Purpose: The objective of this study is to illustrate how participants in leaderless based projects communicate with each other. Several studies have focused on technology-supported projects, such as open source projects, with an established project manager and goal. There is a lack, to the best of our knowledge, in studies that deal with the communication pattern in a leaderless computer supported collaborative project.Method: We have chosen to use a quantitative method where we systematically group several messages according to their content. This method was used in a similar study to illustrate the communication between participants involved in an open source project. We have taken the same Kripendorff based method and adapted it to our study by adding more descriptive variables.Theoretical perspectives: Manuel Castell discusses the aspects of a new communication power that is rooted in the individual as part of a larger creative audience.

Distributed system development is a common occurrence in today?s technological and global world. Because the consequences of its geographically distributed nature it creates barriers between people that affects their communication and collaboration efforts in the distributed context. Despite a lot of technological breakthroughs over the last decades and the occurrence of video-conference applications and other tools for communication and collaboration, cultural and geographical issues have so far not yet been completely resolved. In this study I have made a literature study over distributed system development to form a set of central factors that affects the distributed development process.

Denna forskningsrapport undersöker hur nya teknologier kan verka som stöd för visuellt informationsutbyte och koordination för kreativa arbeten på distans. Arbetsgruppen genomförde denna undersökning för att kunna utbyta prototyper och annat visuellt material på regelbunden basis med en beställare av ett projekt som har sitt säte i New York. Projektet använde sig av en så kallad projektblogg som kanal för att förmedla utfört arbete samt för att föra en diskussion och ge feedback på det. Eftersom detta projekt skulle genomföras inom ramen för detta examensarbete valde arbetsgruppen att även undersöka hur examensarbetet skulle kunna koordineras genom projektbloggen. Dessa två undersökningar skedde genom en fallstudie under 8 av examensarbetets totala 10 veckor.

Human-computer interaction is central for computer assisted development. The aim was to investigate the user experience of a new (U2) compared to an old (U1) computer system, within a cognitive psychology frame of reference. Six subjects, frequently using the system, participated in the study. It was shown that the new (U2) compared to the old system (U1) enhanced and supported more the users? system related procedures/tasks.

AbstractIn this thesis we aim to extend the current theories about a concept called persona. A persona is a model of a user, mostly based on qualitative research and made with such accuracy that it to some extent can be used as a replacement of a real user in a development process and as a communicative tool. We will present a way of constructing this persona without meeting the actual users and follow up with interviews from the organization using them. This will lead to a model over the process of introducing personas as a concept in an organization,previously not familiar with the concept. The model is adapted to also work for projects and organizations where the concept is already known..

In today?s individualistic society, I experience a need to bring forward the importance of collaboration. From a sociocultural perspective, I have chosen to highlight the positive and negative aspects of collaborative learning, with the intention of illustrating the effects for the individual learning and development. I have therefore made an interview with an educationalist, who?s been a teacher all her grown up life, with the intent of illustrating her thoughts on collaborative learning.

This master thesis deals with computer game classics and a possible computer game canon. It looks closer at four computer game genres - adventure, RPG, action and strategy - in order to discern which games are considered classics and what characterizes them. To answer the first question a quantitative research method was used. 675 computer game reviews from 5 Internetsites were examined in order to see which games are mentioned most often in this context and therefore might be considered classics. To answer the second question a qualitative research method was used.

The aim of this study is to highlight the computer as a learning resource in the education and give us knowledge about how the students uses the computer in year one in a selected High School where one computer per student were introduced in autumn 2011. The aim is also to contribute to the discussion about how the computer can become a natural learning resource for all students in all subjects, including the students in need of special support.How are the High School students using the computer?Are there differences in computer use, whether the student is in academic or vocational program?Are there differences in computer use between boys and girls?Do the student experience that the digital competence is increasing together with if they experience the computer as aid?In what degree do the teachers encourage the students to use the computer?How much do the students use the computer to learn mathematic?The study is based on a survey of all students in year one in a municipal High School.The result of the study is showing that the students first of all use the computer to play music, surf the Internet and to be logged in on social media (eg. Facebook). The students have learned to use the computer for the tasks they need, although the teachers don?t encourage the students to use the computer in any higher means, not in mathematics and not in other subjects.

