Deliverables Report

IST-2001-33310 VICTEC

<July 2003>

DISSEMINATION AND USE PLAN

AUTHORS: Sara Coimbra, Nisa Silva, Ruth Aylett, Sarah Woods

STATUS:Final

CHECKERS:Sandy Louchart, Salford

Responsible author: Autor

Document Id: D.8.2.1

Project: VICTEC (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters)

Version:Final

Date: July 31st 2003

Access: public

Executive Summary

VICTEC EU IST-2001-33310 Project Deliverable D8.2.1

This Dissemination Plan aims to identify and organize the activities performed and to be performed in order to promote the project’s results and the widest dissemination of knowledge from the project. We intend to target specific audiences that will benefit from our results using a variety of techniques as appropriate for the content to be delivered.

Firstly we describe the Dissemination Activities already carried out by partners in several areas of interest. The Teachers’ Workshop was a key point for the Victec project so we explain the details of this event and its outcomes. Dissemination Materials include project presentation material designed and produced by partners, including the web site, video and brochures. Future Dissemination Actions describes planned actions to promote the project and its results to relevant communities in the next months.

PROJECT MANAGER

Name: Ruth Aylett

Address: CVE, Business House, University of Salford, University Road, Salford, M5 4WT

Phone Number: +44 161 295 2912 Fax Number: +44 161 295 2925

E-mail:

  1. IntroductionPage 5
  2. Dissemination ActivitiesPage 6
  3. First Teacher Workshop Page 7

3.1 GoalsPage 7

3.2 Feedback from the bullying presentationPage 7

3.3 “What is happening in our schools”Page 8

3.4 How we might use ICT and VLE as part of PSE in schoolsPage 8

3.5 Scenario DevelopmentPage 8

3.6 Timetable for teachersPage 9

  1. Dissemination MaterialPage 11

4.1Corporate IdentityPage 11

4.2 Web PagePage 11

4.3 BrochurePage 18

4.4 VideoPage 19

4.5 PublicationsPage 19

4.6 PowerPoint PresentationsPage 19

  1. Future dissemination actionsPage 20

5.1 First Technical Workshop – IVA 2003Page 22

5.2 Second Technical Workshop – CHI 2004Page 22

  1. AnnexesPage 23

-Annex 1 - Dissemination Activities, details

-Annex 2 – English brochure

-Annex 3 - Next dissemination activities

1Introduction

This document presents the Dissemination and Use Plan prepared for the project Victec (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters).

This document was prepared under Work Package Dissemination and Use Plan (WP8).

The document sets out to describe the scope of the dissemination activities of the Victec project. Particular attention will be given to the various levels on which the numerous dissemination activities will unfold. Future dissemination activities may be evaluated against intentions as specified below, thus making it possible to indicate a measure of success in this area.

This document is intended to be a “living document”, a “work in progress” in other words. It is assumed that major parts of the Dissemination and Use Plan can only be written/specified as the project evolves. It is therefore expected that various updates of this document will occur during the project duration. The intended readerships of this document are all project participants and the European Commission.

2Dissemination activities

Overall

Through these activities partners intend:

-To share with the various relevant scientific communities results achieved within the Victec project;

-To engage with the schools community as a way of disseminating project software and results;

-To gain feedback for our work while we are developing it; so as to ensure the final product is suited to actual needs;

-To learn from best practice; contacting different investigators and/or professionals in relevant areas allows us to avoid wasting time researching where there already exists credible research.

.

