User:Xiw34/sandbox

iSchool
Welcome to our school at University of Pittsburgh! School of Information Systems or University of Pittsburgh

Educational systems
A lot of usages of social navigation have been applied in educational systems, such as: Knowledge Sea II. Compared to traditional approaches (so-called Closed Corpus), this system helps to further gather online information (named Open Corpus) and feedbacks from different sources. Group traffic is used as feedback to indicate social navigation information like: the most important parts of the textbooks. After a classroom study, Knowledge Sea II system shows better performance in visualization of content relevance of the textbook and satisfaction of student users. Mertens and his colleagues optimize an existed system: virtPresenter, with addition of hypermedia navigation concept. Bookmarks, footprints and structural elements are integrated to help users to access lecture recordings and support social navigation for the latter users as well. The new version of virtPresenter shows better performance in social navigation function such as: visualization, week based filtering and exchangeable bookmarks. Furthermore, further research of combining virtPresenter with Knowledge Sea II is discussed. Farzan and Brusilovsky introduce the AnnotatEd system, which combine functions of web annotation and adaptive navigation support to synergize social navigation application in web-based education. First, implementations of web annotation and social navigation support (SNS) are described respectively. Then, integration of interface of AnnotatEd system with Knowledge Sea II or ASSIST-ACM, and its algorithm is presented elaborately. After that, AnnotatEd integrated Knowledge Sea II has been evaluated for six semesters in School of Information Systems University of Pittsburgh, which shows the significantly higher positive user attitude towards the new system with social navigation integration.

Urban mobile information system
In Foth’s (2008) book, a system called CityFlocks is introduced to show social navigation implementation in urban mobile information system. This implementation is described in more details by Bilandzic et al (2008) a few months earlier. In the article, to solve so-called “socially blind” problem even based on booming of mobile phone user, CityFlocks is designed enabling web annotations combined with longitude and latitude coordinates upon physical targets in the city. Also, this social navigation implementation could be applied in direct or indirect way. To achieve this, focus groups are chose to collect requirements and problems in social navigation. Accordingly, CityFlocks are designed and generated using appropriate techniques such as Google map and information retrieval. Interestingly, after user tests of CityFlocks, indirect approach is acceptable than direct one, partial because of the concerning of talking to a complete stranger. In this situation, message texting was used more than other channels.

Prototypes
Two prototypes of social navigation system have been introduced as prototypes: “Juggler” and “Vortex”. The “Juggler” system combines MOO, a textual virtual environment, and a Web client. The “Vortex” system uses an alternative way: simplified desktop, to present URLs.