Dimitris Gouscos

• Professor (Assistant) at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

This paper presents an effort for introducing children rights to preschool students transcending conventional methods. An educational intervention was designed and developed for the introduction of preschoolers to issues of survival, development, non-discrimination and protection rights through digital games. The latter were used in online sessions...

This paper reports results of completed research with primary school children which took place in Athens, Greece. Children engaged in designing the play experience of digital mini-games corresponding to episodes/missions of an entire plot. The games were coded by the school teacher on low-end mobile phones using AppInventor and were then played by...

This chapter describes how little is known about how Greek local authorities capitalize on the potential of social media as a communication channel. The authors present the results of following up on a 2014 study assessing major Greek cities' presence on social media at the time. The authors check whether and how Greek cities may have improved thei...

In this research, we present an assessment study exploring the hypothesis that psychophysiological responses and associated facial expressions should differ significantly while players are engaged in free-form versus formally structured digital games. In the context of this study, real-time psychophysiological measurements of skin trans-conductance...

ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗ Η χρήση ψηφιακών παιχνιδιών στην εκπαιδευτική διαδικασία προωθεί την διαδραστικότητα και την εξασθένιση των εντάσεων, προωθεί ενεργητικά εκπαιδευτικά μοντέλα και προσφέρει νέες δυνατότητες επικοινωνίας, συνεργασίας και μάθησης. Το ψηφιακό παιχνίδι, δίνει τη δυνατότητα εισαγωγής του μαθητή με αυτισμό σε ένα ελεγχόμενο περιβάλλον που είναι π...

This paper reports on three digital GBL pilots which have taken place, respectively, in preschool , primary school and special education settings, for project assignments of the "ICT in Education" MSc program jointly run by the University of Athens, the University of Thessaly and the Technological Educational Institute of Piraeus, Greece. The pilot...

Τα τελευταία χρόνια υπάρχει αυξημένο ενδιαφέρον για τα παιδιά στο φάσμα του αυτισμού και επομένως η χρήση και η εφαρμογή κατάλληλων εκπαιδευτικών εργαλείων είναι επιτακτική για την εκπαιδευτική κοινότητα. Στόχος της παρούσας εργασίας είναι μέσα από μια επισκόπηση της σχετικής βιβλιογραφίας α) να σκιαγραφήσει τη συναισθηματική ανάπτυξη και εκπαίδευσ...

In this work, we describe an educational approach based on augmented reality (AR) and mobile technology that has been developed with the aim to engage students in a learning procedure regarding the electric forces as well as Coulomb’s Law. Initially, we present the AR learning environment and we explain its design principles with respect to the edu...

Civic Responsibility trends through digital solidarity: the case of Greece during the economic and social crisis, Eleni-Revekka Staiou, Evika Karamagioli, Dimitris Gouscos, Media in Transition 10, Democracy and Digital Media, May 17-18, 2019, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston, USA

Social networks have become one of the most popular tools in promoting the tourism product. This applies to National Tourism Agencies, as well as tourism-related general government bodies (GGBs) and local authorities (LAs). This study examines such organizations alongside selected chief administration officials (CAOs) that are related with the tour...

The concept of freedom in player interaction withdigital games, the nature of the choices that make it up and the subjective assessment as to whether a game is considered free-form or structured are at the heart of the interest of this paper. Free-form games that give room to many different player-generated gameplay paths may amuse a player, while...

Since the beginning of the economic crisis in Greece, the first impacts were felt on standards of everyday living. Citizens felt the urge to self-organize and take action based on their own strengths as the only practical solution to fill in the gaps left by the state's absence of intervention. Rooted in the country's economic crisis, Greek citizen...

Βασικό ζητούμενο της εποχής μας είναι η δημιουργία ενός ανοικτού στην κοινωνία σχολείου, το οποίο θα πρέπει να έχει τη δυνατότητα να αλληλεπιδρά με αυτή μέσα από μία συμμετοχική και διαλλακτική σχέση. Πρόκειται για μια σχετικά νέα αντίληψη όσον αφορά στο ρόλο της σχολικής μονάδας, η οποία έχει ως αποτέλεσμα η διαδικασία της μάθησης να διαπερνά το φ...

This chapter describes how little is known about how Greek local authorities capitalize on the potential of social media as a communication channel. The authors present the results of following up on a 2014 study assessing major Greek cities' presence on social media at the time. The authors check whether and how Greek cities may have improved thei...

The paper will introduce a research plan to establish dynamic learning experiences about public space management and the strategies selected. More specifically, we are concerned with an educational design approach for K-12 learners, focusing on sustainable use of public space, game-based learning with mobile devices, and integration of participants...

