2009 Publications | Publicações de 2009 (IV)

This is the final post in this series, after the previous ones.

It includes a few papers about students' work, including those from SLACTIONS, and the first two papers resulting from my participation in the VITA project.

Pinto, Mércia; Varajão, João; Morgado, Leonel (2009). Business simulator in the Second Life virtual world. In Proceeedings of the CENTERIS 2009 – Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems, 7-9, October 2009, Ofir, Portugal, ISBN 978-972-669-929-3, p. 727, Vila Real, Portugal: UTAD.

Mércia developed a 3D model of a company, identified the roles of various elements (managers, secretaries, etc.), and programmed simple textual interactions with virtual dolls, to "chat" with them. A normal poster.

Gens, Luís; Paredes, Hugo; Martins, Paulo; Fonseca, Benjamim; Mor, Yishay; Morgado, Leonel (2009). MobMaps: Towards a Shared Environment for Collaborative Social Activism. In Carriço, Luís; Baloian, Nelson, & Fonseca, Benjamim (Eds.) Groupware: Design, Implementation, and Use - 15th International Workshop, CRIWG 2009, Peso da Régua, Douro, Portugal, September 13-17, 2009, Proceedings, ISBN 978-3-642-04215-7, ISSN 0302-9743, pp. 295-302. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Luis and Hugo developed a simple cellphone application for denouncing human rights issues, inspired in the field work of Machsom Watch, "an organisation of peace activist Israeli women against the Israeli Occupation of the territories and the systematic repression of the Palestinian nation." Eventually Luis would travel to the border between Israel and Palestine, testing this for one week and actually making a great field work assessing requirements, and his experiences are detailed in a blog, which is a great read (if you know Portuguese).

Morgado, Leonel; Cruz, Maria Gabriel; Tavares, Ana Teresa; Moura, Christophe; Pinto, Rute Bastardo (2009). Livro de actividades em ToonTalk para o pré-escolar. In Veloso, Ana; Roque, Licínio; Mealha, Óscar (Eds.) "Videojogos 2009, Aveiro, 26 e 27 de Novembro de 2009 - Actas", ISBN 978-972-789-299-0. Braga, Portugal: Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências dos Videojogos.

Some years ago, I helped a full class of students of the Early Childhood Education programme of studies develop computer activities in ToonTalk. Then finally, in 2008/2009, a couple of students from our Communications & Multimedia programme of studies took up the challenge of turning those activities into a no-text-only-pictures book, for use in preschools and kindergartens. I supervised them, helped refine the activities, and Prof. Maria Cruz created opening texts, with the educational goals of each. The result is a book to be published by Cnotinfor, and this paper details the process of its creation.

Rodrigues, Nuno; Magalhães, Luís; Moura, João Paulo; Chalmers, Alan; Santos, Filipe; Morgado, Leonel (2009). ArchHouseGenerator – A Framework for House Generation. In Morgado, Leonel; Zagalo, Nelson; Boa-Ventura, Ana (Eds.) "Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2009 International Conference - Life, imagination, and word using metaverse platforms", pp. 11-20, ISBN 978-972-669-924-8. Vila Real, Portugal: Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro.

Nuno is the doctoral student of some of my colleagues, who is developing a great system to generate architecturally-correct 3D houses automatically. It's not that often that you have a computer science student reading "Vitruvii De Architectura". I and Filipe helped make the connections between his work and virtual world platforms.

Bernardo, Martine; Rabadão, Carlos; Morgado, Leonel; Gonçalves, Ramiro (2009). A phenomenographic study about the future of the electronic commerce in the Second Life. In Morgado, Leonel; Zagalo, Nelson; Boa-Ventura, Ana (Eds.) "Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2009 International Conference - Life, imagination, and word using metaverse platforms", pp. 97-101, ISBN 978-972-669-924-8. Vila Real, Portugal: Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro.

