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Category: NewsThe “Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability 2012″ (ITAG) conference takes place this year on 23-24 October 2012 at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham.
Call for papers
The aim of the conference is to bring together academics and practitioners working with interactive technologies to explore and innovate within the areas of Education, Health and Disability. We have a particular focus on the use of gaming hardware and software to implement accessible solutions, interaction design using new input/output devices and the increasing impact of ubiquitous computing on our everyday well being.
The conference provides an excellent opportunity to showcase practice and to mainstream research ideas and outcomes. It introduces a wider audience to key findings and products from research and illustrates how practice feeds back into and informs research. The conference creates a forum for two-way communication between the academic and practitioner communities and particularly welcomes user led presentations and workshops.
The programme includes presentations of papers, workshops, and an exhibition space for demonstrations and posters. This event is held in partnership with GameCity – the World’s best-loved videogame festival (http://gamecity.org/) and delegates are welcome to attend all GameCity events including the opening drinks reception.
Scope
As guidance to participants on scope of papers and activities we state that: ‘Education’ includes both compulsory and post-compulsory education; ‘Disability’ includes physical, sensory and cognitive impairment; and the impact of interactive technologies and games on health and well-being is also a focus of this conference. An emphasis is placed on practical applications and guides to where currently available training resources and tools can be found and used. A selection of papers will be published electronically in full, so presentations will be limited to 20 minutes for the key findings, including time for questions from the floor. It is hoped (as in previous years) that the best papers will be published in a special issue of a relevant academic journal. Previous special issues have included:
- Journal of Assistive Technologies – Volume 3 issue 2 June 2009 (ITAG 2008 selected papers)
- Computers and Education – Volume 56, issue 1 (ITAG 2009 selected papers)
- International Journal of Games Based Learning – in press (ITAG 2010 selected papers)
- Journal of Assistive Technologies – Volume 6 issue 3 in development (ITAG 2011 selected papers)
Themes and topics:
The conference encourages multidisciplinary papers and examples of themes and topics include (but don’t let this restrict you):
Games Based Learning:
- Social and collaborative aspects of games (e.g., educational aspects of Massively Multiplayer Online Games)
- The efficacy of games based learning
- Self authored content and personalisation in games
- Learning theory, pedagogy and instructional design in games
- Motivational aspects of games
- Collaboration between Science and Art for more effective learning
- Games to promote the inclusion (e.g., for offenders and people with disabilities, motivation of female gamers)
Game related Technologies:
- Using contemporary games controllers to create new opportunities in health and rehabilitation applications (e.g., applications for Wii Fit, Kinect. Move).
- Brain control interfaces to games
- Pervasiveness and mobility of games
- Location based services
- Handheld learning in the classroom
Games for Health:
- Serious games for clinical assessment (e.g. after stroke)
- Serious games for rehabilitation and treatment (e.g. of phobias, ADHA, post-traumatic stress disorders, stroke)
- ‘Modding’ for health
- Art and music rehabilitation in 3D multisensory environments
- Games for children in hospital
- Games to increase physical activity in children
Accessibility and Design:
- Open source accessibility
- Participatory design
- Design for all
- Natural user interfaces
- The representation and promotion of gender equality in games
- Alternative input modalities to games for people with disabilities (e.g., brain, haptic and audio interfaces)
- Access to interactive technologies for elderly people
Web based technologies:
- Resources for interactive learning tools and environments, e.g. Flash, podcasts, simulations, mobile games, Web 2.0 tool etc.
- The Internet as a communication medium ( e.g. for people with Asperger Syndrome).
- Browser based games and linking into social media channels
Submissions
Those wishing to present papers or hold a workshop should send abstracts, to a maximum of 500 words. For those hoping to exhibit or produce a poster, a 300-word abstract is required. The deadline for submissions is Friday1st June 2012 to be sent to: karen.krelle@ntu.ac.uk
Final copies of accepted papers are required by Friday 14th September 2012
There is a conference fee of £150 for 2 days, and £80 for 1 day registration. This price includes your invitation to the Game City opening event, lunch, and morning and afternoon refreshments.
Accommodation and Travel Links: https://www.conferencebookings.co.uk/delegate/NCBITAGEHD2010 and http://www.nctx.co.uk/
Prizes Offered:
As in previous years prizes will be awarded!
- Best Paper Award: £250
- Best Student Paper award: £250
- Best Student Poster: £150
The Great Lakes and Pacific ADA Centers on behalf of the ADA National Network are pleased to announce the 2012 Accessible Technology Webinar Series. Electronic information and communications technology have become essential tools in all areas of our lives and working environments today, and are particularly important to people with disabilities by providing equal access to the workplace and social media.
Please join us for our 2012 webinar series as we explore some of the latest technological trends and their accessibility to people with disabilities.