The following table identifies the various dissemination channels targeted by the project and the appropriate dissemination modes for each:

Dissemination Channel / Appropriate modes / Comment
Scientific
AI/HCI
Psychology
Educational Technology
Drama, Creative / Conference and Journal papers, conference presentations, seminars, technical workshops, visits to researchers and practitioners / Each partner has identified relevant modes but taking unexpected opportunities (specific calls etc) is also very important
End-users
Charities / Visits, presentations, publicity material
Schools / Teachers’ workshops, visits, publicity material
Education authorities / Visits, Educational fairs
Software companies / Visits, Educational fairs
The Public-at-large
Press, TV, Partner external relations channels / The project does not want to raise expectations it cannot fulfill or ‘hype’ the work: these channels will be targeted near the end of the project

Dissemination Activities bring together: contacts with different entities, conferences, papers, congresses, presentations, posters, symposiums, exhibitions, colloquiums, publications (journal papers and journal articles) mostly directed to the scientific and school community.

The following table summarises all the activities carried out up to now. More detail on each will be found later in the document.

Conferences and Publications

/
  • AISB02 (April 2002)
  • VRAI (April 2002)
  • NILE 2002 (August 2002)
  • VSMM, (September 2002)
  • Game-on (November 2002)
  • Childline Conference (April 03)
  • SRCD (Society for research in Child Development) April 2003
  • Social Science; Bristol University; May 2003
  • TIDSE 2003
  • IJCEELL (International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Lifelong Learning)
  • UH Horizon Magazine Publication, March 2003 edition
  • Virtual Reality Journal Publication, December 2003 edition

Public Relations
(Contacts and visits) /
  • CragRats Theatre Company (July 2002)
  • Immersive Education (September 2002, April 2003)
  • Colin Muir, Performance and Scripting Department of the University of Salford
  • Dr Isabelle Vanderschelden, Cinema Studies Department at the Manchester Metropolitan University
  • Empiricom Ltd
  • Darmstadt Fraunhofer IGDV
  • Dr Ian McBriar
  • Msc Virtual Environment students; University of Salford
  • Steve Dixon , Head of performance, senior lecturer in media performance, University of Salford

Congress

/
  • “Virtuelle Agenten als Testfeld psychologischer Theorien”; Berlin, September, 2002

Presentations

/
  • “Results of Empathy Measurement in German Schools” (March 17th, 2003)
  • 5thInternational Conference on Cognitive Modeling on VICTEC & Modeling Empathy; Bamberg, Germany, April 10th – 12th, 2003
  • Adaptive Systems Research group: Seminar Talk about VICTEC: 29th January 2003
  • Computer Science Colloquium: VICTEC talk: 12th February 2003

Fairs

/
  • WEM (World Education Market) May 2003

3The Teachers Workshop

The teachers’ workshop planned at D8.1.2 was carried out in Lisbon at September 2002.

3.1Goals

The overall goal of the teachers’ workshop was to provide an overview of the VICTEC project to teachers from the three countries. Equally importantly was to get their views and experiences about bullying and victimization behaviour cross-culturally in the schools where they work.

A breakdown of the teacher workshop programmed was to:

  • Provide an overview of the VICTEC project including the goals and aims.
  • Present recent research findings about bullying behaviour in schools in the U.K, Germany, and Portugal.
  • Allow teachers to share their experiences about bullying behaviour, differences in bullying behaviour cross-culturally, and discuss intervention strategies that are successful or unsuccessful.
  • Explore how we might use ICT and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) to allow children to explore bullying issues.
  • Examine how ICT is currently being used in schools throughout Europe dealing with Personal and Social Education (PSE).
  • Set the goals for VICTEC in terms of teacher involvement. Schedule a preliminary timetable of work and deadlines to be reached.

3.2Feedback from the bullying presentation

The University of Hertfordshire presented a detailed account of the profiles of children involved in bullying behaviour, the extent of bullying problems in schools cross-culturally, the precursors of bullying behaviour and some of the consequences of bullying behaviour.

Overall, the feedback from teachers regarding this session was positive. The research findings presented generated a lot of interest and discussion between the teachers regarding the relationship between bullying behaviour, behaviour problems, health problems etc, and the character profiles of the children involved in bullying behaviour.

Some teachers asked for further information and a copy of the presentation for future reference.

