Nachwuchsförderpreise Verbraucherforschung NRW 2016

How to combine adolescents’ keen interest in new forms of media with learning aboutagricultural processes was the leading question of the bachelor thesis. Based on experientialeducation and nutritional and consumer education a learning concept thatintegrates smartphones and QR-codes into the process of learning on a farm was developed.The potential of including new media like smartphones and QR-codes in mobilelearning scenarios is found in the promotion of the users’ competence regardingnutrition, consumer behavior and media. The developed exemplary learning conceptdirected to adolescents integrates the usage of smartphones and QR-codes into themethod of "station learning” on a dairy farm. One station, for example, is "The processof milking” where the participant is interactively informed about the details ofthe milking process with the help of placed QR-codes. The integration of smartphoneshas its advantage in the capability to answer various questions about and raise curiosityin modern agriculture despite the farmers’ restricted time to do so. The conceptanswers the increasing demand for integration of new media into interdisciplinarytuition and makes the learning venue "farm” attractive for media education. Mobilelearning is able to contribute to "Education for Sustainable Development” (Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung / BNE) by imparting knowledge about regional goods andtheir production as well as enhancing adolescents‘ media competence.

Smartphone application developers intensively use cloud services to cope with thestorage, processing, and energy restrictions of mobile devices. Here, Cloud Computingoffers them cost-efficient and dynamic data processing and storage. To this end,Cloud Computing is based on a layered architecture, providing access to resourcesat different layers of abstraction. A cloud provider can offer access to physical infrastructure,called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), as well as hire infrastructure froman IaaS provider, enhance it, and subsequently offer it as Platform as a Service (PaaS)or Software as a Service (SaaS). An example of a SaaS using third party infrastructureis Dropbox, which is partly based on Amazon‘s EC2 infrastructure.

However, users are often not aware of the utilization of cloud services. This is furtherexacerbated by the layered architecture of Cloud Computing. As a consequence, usersdo not know about the storage location of their data and the companies involved.This raises users‘ uncertainty about potential privacy invasions, which can cause anaversion to using this technology. Nevertheless, Cloud Computing has many potentialadvantages, so a full denial of Cloud Computing is disadvantageous.

To meet user concerns, we developed a mobile application capable of detecting utilizedcloud services and thus enable the user to make an informed decision regardingthe use of a specific service. We accomplished this by developing an Android applicationthat observes network traffic and detects utilized cloud services. To protectthe user‘s privacy, we gather and analyze data solely on her device. Since usability iscrucial for such a tool, we enabled network capturing without the need for any systemmodification. If an app, such as Dropbox, starts to communicate with the cloud infrastructure,we intercept all network packets, analyze them based on patterns, and thusreveal the hidden cloud infrastructure provider. We evaluated our application andconducted a small-scale user study. Our results show that our approach is feasibleand reveals that different user behaviour results in significantly different cloud usage.

The work describes the design of a holistic eco feedback system – "eco diary" – withthe goal to create awareness about the personal consumption in the domains household,work and in mobility. According to the user centred design interviews and workshopshad been conducted with perspective users to learn about their behaviour,their needs and demands. The design process contained the development of severalprototypes. At the end a clickable high fidelity prototype had been created, that illustratedthe outcomes of the study. The main findings were that the application hasto be adjustable to the users needs. Users find different units helpful to understandtheir consumption data. The users were interested in values like kg of CO2 and kWh,as well as in monetary values. Also the time frame of the consumption data shouldbe variable. It was also identified that users would like to compare the consumptiondata between the three different domains. So there should be an adjustable overviewof all three domains. The overview of the consumption data has to be displayed in aminimalistic style. The users were also interested in a separated view of each of thethree domains to investigate about specific saving potentials. In general the resultsindicate that people can be motivated to explore and rethink about their consumptionbehaviour, which can be a first step into a sustainable future