All sessions are free and scheduled for 2-3:30pm Eastern/1-2:30pm Central/12-1:30pm Mountain/11-12:30pm Pacific utilizing the ElluminateLive! webinar platform.
2012 Schedule:
February 14, 2012 – Making Tactile Graphics featuring Clara van Gerven, National Federation for the Blind
April 10, 2012 – Improving the Web Accessibility Game Plan featuring Karl Grove, Deque Systems
June 12, 2012 – 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act featuring Jim Tobias, Inclusive Technologies
August 14, 2012 – Accessibility of Web Authoring Tools featuring Jutta Treviranus, Inclusive Design Research Center
October 9, 2012 – Using the WAVE Web Accessibility Toolbar featuring Jared Smith, WebAIM
December 11, 2012 – Mobile Accessibility – The Status of Accessibility in Mobile Devices featuring Representatives from the Mobile Manufacturers’ Forum
Registration is available on-line at http://www.ada-audio.org/Webinar/AccessibleTechnology/.
The AALIANCE2 Project is pleased to announce the first Stakeholder Workshop of the AALIANCE2 Roadmap “Technologies for AAL solutions: AAL application domains” on February 14, 2012, 9.00–16.30, at The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Viale Rinaldo Piaggio, 34 in 56025 Pontedera (Pisa), Italy. Contact persons are f.cavallo@sssup.it, m.aquilano@sssup.it, christian.wehrmann@vdivde-it.de.
AALIANCE2 Project is a Coordination Action funded in the FP7-ICT-2011.7, which focuses on the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions based on advanced ICT technologies for ageing and wellbeing of elderly people in Europe. One of its main objectives is to build consensus upon research priorities in the AAL roadmap and Strategic Research Agenda for the upcoming decades.
This first workshop will focus on the functional areas associable to the AAL application domains (AAL4Person, AAL in the Community) and the relative activities/application scenarios. The objectives are to refine, classify, organize and improve the contents of the first AALIANCE Roadmap, published in March 2010.
Suitable persons for the AALIANCE2 Workshop are experts in the AAL domain, which have experience in some of the following tasks: designing, developing, producing, experimenting, and assessing AAL technologies or studying and defining the main aspects of AAL field. Experts should be AAL technology developers and researchers, ICT service providers and technology suppliers, policy‐makers, standardization organizations, health and care service organizations, caregivers, etc.
We would like to invite you (or some of your staff) to participate in this Workshop as Experts in the field of the AAL or responsible in Projects related to AAL and Ageing Well. The participation in the Workshop is limited to a small number of experts, therefore we ask you to confirm your participation as soon as possible, since the experts will be accepted based on the “who first confirms, first participates in”.
We gently ask you to extend this invitation also to all partners of the AAL project in which you are involved in.
If you accept to participate in the Workshop, you will receive guidelines to participate in the event and contents of the previous AALIANCE Roadmap.
The OASIS project launched its final video, providing insight in the project’s outcomes, and how the piloting was conducted.
The video features an interview with the OASIS project coordinator Silvio Bonfiglio (FIMI), as well as scenes from piloting and user forums in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Romania.
OASIS is a Large Scale Integrating Project — partially funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT 215754) – with the aim to develop an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic services, that will allow plug and play and cost-effective interconnection of existing and newly developed services in all domains required for the independent and autonomous living of older people and their enhanced Quality of Life.
For more information: www.oasis-project.eu
A related video can be found at http://youtu.be/gOme8Qa-s9U which presents the OASIS project concept.
The numerous political initiatives and the increasing financial involvement of firms attest of the growing attention to e-Accessibility. It was still, a few years ago, a question limited to specialists. Today, however, it is a regular preoccupation in the ICT sector. But this achievement must be nuanced. Nowadays, e-Accessibility is still considered as a supplement to the information system development: features dedicated to the disabled population, facultative feature, economical investment detached from any return on investment, e-Accessibility is often thought as an external problem, peripheral to the development of the Information Society. But it appears more and more clearly that this externalizing perspective is one of the most important reasons of the difficulties of e-Accessibility development. Technically, any underestimate of accessibility at the earliest design stage of a device or a website implies a complex and costly reengineering. Economically, it restricts the target of e-Accessibility to the disabled persons, which prevents decision makers to apprehend the larger benefits for companies and society as a whole. Finally, politically, this limited perspective turns us away from the juridical paradigm stating that society, not the individual, is responsible for any disability and, from this point of view, that accessibility is a primordial need for everyone. For all these reasons, putting e-Accessibility at the core is an urgent technological, economical and socio-political necessity. It is in this context that the Institute of e-Accessibility (IAN) organizes the 6th European Forum on e-Accessibility on the theme: “Putting e-Accessibility at the core of the information systems”. Registration is now open.
Link to event website.