3.3“What is happening in our schools”

Teachers were divided up into 4 groups for this session. Each group had a teacher representing each country and a member of the VICTEC team.

This session provided useful insights into the different bullying problems across cultures in schools in the U.K., Germany and Portugal. Each school also provided some concrete examples to highlight these differences.

The groups then discussed the different policies and interventions that have been tried out, and differences in approaches cross-culturally.

3.4How we might use ICT and VLE as part of PSE in schools

Demonstrations of ICT packages integrating educational aspects of bullying behaviour were shown to the teachers. Feedback was collected regarding the appropriateness of the packages and whether teachers would actually implement them alongside classroom sessions regarding PSE.

3.5Scenario Development:

One of the major work packages for the project is to generate bullying scenarios. To ensure that up to date types of bullying behaviour are enacted in these scenarios, teachers worked together in groups to generate scenarios that are realistic, and may have happened at their school. This also allowed the team to take cultural differences into account when designing the scenarios to be depicted in the VLE.

3.6Timetable for teachers.

October 19th-20th 2002 / Teacher Workshop.
End Oct 2002 / Feedback from Teacher workshop to be circulated to all schools.
Nov – Jan 2002 / Teachers will have the opportunity to send in scenarios for the VLE that have been discussed with the children. These could be posted onto the VICTEC website.
End Nov 2002 / VICTEC work package to be prepared for all schools involved in the project.
End Nov/Beg Dec 2002 / Visit schools with bullying scenario storyboards and ask the children if these are relevant to them. Show children some of the characters, which we propose to use in the VLE to see which they prefer. Have a series of different school environments to show the teachers to determine preferences.
Jan 2003- Feb 2003 / Pilot the bullying interview in UK schools. Validation of empathy and bullying instruments in UK, Germany and Portugal.
Date to be confirmed for User Evaluation. / This will be carried out in schools in UK, Portugal and Germany to assess how believable the children found the VLE, whether they enjoyed the VLE experience etc.
November 2003 / Pre-test of empathy assessment.
January 2004 / Demonstration to schools of finalised version of the VLE.
February 2004 / Post test of the Empathy evaluation in Germany, U.K and Portugal.
June 2004 / Bullying evaluation with the VLE to be held at UH involving 400 children from schools around Hertfordshire.

4Dissemination Material

Overall: we present in this section the dissemination material generated by the Victec partners in order to disseminate the project. The diversity of the dissemination material will ensure that the dissemination of project results will take place on a wide platform. So, we have made a web page with specific information for specific targets, a color full brochure to introduce our project at exhibitions and a short explanatory promotional video.

4.1Corporate Identity

A corporate identity has been created for the project to facilitate clear and consistent communications. Through a variety of dissemination activities the Victec project generated a brand image that is being used to promote awareness of the project and it’s activities. The logo is being used on all documentation, promotional/publicity literature and on the project web site.

4.2Web Page

One of the deliverables corresponds to the design and continuously maintenance of Victec Web page that will follow the project from its beginning through its official ending. It helps as a valuable mean of dissemination for attracting the interest of the school community, educators and research organizations.

The VICTEC Web page ( was first established in Mars 2002 and it was entirely developed by Autor, although the contents were developed and translated by all partners. It works as a communications and promotional tool, describes the VICTEC project, its objectives as well as important information. Since this web page is presented in three languages (Portuguese, English and German) it reaches, potentially, a wide number of users. The consortium continuously feeds it with valuable information, project outputs, event advertising and other dissemination material.

The Web page was designed to reach four major groups: general visitors, researchers, teachers and children.

If visitors are not looking for specific information, they can find an Overview link with: generic information about the project (What is Victec), partner’s contacts (Proposers); the aims of our work (Objectives); the problem we are facing (Bullying); technological information (What are Synthetic characters) and the innovation factor description (What is Emergent Narrative).

Researchers link contains information for academics and researchers (programmers, investigators) explaining thoroughly what The Problem is, how we are intending to solve it (The Toolkit and The Demonstrator); what we have being communicating externally (Publications) and Relevant Research made by others.