This paper describes an experiment which aims to examine whether different versions of the same game, which differ only in terms of freedom of movement that incurs varying degrees of freeform gameplay, elicit different kinds of player experiences. Seventy one children aged 9 and 11 from a Greek primary school participated in a research experiment w...

The financial crisis and austerity politics in Europe has had a devastating impact on public services, social security and vulnerable populations. Greek civil society responded quickly by establishing solidarity structures aimed at helping vulnerable citizens to meet their basic needs and empower them to co-create an anti-austerity movement. While...

This chapter reports how participatory processes and ICT tools can go against rule-driven bureaucratic approaches to political participation and public deliberation, trying to defy strict procedural norms in favor of more flexible formats for citizen mobilization, political co-thinking, and sustained social innovation in the area of constitutional...

During the last four decades, the results of a great deal of research have indicated that, prior to any formal instruction in physics, students hold scientifically incorrect ideas about physics concepts in general, and about the force and motion concepts in particular, the latter being considered central in science teaching. To these days, students...

The purposes of this study were (a) to develop a valid and reliable questionnaire using both the structural characteristics of digital games and students perceptions of the concept of freedom of choice in digital games, (b) to validate items to be used in questionnaire to measure perceived freedom of choice, (c) to identify the factors that underli...

The paper presents results of a study that was focused on testing the hypothesis that the levels of kindergarten and primary school students' positive emotions, engagement and positive experience will be significantly different while they play free-form and structured digital games. In the context of this study, students' emotion, engagement and ex...

Paper as presented in ”2015 Social Media, Activism and Organizations Symposium” (#SMAO15), 6 November 2015, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

The research reported in this paper examines how two different groups, primary schoolchildren and elderly people, could close the generation gap through a digital storytelling-based interaction framework that can result in learning for the younger and intergenerational communication. Yesteryear jobs have been chosen as the theme of this research, b...

This paper introduces Milia (AppleTree), an open online platform for social interactive digital storytelling, which has been developed by the Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media, with the support of the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC) of the Faculty of Communication and Media...

This paper attempts to investigate potential contribution of augmented reality to the reformation of students’ misconceptions regarding physical sciences. Based on its intrinsic feature of enabling ubiquitous interaction with digital information superimposed on physical objects, we argue the merit of exploiting AR technology for the development of...

The chapter describes the key elements of the innovative effort of the Greek public administration over the last 5 years to enable the transition to a new public administration model via opened-up governmental policies so as to improve public services provision, increase public integrity and ensure a more effective management of public resources Af...

Social media tools can enhance governments' abilities to interact with and engage citizens as well as to meet their expectations for transparency as they have the potential to make policy processes more inclusive and thereby rebuild the long lost confidence between governments and citizens. Little is known about how Greek local authorities capitali...

Environmental education (EE) institutions worldwide strive to promote awareness and learning related to the protection of the environment and sustainability issues. In this effort, they take stock of the capabilities of online and social media. This paper briefly overviews characteristic examples for the use of social media for environmental educat...

The objective of this article is to present four civil society initiatives that attempt to scrutinize government spending using open data from the Greek government OpenGov initiative Diavgeia project (“diavgeia”, in Greek, standing for lucidity). In a period of strong economic recession, Greece is facing one of the most intense social and political...

Since the beginning of the economic crisis in Greece, the first impacts were felt on standards of everyday living. Citizens, frustrated by the state's handling of the crisis, felt the urge to self-organize and take action based on their own strengths and volunteerism as the only practical solution to fill in the gaps left by the state's absence of...

On the basis of existing literature and benchmarking efforts for various facets of e-Government (expected benefits, existing barriers, methodological guidelines) the paper identifies a number of factors that affect e-Government projects (broader environment, political, funding, public management and service delivery frameworks, customer engagement,...

The need for provision of parliamentary information in a simple, systematic and organized way as a corollary of the constant appeal for parliamentary openness by the civil society have paved the way for Parliamentary Information Visualization. Independent organizations and researchers, volunteers, not-for-profit initiatives have deployed Informatio...

The Greek political landscape and the way public administration and political procedures are performed is an ideal field of study of the enabling potential of the Internet to foster new, dynamic forms of democracy, introducing open and “citizen-friendly” forms of government mainly by functioning as a horizontal communication channel allowing polyph...

The objective of this article is to present four civil society initiatives that attempt to scrutinize government spending using open data from the Greek government OpenGov initiative Diavgeia project ("diavgeia," in Greek, standing for lucidity). In a period of strong economic recession, Greece is facing one of the most intense social and political...