This study has been carried out as a part of the EC funded project, SMARTDOC IST-2000-28137, with the objective of developing application components that provide highly interactive visualization and collaboration functionalities. The low-level components from the graphics library AVS OpenViz 2.0 are used as the development basis. The application components can be inserted into electronic documents that allow embedded controls such as web documents or Microsoft Word or PowerPoint documents. Instead of displaying results as static images, a SMARTDOC component provides the ability to visualize data and interact with it inside the document. Although the principal goal of the SMARTDOC project is to create components in a number of different application domains this study concentrates on developing a medical imaging application component in collaboration with the project partners AETmed and professor Alan Jackson at the University of Manchester.

The purpose of our study is to describe and understand whether, and if so, how social workers in school and in social services construct computer gaming adolescents as a social problem. We chose social workers who encounter adolescents with different problems. We have conducted qualitative interviews with vignettes to capture the social workers' reasoning about computer gaming adolescents and how they handle this in their work. The study shows that all social workers we interviewed had encountered adolescents with troubling computer gaming habits. In the study, all agree that computer gaming becomes a problem when it leads to deviant behaviour such as not going to school, staying up all night and so on.

This paper presents the results of a workplace study of two smaller companies in the design industry. The core issue has been to investigate the companies use of technical tools and to what extent social praxis influence the daily work. The methods used are based on a qualitative analysis of interviews and observations. Various kind of work procedures, such as verbal and computerized, have been identified, but the most important occurrence was how spontaneous conversations between employees required certain flexibility, since the actors repeatedly were required to change focus and quickly perceive different information. For that reason, a thesis has been defined regarding how the use of spontaneous communication put an indirect need of a flexible working environment and also how this lead to more significant participation and exchange of information, as well as more awareness at the companies..

I den här rapporten utvärderas ett antal olika collaborative filtering algoritmer för att ta reda på vilken av dess som lämpar sig bäst för att implementera åt PlanEatSmile i en PHP/MySQL-miljö. Målet är att hitta en algoritm som klarar av att skapa rekommendationer i realtid och med hög precision. Därtill är det viktigt att algoritmen ska kunna skapa rekommendationer åt nya användare (cold-start-problemet) samt att algoritmen ska skala väl när sajten växer.De algoritmer som undersöks är user-based collaborative filtering, item-based collaborative filtering och tendencies collaborative filtering. Samtliga algoritmer undersöks i två versioner. En version som utgår ifrån receptbetyget och en version som omvandlar receptbetygen till  ingrediensbetyg.Algoritmerna testas på data insamlat genom en enkät för att avgöra deras precision.

Fler och fler spel öppnas upp för användargenererat innehåll, vilket ofta resulterar i större mängder material än vad en ensam spelare kan utnyttja. Den unika spelare vill ta del av det som passar just dennes smak.Studien genomfördes med designforskning som metodval och med hjälp av denna metod skapades en artefakt. Med hjälp av den utvecklade artefakten, ett plattformspel som är både enkelt att förstå och spela, kunde en datamängd samlas in ifrån olika spelare. Data byggdes upp av att användarna efter varje slutförd nivå, explicit fick lämna sitt betyg på nivån i en skala mellan 1 och 5.Genom att introducera collaborative filtering och där låta användarens tidigare betyg jämföras med övriga användare kan en predicering av kommande betyg ges. Vid jämförelser av olika collaborative filtering-algoritmer kunde den mest lämpliga upptäckas och senare även användas.Resultaten visar att mer precisa uppskattningar av kommande betyg kan göras av collaborative filteringen än genom att använda nivåns medelbetyg och resultaten leder därför till slutsatsen att collaborative filtering kan ge skräddarsydda spelupplevelser för en unik användare och således förhöja dennes spelupplevelse..

Education in information seeking is often traditional and focused on technology. When it comes to this sort of education, research proves it is unusual to pay attention to the interaction between students. My intention has been to examine if it is possible to pay attention to the interaction between students, in order to create more and better situations of learning. The issues in this work are about describing the students? interaction.

The ambition with this piece of work, a collaborative project between a landscape architecture student and an architecture student, is to design a centre for art and culture at Lilla Stenshuvud near Kivik in Skåne in the south of Sweden. Though the project draws upon existing plans for an institution like this on the site, it has been independently developed and can thus be regarded as a project sufficient in itself. During the work-in-progress a proposal has been shaped which considers the existing landscape and emphasizes its characteristics. Great effort has been invested in the centre?s location, and thereafter the work has focused on finding an expression for the art centre that connects to the specific character of the surroundings in this part of Skåne.