Another group of particular interest in this project are the Teachers. We have a link explaining the bullying problem in school, the origins, the consequences and the ways of dealing with bullying behavior. All this information is based on studies carried out by Victec partners defeating stereotypes about bullying in our actual society. Victec For Schools explains how do we intend to help them dealing with the problem using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Associated Schools link is being rearranged now; More Information contains links to other relevant sites on bullying problem.

Children have their own language, so we created a link explaining What is Bullying, the Consequences of Bullying and What should you do especially for them. The visual aspect is color-full and the language is simple and direct. Information to help contains links to responsible organizations. We want them to know our project; so, we explained it all at What is VICTEC about and VICTEC Characters.

Victec web site possesses a statistic software allowing us to know which are the most visited pages and areas, where the visitors are coming from, how users navigate through pages and how long do they stay on web site.

4.3Brochure

Autor has produced a brochure for the Victec project. This brochure is being used for the promotion of the project in a number of places like marketplaces, conferences, and other initiatives regarding the main subject for Victec. The brochure, like the site, was made in 3 languages. The brochure includes all the main ideas presented on the web site, but works as a different communication channel. It can be used as an easy way to leave a contact or to explain the project in a few seconds. An English brochure can be consulted in attach.

4.4Video

The Video will work as a promotional movie including the main points about Victec. In a few minutes others can make contact with the bullying reality and Victec objectives presented by a virtual character called Martinha.

4.5Publications

Articles are being published in specialized scientific/technical publications, but also those non-technical publications with strategic value for dissemination, such as those related to the end users, children and teachers and also the general Press. We want to ensure that specific communities of “opinion makers” are aware of our project and its benefits, before releasing any product.

On the technical side, we are reporting several papers in major technical conferences and workshops, several speeches at universities and research centers worldwide on the occasion of visits from consortium members. The details are presented at point 2 of the present repost “Dissemination activities”.

The proper dissemination/marketing channels of the partners within the consortium are also being taken into consideration to fulfill this dissemination task.

4.6PowerPoint Presentations

Nowadays PowerPoint presentations are widely used to present ideas to groups of people. So we prepared two presentations especially for teachers, explaining the Victec project and our bullying perspective.

5Future dissemination actions

Overall

The Victec consortium is mostly interested in communicating the project to others. This means, we are developing an effective and attractive product, making it accessible to the target customer and, besides that, we are disseminating our knowledge resulting from developing this product. So, in order to achieve these purposes we will keep developing and participating in a number of activities. The following table summarises already planned activities for the future of the project. Further activity will be incorporated into the plan as opportunities arise.

Conference

Papers

/
  • Empathy paper;Proposed submission: June 2003 to Psychological Bulletin
  • XIth Developmental Psychology Conference; 26th August – 31st August 2003
  • IVA conference; September 2003
  • "Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling”; November 2003
  • 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2003).
  • XIth European Conference on Developmental Psychology; August 2003

Public Relations
(Contacts and visits) /
  • Feedback presentation for Bamberg teachers on “Results of Empathy Measurement in German/UK/Portuguese Schools”

Publications

/
  • Storyboard publication; Planned for July 2003
  • Publications as a result of the 2004 evaluation event at UH; June 2004
  • Articles on Empathy & Bullying, Development of the Empathy Questionnaire, Empathy & Virtual Characters, Final Evaluation of the Demonstrator, by Bamberg.

Workshops

/
  • Teacher workshop presentation; Kassel, Germany, October 2003
  • First technical workshop – IVA Sept 2003
  • Second technical workshop – bid to CHI 2004

Mailing lists

/
  • Send press releases to newspapers/broadcast media and emails to mailing lists from schools on the three countries (Aug/Sept 2004)
  • Press releases to newspapers/broadcast nmedia re June 2004 evaluation

5.1First Technical Workshop – IVA 2003