Municipalities around the world have become increasingly reliant upon digital technologies in their everyday operations. In pursuit of a faster, cheaper, and more efficient local government, service platforms and applications that mediate citizen-government interactions, smart city infrastructures, and automated decision-making systems have proliferated. More recently, digital technologies are also sought to address socially complex issues and foster civic engagement. These ambitions, motivated by both rational and democratic perspectives, however, confront many challenges such as designing with wide heterogeneous groups, navigating organizational structures, and dealing with the political agendas and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholders. Designing digital technologies for municipalities, therefore, requires an ability to address the technical, social, institutional, and political challenges critically, practically, and holistically. This hybrid workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to (1) explore how this could be achieved and (2) map the existing and emerging challenges and opportunities for designing public digital services and technologies.
Learning is a lifelong process and the ways of learning and teaching have been changing in recent years, reform traditional classroom teaching to interactive, entertaining, and engaging teaching. Recent years have shown the popularity of educational games as a pedagogical method for children and youth in particular. Games are often employed to engage, inspire and motivate learners, as well as to support teachers in delivering various pedagogical content. Learning and teaching methods are in the transition phase. However, only scarce literature exists on the utilization of educational games with older adults and the elderly. Additionally, the understanding of how accessible educational games are for the senior citizens is still limited. Educational games are often utilized in classrooms, next to traditional teaching methods. In such situations, the accessibility of a whole gaming session must be taken into consideration to ensure inclusion. It is thought that there are general barriers to their use of (game) technology such as psychological apprehension of technology, as well as physiological barriers, e.g., visual, hearing and other bodily impairments. Hence, this article examines the utilization of the educational games of Kahoot! and Quizizz, as well as their perceived accessibility with elderly students. Through surveys and observational data gathered from 27 participants in four different sessions, the results point to several issues in terms of accessibility, game tempo, as well as issues related to the classroom space design, such as lighting and size of the board on which the games are projected. However, similar to younger audiences, the elderly appears eager to engage with educational games, especially with appropriate game design and facilities.
Over the last decade, in acknowledgment of a growing challenge of digital divide, researchers have been partnering with community organizations to explore community-engaged methods to empower under-served communities as they respond to new challenges in a digitally-dominated world. These community-engaged methods show great promise, enabling localized interventions which honor the lived reality of participants, but their highly customized nature also presents new challenges in measurement and assessment for the research community. In this work, we present a case study of a 12-session workshop series focused on digital enablement and describe challenges of applying traditional evaluation methods in understanding the value of the program. As a response to these challenges, we propose a framework for assessment of similar programs that enables us to better understand the ways in which our participants created digital capital and will support cross-study comparison and evaluation in future work.
Diaspora communities, such as the Armenian, who lost their tangible connection to their homeland, tend to carry objects with them that are representative of their roots and create a sense of belonging. Stop-motion animation can bring objects into life through sequential photography. As the objects are manipulated by the animator, directly by touching, or indirectly by accidental physical contact, stop-motion is directly linked to the sense of touch and materiality. Through this, we believe the stop-motion animation process can evoke rich memories. In this paper, we report on an exploratory stop-motion workshop, which was organised in collaboration with five Armenian community members with no prior animation making experience. We learned how the participatory stop-motion animation approach evoked memories through its inherent connection to storytelling and tangible manipulation, and how the creative group process supports a sense of belonging that transcends self-representation and bridges different cultures.
Like other crowdsourcing communities, e.g., Wikipedia, citizen science projects struggle to attract and retain long-term contributors. Long-term contributors are critical to the success of many projects; research about motivational drivers has attracted the attention of many scholars. Prior literature has argued that values are motivational constructs linked to behavioral outcomes, and value orientations differ among demographic groups and cultures. In this paper, we assess the value orientations of volunteers who contribute to Zooniverse - an online platform that connects the public and researchers who collaborate on scientific research. We conducted an online survey (N=5,436) to measure the value orientations of Zooniverse contributors using Schwartz’s’ Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). We found the most salient value orientations of the population were achievement, self-direction, and security. Value prioritization differs slightly among some demographic groups. We present strategies for motivating contributions based on value orientations in the discussion.