The objective of this article is to highlight the contribution and importance of parliamentary information visualization (PIV) with a view to legislative transparency and citizen empowerment. The constant appeal for parliamentary openness regarding information on laws and bills and accountability of elected representatives calls for transparency in...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to research the key role of eParticipation and social media in the construction and diffusion of a European identity for European citizens, as a valuable means of acculturalisation, through the creation of a common sense of belonging and self-identifying with the European ideals. Design/methodology/approach –...

In this chapter we support the view that communities of practice (CoPs) with the support of social media can serve the education for citizenship and sustainability, with a clear benefit on citizens' culture towards future public reforms. This has led to the development and implementation of the policy for sustainability, which is a European and nat...

This chapter discusses the implementation of social media in parliaments in order to engage citizens and facilitate participation. In particular, are provided and discussed the findings of a quantitative research on parliamentary institutions that actually use social media, with a view to assess the current presence of parliaments on social media a...

Technologies Laboratory in Communication, Education and the Mass Media (N.T.L.C.E.M.) have been carrying out a number of research projects in the field of Intergenerational Communication and Learning. Members of community centres for the elderly and public high school students have participated in the projects focusing on the social need for interg...

In an era of citizens' discontentment towards parliamentary democracy and a common perception that public opinion is not properly taken into account by governments, many national parliaments are striving to implement e-services that will attract citizens' interest and engage them actively in parliamentary procedures. This chapter provides an overvi...

This paper introduces; a) some good examples of digital games freely available on the web that can be used as educational tools supporting entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity skills; b) an evaluation framework for identifying such examples. To this end, in the first part of the paper, indicative examples are provided for digital games purpo...

The objective of this chapter is to highlight and discuss the concepts of e-governance, open governance, and civic engagement enabled by technologies such as Web 2.0, social media, and user-generated content. The focus of discussion is placed on common founding premises and adoption factors that are reproduced at multiple levels, from that of the u...

In this chapter we support the view that communities of practice (CoPs) with the support of social media can serve the education for citizenship and sustainability, with a clear benefit on citizens' culture towards future public reforms. This has led to the development and implementation of the policy for sustainability, which is a European and nat...

In an e-Government approach, focusing on the citizen as customer, the General Secretariat for Information Systems (GSIS) of the Greek Ministry of Economy and Finance has deployed TAXISnet, a pilot project offering VAT e-filing services directly to the general public, as a web-based extension to the TAXIS internal information system. Experience from...

This paper aims to address two main goals: (a) to present the results of a literature review, regarding existing evaluation and educational assessment procedures of digital games; and (b) to propose an open methodological approach concerning the educational assessment of digital games (OMEGA), based on the findings of the literature review. This re...

Η σπουδαιότητα της ευχρηστίας και της παικτικότητας ως βασικών συνιστωσών σχεδιασμού και ανάπτυξης ψηφιακών παιχνιδιών μαθησιακού σκοπού αναγνωρίζεται πλέον από τη διεθνή επιστημονική κοινότητα. Με την παρούσα εργασία θα επιχειρηθεί η αξιολόγηση των υφιστάμενων ψηφιακών παιχνιδιών για τη διδασκαλία της γλώσσας σε παιδιά προσχολικής ηλικίας ως προς...

In an era of citizens’ discontentment on democratic institutions, parliaments as a democratic cornerstone, are constantly striving to create alluring services taking, at the same time, into account the difficulty of achieving accessibility and transparency in citizens’ e-participation. At the same time, the evolution of ICT tools presents opportuni...

The paper presents (a) the process of localizing into Greek selected digital games from the Poisson Rouge website as well as (b) the pilot application of this digital game based learning material for learning basic language and maths concepts in a preschool educational setting. Participants were 20 preschool age children from an urban kindergarten...

This chapter has a twofold objective: (a) to identify the factors that underlie an attempt to “socialize” (i.e., make more inclusive, collective, and peer-to-peer) citizen participation and governance in a Web 2.0-like fashion, and (b) to investigate the potential of social media as new and more inclusive forms of participatory e-governance. To thi...

In this paper we present an initial overview of the characteristics of modern parliaments recording the existing service offerings and proposing a stakeholder-based categorization with specific categories that can best accomodate explicit and active citizen participation within parliamentary functions. Moreover, are highlighted a number of existing...

This paper focuses on a digital games-based learning pilot in a primary school classroom, as part of a project assignment of the "ICT in Education" MSc program jointly run by the University of Athens, the University of Thessaly and the Technological Educational Institute of Piraeus, Greece. The aim of this pilot research was to investigate how a di...

This paper aims to introduce a useful approach on the combined use of template based publishing tools (i.e. for blogs and wikis) and content personalization services. The approach considers that the original developers of web content have limited awareness on accessibility issues, and they are facilitated and guided by the editing interface. The pu...

