Evaluation of Situations Causing Split of Attention in Multimedia Learning Environments via Eye-Tracking Method

In this chapter, situations that can cause split of attention in multimedia environments were determined via eye tracking method. Fixation numbers, heat maps and area of interest of learners were analyzed. As a result of these analyses, design suggestions were determined for multimedia environments to provide focusing attention to content without split attention effect. Visual and auditory resources should be provided simultaneously. Visual information should be supported with auditory expression instead of texts. Images such as videos, pictures and texts should not be presented on the same screen. Texts provided with pictures should be presented via integration to each other instead of separate presentation of text and picture. Texts provided with videos should be presented via integration to each other instead of separate presentation of text and video. Images should be given via marking important points on images to increase attention.

Use of Video to Enhance Education

Even with so many different educational tools and evolutions in techniques of instruction (both pedagogical and andrological approaches), the use of video is one of the most effective means of instructing students. This chapter presents multiple evidence detailing why video can greatly enhance instruction in a multiple of ways to include its use in motivation, explanation (via multi-modalities), and feedback. This chapter will also demonstrate the benefits of using a student-centered/learning-centered instructional video capturing system within the classroom to improve learning for both face-to-face and online learning. Resources and specific examples are provided to demonstrate that video is a fundamental tool that should be used to enhance both the educational process and instructional experience. New uses and video technologies are also addressed for future investigation and incorporation.

The Evolution of the (Hidden) Web and its Hidden Data

This paper presents an analysis of the most important features of the Web and its evolution and implications on the tools that traverse it to index its content to be searched later. It is important to remark that some of these features of the Web make a quite large subset to remain “hidden”. The analysis of the Web focuses on a snapshot of the Global Web for six different years: 2009 to 2014. The results for each year are analyzed independently and together to facilitate the analysis of both the features at any given time and the changes between the different analyzed years. The objective of the analysis are twofold: to characterize the Web and more importantly, its evolution along the time.

Grounding Cyber

Tying “cyber” entities, spaces, and events to real-world physical spaces is a critical step in de-mythifying cyberspace. This chapter introduces Maltego Tungsten™, a penetration testing tool, as one method to extract geolocational information from social media platforms, the Web, and the Internet—in order to relate online accounts, emails, aliases, and online-discussed events to specific physical spaces. This tool may be used for general research or applied “oppo” (opposition) or “doxing” (documenting) research of targets. This also discusses how the geolocational information may be further used to extract deeper understandings. Also, Network Overview, Discovery, and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) is applied for some geolocational information extractions.

Conducting Semantic-Based Network Analyses from Social Media Data

Network analysis is widely used to mine social media. This involves both the study of structural metadata (information about information) and the related contents (the textual messaging, the related imagery, videos, URLs, and others). A semantic-based network analysis relies on the analysis of relationships between words and phrases (as meaningful concepts), and this approach may be applied effectively to social media data to extract insights. To gain a sense of how this might work, a trending topic of the day was chosen (namely, the free-information and data leakage movement) to see what might be illuminated using this semantic-based network analysis, an open-source technology, NodeXL, and access to multiple social media platforms. Three types of networks are extracted: (1) conversations (#hashtag microblogging networks on Twitter; #eventgraphs on Twitter; and keyword searches on Twitter; (2) contents (video networks on YouTube, related tags networks on Flickr, and article networks on Wikipedia; and (3) user accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia.

Audio for Multi-Media Presentations in E-Learning

Although many advances have changed the way we are able record, distribute, and consume audio enhanced or audio based learning materials, audio can still be either a critical driver or an impeding detriment to learner comprehension and retention. Consequently, this chapter reviews the instructional design implications of audio prior to exploring the impacts advances in audio technology, software, and equipment have on the creation of audio enhanced or audio based multimedia presentations for learning, training, or education.

Rolling NVivo 10 out to a University's Research Community

At Kansas State University, there has been a concentrated effort to evolve the institution into one of the nation's top 50 research public universities. One small part of that involves the rollout of NVivo to the university's faculty, staff, and graduate students. By the second year of the site license, the campus was on its own to provide training. This effort involved multiple live face-to-face (F2F) trainings and the use of a multimedia e-book. “Using NVivo: An Unofficial and Unauthorized Primer” (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/using-nvivo-an-unofficial-and-unauthorized-primer/index) was written over a several week period (hyper-fast agile development) and released on the Scalar platform in Fall Semester 2014. This chapter addresses how a designed e-book, built on a Semantic Web-friendly platform, harnesses the power of multimedia, digital repositories, the Surface Web, and crowd-sourced feedback.

Using Microsites as Live Presentation Platforms

Live presentations in academic conferences often link to online resources for preview or post-view. Microsites may enhance live and real-time presentations. To examine the human factors and software challenges involved, this chapter offers three real-world partial solutions for interactive microsites that serve multiple purposes. This article focuses on the use of SoftChalk as a core authoring tool to create microsites for live presentations. Three real-world and unique cases (all from 2012) are showcased here: “Using Tableau Public for (Spatial and Trendline) Data Visualization (An Early Exploration and ‘TMI' Musing on Data)” at https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/rtNYCf1K80el9w; “Building and Analyzing Node-Link Diagrams to Understand Social Networks” at https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/c4d8tSWMCwm39n; and “Building Effective Study Guides for Online Learning and Assessment” at https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/rFnD0AQX3xRVTa.

Promoting Engagement with Online Presentations

Educators delivering online presentations face many challenges when teaching in this modality. Lack of student engagement is one such challenge. Students can study online with lackluster learning experiences when participating in a predominately text-based course. Applying multiple instructional strategies to address students' diverse learning styles can provide students with a more engaged online learning experience. Another challenge many educators face, is the need for support and guidance to facilitate effective online learning. More specifically, educators of the twenty-first century are seeking the know-how to move traditional text-based materials into online, media-rich course content. This chapter will examine some of the challenges of delivering quality online presentations. In conclusion, the author will provide examples of strategies for delivering effective online presentations within the virtual college classroom.

Static Text-Based Data Visualizations

Data visualizations have enhanced human understandings of various types of quantitative data for many years. Of late, text-based data visualizations have been used informally and formally on the WWW and Internet as well as for research. This chapter describes this phenomenon of text-based data visualizations by describing how many of the most common ones are created, where the underlying textual datasets are extracted from, how text-based data visualizations are analyzed, and the limits of such graphical depictions. While this work does not provide a comprehensive view of static (non-dynamic) text-based data visualizations, many of the most common ones are introduced. These visualizations are created using a variety of common commercial and open-source tools including Microsoft Excel, Google Books Ngram Viewer, Microsoft Visio, NVivo 10, Maltego Tungsten, CASOS AutoMap and ORA NetScenes, FreeMind, Wordle, UCINET and NetDraw, and Tableau Public. It is assumed that readers have a basic knowledge of machine-based text analysis.