The Effect of Prolonged Exposure to Online Education on a Classroom Search Companion

Exposure to technology impacts children’s perception and conceptualisation of the way devices they regularly use work. This prompts us to study if almost two years of online teaching, enabled by a broad range of technologies, have influenced the way children imagine a search companion would look and behave when helping them perform school-related search tasks. We conducted a 2-stage study during which children ages 9 to 11 drew and described their imaginary search companion;they also chose a few desirable and non-necessary traits. By following the protocol of a study conducted pre-pandemic, we contextualise salient altered expectations that we attribute to exposure to technology prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight and discuss emerging trends observed from the analysis of data gathered before and after the extensive online experience and how these will guide the design of functionality of a search companion for the classroom. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

6th KidRec Workshop: Information Retrieval Systems for Children in the COVID-19 Era

The role that technology plays in supporting children at school and at home is more prominent than ever before due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This has prompted us to focus the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec) workshop on what the lasting changes will be to the design and development of child information retrieval systems. After two years, are information retrieval systems used more in and out of the classroom? Are they more interactive, more or less personalized? What is the impact on the research and business community? Are there long-term and unexpected changes on the design, ethics, and algorithms? The primary goal of our workshop continues to be to build community by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders from various backgrounds and disciplines to understand and advance information retrieval systems for children. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Meeting Participants with Intellectual Disabilities during COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Improvisation

With the COVID-19 pandemic, we all suffered from several restrictions and measures regulating interaction with one another. We had to wear masks, use hand sanitizer, have open-air meetings, feel a combination of excitement and frustration, and eventually depend on online video calls. The combinations of these additional requirements and limitations, while necessary, affected how we could involve users in the different stages of design. It has profoundly hindered our chances of meeting in person with people with temporary or permanent disabilities. In our project, involving people with intellectual disabilities in the museum context, we also had to deal with museums being closed and physical exhibitions being canceled. At the same time, guardians and caregivers often turned to a stricter interpretation of anti-COVID measures to protect people with intellectual disabilities. This paper aims to discuss these challenges and share our lessons about coping with challenging and unpredictable situations by using improvisation. © 2021 Owner/Author.

Getting to know you: Search logs and expert grading to define children's search roles in the classroom

In this paper, we examine the roles children play when using web search engines in the classroom context by revisiting, not replicating, a seminal work set in the home context. In particular, we describe how we juxtaposed performance indicators inferred from a combination of search logs (collected over two years) and expert grading of completed inquiry assignments to discern emerging search roles among children in primary four and five (aged 9 to 11). In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also explore differences when a traditional classroom is replaced by online instruction at home. Lastly, we discuss future research directions that we see as pivotal to advance research in Information Retrieval to and for children. © 2021 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved.

Ethical implications for children's use of search tools in an educational setting

In the classroom, search tools enable students to access online resources. While these tools have many benefits in theory, in practice there are also ethical issues to consider. In this article, we discuss a number of ethics-related problems teachers are faced with and they need to find solutions for. Based on our own research experience developing and deploying information discovery tools for the classroom (both in a traditional classroom setting and on the Internet due to the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19), we share insights about ethics and the role of the expert-in-the-loop, teachers, both as co-design partners and liaisons between search tools and students. Furthermore, we introduce a set of guidelines, EMILIA, to assist teachers in recognizing and reflecting on ethical issues that arise from their use of search tools in the classroom. © 2021 The Authors

Containment and resilience spaces in educational communities in the context of COVID-19 in Chile

This study aimed at identifing resilience factors in a school community, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools communities have had to adapt their communications and learning methods, increasing the responsibilities and workload of educators. Many teachers have reduced their perception of well-being, developed depression, frustrations feelings and low self-efficacy. Some schools have implemented interventions to support digital and emotional skills, such as the "Me cuido para cuidarnos" psychosocial program. During 2020, 35 private and subsidize schools in Chile, participating in this initiative, reaching 1.599 teachers for 259 hours of online training. Using qualitative techniques (creative workshop and brainstorming). Results showed 5 main clusters of information: community, support, well-being, improve of space and security, concluding that the scholar community has started to generate resilience processes, using their own resources to cope with uncertainty. It's important to continue giving teachers emotional support.

How Are We Teaching and Dealing with Accessibility? A Survey from Switzerland

The need to better understand how to support and provide accessibility has increased dramatically in recent years, whether in industry or education. Higher education institutions have an essential role in raising awareness of how important accessibility is and, at the same time, can provide students with examples of good practice in building inclusive experiences. This work aims to assess the state of the art of accessibility in Switzerland, from teaching to administrative staff. Our findings show that the majority (77%) do not teach accessibility because it is not a core part of their courses and 21% declared to don't know enough to teach. 62,5% of who is teaching accessibility teach to evaluate web pages accessibility standards and heuristics and half of them help understanding technology barriers faced by people with disabilities. Likewise, our administrative staff respondents had four times more guidelines to deal with physical access than with technology enhancements. We also found out that with the COVID-19 outbreak, our instructors mainly used extra software and were more available online. CCS CONCEPTS •Human-centered computing → Accessibility theory, concepts and paradigms;•Accessibility technologies;•Social and professional topics → People with disabilities. © 2020 ACM.

Parent-Infant Skin-to-Skin Contact and Stress Regulation: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Several studies have focused on neonatal maternal separation (MS) to investigate behavioural and neuroendocrine reactions to lack of contact, but only a few have focused on early separation in the first days or weeks after birth. This literature review investigates the vital importance of contact and touch by exploring how skin-to-skin contact (SSC) regulates stress in the mother-infant relationship. Various databases such as PubMed, Scopus, and ScienceDirect were searched for literature published between 2015 and 2020. From 1141 articles, 22 were declared eligible. The reviewed articles showed how SSC regulates child stress by biological indicators such as the autonomic nervous system (ANS), heart rate variability (HRV), cortisol, and oxytocin. This research concludes the importance of SSC for stress regulation, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. With no research to date indicating a possible risk of neonatal COVID-19 transmission following SSC, SSC should continue to be practiced for all women, as recommended by the WHO.