

This is been a very progressive week. Plenty of coffee, late-nights, and more importantly: Learning!

1. RSS feeds from www.weather.com were parsed. These feeds were previously generated from a php scripts.
2. The xml file is accessed through Asynchonous requests (hence Ajax) such as http_request
3. XML processing using Javascript functions retrieves the specific strings
4. The string is further parsed to extract only the valuable data (i.e. date, weather)
   
5. The string is displayed a an element added to the calendar

To do:
1. Improve display of data
2. Design stylesheets for pop-ups

web 3.0?

Berners' Lee's comments on yet another .com boom. Only this time, its not a bubble.