Martine was a great MSc student who set out to find out how current Second Life residents foresee the development of e-commerce in virtual worlds. She developed a strict phenomenographic approach to inquiry and analysis of the data, and came up with several interesting results - and Second Life residents are more conservative than one might think!

Rodrigues, Clara; Coelho, Dalila; Morgado, Leonel; Varajão, João; Haidimoschi, Aura; Doppler, Gerhard; Koivusalo, Hillevi; Jokinen, Paivi; Velegrakis, George; Sancin, Chiara; Carmenini, Valentina (2009). Virtual Learning for the management of successful SMEs in Europe. In Morgado, Leonel; Zagalo, Nelson; Boa-Ventura, Ana (Eds.) "Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2009 International Conference - Life, imagination, and word using metaverse platforms", pp. 165-170, ISBN 978-972-669-924-8. Vila Real, Portugal: Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro.

Velegrakis, George; Rodrigues, Clara; Coelho, Dalila; Varajão, João; Morgado, Leonel; Dominguez, Caroline; Sancín, Chiara; Doppler, Gerhard; Koivusalo, Hillevi; Lakanen, Erja; Haidimoschi, Aura (2009). Profile of the SME manager - Competences defining the profile of the European entrepreneur. In Proceeedings of the CENTERIS 2009 – Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems, 7-9, October 2009, Ofir, Portugal, ISBN 978-972-669-929-3, pp. 725-726, Vila Real, Portugal: UTAD.

In 2009, I and a few colleagues embarked on a project funded by the Europan Commission, under a proposal of the Higher School of Education of Beja. Called the VITA project, partners from 6 countries are trying to use Second Life to teach management concepts to managers of small and medium enterprises. These two papers are the first outputs. The SLACTIONS paper details the project's rationale, and the CENTERIS paper is the result of an European-wide survey of what academic, professional, and government sources state as competences an SME manager should be skilled in.

2009 Publications | Publicações de 2009 (III)

Following the previous posts, here's the third part of 2009's papers.

My research team and students had four papers in the first two issues of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research in 2009 - great!

Morgado, Leonel (2009). Interconnecting virtual worlds, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 3 (1), 4-7.

In the position paper above, I make a parallel between the emergence of virtual worlds technology and the emergence of the Web, which I witnessed, and present the argument for a Metaverse of interlinked virtual worlds of varying technologies.

Valério, S.; Pereira, J.; Morgado, L.; Mestre, P.; Serôdio, C.; Carvalho, F. (2009). Second Life Information Desk System using Instant Messaging and Short Messaging Service Technologies. In Rebolledo-Mendez, G.; Liarokapis, F.; Freitas, S. (Eds.) "IEEE First International Conference - Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, Coventry, UK, 23-24 March 2009", pp. 125-132. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society.

The paper above was the output the first research cooperation on virtual worlds between UTAD and PT Inovação in 2008, the research arm of Portugal Telecom - the PtInworld project. It details a system to use technology developed previously by this team, so that a small company or organization can provide continuous staffing of virtual-world spaces, without actually needing to have a staff member logged into Second Life all the time. This was the idea that led to the HELPMI project, which was developed in 2009, and will be presented this year (2010).

Pereira, A.; Martins, P.; Morgado, L.; Fonseca, B. (2009). A virtual environment study in entrepreneurship education of young children, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (2).

Ângela is one of my doctoral students. She took up a huge risk, in deciding to identify the requirements of using a virtual world platform (Activeworlds) in primary schoold to teach entrepreneurship education, and providing & testing technical solutions for them. While doing this, she also had a baby, and still managed to be completing her thesis - no small endeavour! In this paper, she presents the results of field work in primary schools and the technical requirements that were identified.

Esteves, M.; Fonseca, B.; Morgado, L.; Martins, P. (2009). Using Second Life for Problem Based Learning in Computer Science Programming, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (2).

This was another part of Micaela's field work, which I already mentioned in the previous post.

