HotMesh 2012 has received 18 submissions, on a similar scale as last year edition. The review process was organized and overviewed by PC chair Stefano Avallone. Each paper was assigned to three Program Committee members for a first round of reviews. The most promising papers were selected for further discussion in an online PC meeting, and were later reviewed and ranked by the Chairs. Finally, ...

Music offers an intriguing context to engage children in electronics, programming and more. Over the last year we been developing a hardware and software toolkit for music called modular-muse. Here we describe the design and goals for these tools and how they have been used in different settings to introduce children to concepts of interaction design for music and sound design. Two exploratory ...

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are rich in goaloriented activities and collaborative and social interactions, both essential for learning the game and progressing. In this chapter we employ a theoretical framework for linking learning and collaborative learning principles with MMOGs and investigate, through an exploratory and qualitative approach, features of the tasks, groups, and ...

I discuss the issues of measuring exploration coverage to evaluate exploratory interaction techniques. I also discuss the ‘refinding’ problem in visual data exploration and how refinding techniques can be evaluated.

We make a call for the formalization of a methodological framework that allows researchers to perform reliable and valid multimodal data analysis. We believe a first step is to guide the collection and interpretation of multimodal data. What we call the MMLA Exploratory Framework suggests that data collection needs to take place at least at two time points to account for within-subject variatio...

In this article we introduce a visualisation technique for analysing relevance and interaction data. It allows the researcher to quickly detect emerging patterns in both interactions and relevance criteria usage. The concept of ”relevance criteria profile”, which provides a global view of user behaviour in judging the relevance of the retrieved information, is developed. We discuss by example, ...

Learning through social interactions and critical thinking is becoming a fundamental teaching approach, especially for adult students. This approach promotes holistic and deeper understanding for the subject being learned. Online technologies are offering us new opportunities to create communities of inquiry that allow for more active learning that enhances students’ critical thinking. This art...

The primary aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for investigating how university – industry relationships evolve over time. Based on theoretical perspectives on the dynamics of interorganizational relationships, this paper investigates the development of several cases of university – industry collaborations. The exploratory study presented investigates the start-up phase of u...

Students’ interaction data from learning environments has an inherent temporal dimension, with successive events being related through the“next event”relationship. Exploratory learning environments (ELEs), in particular, can generate very large volumes of such data, making their interpretation a challenging task. Using two mathematical microworlds as exemplars, we illustrate how modelling stude...