ABSTRACT
Messaging platforms are applications, generally mediated by an app, desktop program or the web, mainly used for synchronous communication among users. As such, they have been widely adopted officially by higher education establishments, after little or no study of their impact and perception by the teachers. We think that the introduction of these new tools and the opportunities and challenges they have needs to be studied carefully in order to adopt the model, as well as the tool, that is the most adequate for all parties involved. We already studied the perception of these tools by students, in this paper we examine the teachers' experiences and perceptions through a survey that we validated with peers, and what they think these tools should make or serve so that it enhances students learning and helps them achieve their learning objectives. The survey has been distributed among tertiary education teachers, both in universitary and other kind of tertiary establishments, based in Spain (mainly) and Spanish-speaking countries. We have focused on collecting teachers' preferences and opinions on the introduction of messaging platforms in their day-to-day work, as well as other services attached to them, such as chatbots. What we intend with this survey is to understand their needs and to gather information about the various educational use cases where these tools could be valuable. In addition, an analysis of how and when teachers' opinions towards the use of these tools varies across gender, experience, and their discipline of specialization is presented. The key findings of this study highlight the factors that can contribute to the advancement of the adoption of messaging platforms and chatbots in higher education institutions to achieve the desired learning outcomes.
ABSTRACT
KANTS is a swarm intelligence clustering algorithm inspired by the behavior of social insects. It uses stigmergy as a strategy for clustering large datasets and, as a result, displays a typical behavior of complex systems: self-organization and global patterns emerging from the local interaction of simple units. This paper introduces a simplified version of KANTS and describes recent experiments with the algorithm in the context of a contemporary artistic and scientific trend called swarm art, a type of generative art in which swarm intelligence systems are used to create artwork or ornamental objects. KANTS is used here for generating color drawings from the input data that represent real-world phenomena, such as electroencephalogram sleep data. However, the main proposal of this paper is an art project based on well-known abstract paintings, from which the chromatic values are extracted and used as input. Colors and shapes are therefore reorganized by KANTS, which generates its own interpretation of the original artworks. The project won the 2012 Evolutionary Art, Design, and Creativity Competition.