Lopes, A.; Pires, B.; Cardoso, M.; Santos, A.; Peixinho, F.; Sequeira, P.; Morgado, L.; Paredes, H.; Foguet, O. (2009). Use of a virtual world system in sports coach education for reproducing team handball movements,Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (2).

Lopes, António, Pires, Bruno, Cardoso, Márcio, Santos, Arnaldo, Peixinho, Filipe, Sequeira, Pedro & Morgado, Leonel (2009). System for Defining and Reproducing Handball Strategies in Second Life On-Demand for Handball Coaches' Education. In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications - ED-MEDIA 2009, June 22-26, 2009, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, ISBN 1-880094-73-8, pp. 3954-3961. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

These two papers are the first outputs of an idea which is now becoming more focused, involving one of my PhD students and two MSc students: the use of Second Life to support the training of handball coaches, presented in Portuguese in 2008, but now coming to fruition. It was first presented in the ED-MEDIA conference (the second paper above) and then detailed and refined in the JVWR. This is now evolving into the cornerstone of our effort to create a data representation for virtual world actions and events, with the cooperation of Nuno Silva from my research centre, GECAD, but that will be the theme for future papers...

2009 Publications | Publicações de 2009 (II)

OK, here's the first part of this series, as mentioned in the previous post.

The year started out nicely with three papers by my doctoral students and co-supervisors:

Esteves, Micaela; Fonseca, Benjamim; Morgado, Leonel; Martins, Paulo (2009). Contextualization of Programming Learning: A Virtual Environment Study. In Proceedings of the 38th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, October 22 – 25, 2008, Saratoga Springs, NY, pp. 17-22, ISBN 978-1-4244-1970-8. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE.

Esteves, Micaela; Antunes, Ricardo; Fonseca, Benjamim; Morgado, Leonel; Martins, Paulo (2009). Using Second Life in Programming's Communities of Practice. In LNCS 5411, Proceedings of CRIWG 08, 14th Collaboration Researchers' International Workshop on Groupware, Omaha, Nebraska, September 14-18, 2008. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Micaela has been doing a great job, determining how Second Life's environment can be used to introduce college students to programming. These two papers detail the ongoing developments of her field work. (An upcoming paper at the British Journal of Educational Technology will put everything in perspective, presenting an overall framework, but these papers have the hard details.)

Santos, Filipe; Fonseca, Benjamim; Morgado, Leonel; Martins, Paulo (2009). A Version Control System as a tool and methodology to foster children’s collaboration in spatial configuration decision tasks. In LNCS 5411, Proceedings of CRIWG 08, 14th Collaboration Researchers' International Workshop on Groupware, Omaha, Nebraska, September 14-18, 2008. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Filipe's work has been, delightfully, a case study of how a nice idea can in turn generate something even nicer, unexpectedly. He started by developing a system for children to be able to compare different spatial organizations of objects in a playground (you can see a video at http://www.amelia-project.org/), and this in turn led to the creation and development of the concept of a different kind of version-control system: not just a "3D wiki", was we affectuosly called it originally, but a multi-linear version control system, with a visual interface that renders it easy to use. Filipe is now finishing his thesis, but this idea will likely be developed into a couple of excellent papers to be submitted in 2010.

2009 Publications | Publicações de 2009 (I)

2009 was a productive year. I co-authored in 16 papers, as many as in 2008, albeit I am waiting for the post to drop a paper magazine printed in Brazil with another one - so the actual number may end up being 17.

That's too many to cover in a single post, so I'll spread them over several, and comment.

As always, the papers can be downloaded from my home page at UTAD.

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2009 foi um ano produtivo. Fui coautor de 16 trabalhos, tantos quanto em 2008, embora esteja a aguardar que o carteiro me traga uma revista impressa no Brasil com mais um, pelo que o número efectivo poderá acabar por ser 17.

São demasiados para tratar num único post, pelo que os vou distribuir por vários, com comentários.

Como sempre, os trabalhos podem ser descarregados a partir da minha página pessoal na UTAD.