This communication presents the Magic Potion, an adventure game for learning that has been developed by the EPINOISI project in Greece for students with mild intellectual disability, and discusses in detail the design principles that have been adopted, and choices that have been made, regarding the game's narrative and gameplay structure as well as...

Students with Intellectual Disability (ID) are often described as "slow learners" and cannot easily integrate to the normal curriculum. Still, the needs of a person with ID for accomplishment, enjoyment and perception of high quality multimedia content are augmented. In general education settings digital games for learning seem to work successfully...

Eleni Panopoulou outlines the European e-participation project, while Dimitris Gouscos presents brief details of EU call announcements on e-participation, e-accessibility and e-inclusion

This paper is positioned at the intersection of two important fields: e-taxation services and Participatory Budgeting (PB). E-taxation has traditionally been considered to be a solution to the bureaucracy and non-transparency of tax filing and payment; however, it does not account for the way in which taxes are used. In addition to evaluating the a...

This paper introduces a framework and methodology for establishing indicators and metrics in order to assess the quality and performance of one-stop e-Government service offerings. The set of quality and performance indicators and metrics proposed has been derived in an outcomes assessment approach, based on the perspectives of e-Government service...

Through the mutual efforts of devoted game researchers and educational practitioners, the value of digital games for learning is starting to augment in formal education, even though considerable opposition persists. Previous studies have shown that an interactive tool tends to educate users better than a pure textual source and it can be argued tha...

Econsultations constitute an effective means to inclusive and informed participation of citizens and society in policy, decision and law formulation processes, and an answer to democratic deficit issues. Econsultation platforms need to support all stages of consultation processes including agenda setting and topics raising, legislation proposal pub...

A requirement for electronic government initiatives to succeed is the ability to offer a citizen-centric view of the government model. The most widely adopted paradigm supporting this task is the life event model, which combines basic services offered from multiple public authorities into a single, high-level service that corresponds to an event in...

Inherent complexity of the e-Government application domain is also reflected in the workflows of e-Government service provision. This paper re- ports on how some real examples e-Government service workflows were mod- eled in a simple and structured fashion by recognizing and re-using recurring segments. Such an approach, drawing from current workfl...

As the exceptional potential of Web services for unleashing the full power of Web-accessible service content and application-to-application integration in business-critical contexts is becoming increasingly evident, management information is mainly modelled in high-level specifications on top of the basic protocol stack. After reviewing relevant wo...

a number of administrative services from public agencies and professional chambers in different countries have been identified for provision through the CB-BUSINESS intermediation hub as one-stop service offerings for cross-border business transactions. This paper reports on the methodological guidelines that have been applied for categorizing avai...

Business enterprises face significant obstacles in their quest to interact with public administrations and governments across Europe, such as bureaucracy, ambiguous procedures, functional disintegration, vague authority structures and information fragmentation. The recent trend towards the delivery of electronic services by governments ("e-governme...

The right of citizens to high-quality e-Government services makes one-stop service offerings an essential feature for e-Government. Offering onestop services presents many operational implications; an one-stop service provision (OSP) architecture is needed that, by means of a layered approach, provides facilities to refer to, invoke and combine e-G...

Hypermedia [1] is a fast growing field of research interest because of the new aspects introduced as far as it concerns the interaction between the machine and the user. The innovative features mainly refer to - the presence of various information types (multimedia environment) - the mapping of the semantic connections between information items int...

Although electronic transaction services are considered to be a necessity for e-government, it has not been possible insofar to unleash their full potential. E-forms are central to the development of e-government, being a basic means for implementing the majority of the public services considered as required for local and central public administrat...

Business enterprises face significant obstacles in their quest to inter- act with public administrations and governments across Europe, such as bu- reaucracy, ambiguous procedures, functional disintegration, vague authority structures and information fragmentation. The recent trend towards the delivery of electronic services by governments (" e-gov...

The right of citizens to high-quality e-Government services makes one-stop service offerings an essential feature for e-Government. Offering one-stop services presents many operational implications; an one-stop service provision (OSP) architecture is needed that, by means of a layered approach, provides facilities to refer to, invoke and combine e-...

E-forms are central to the development of e-government, being a basic means for implementing most of the public services considered as required for local and central public administration authorities. In this paper, we present an object-oriented model fore-form-based administrative services, which spans the e-service lifecycle, including developmen...

Governments are employing modern information and communication technologies to serve society better. Raising the effectiveness and quality of government services is not only a matter of new technologies; it also involves clear vision and objectives as well as a sound business strategy. Information systems need to support internal work within a gove...

. e-Government comprises alignment of IT infrastructures, business processes and service content towards provision of high-quality and value-added e-services to citizens and businesses. Ubiquitous e-Government services require relaxation of time, place and other accessibility constraints and compliance to architectural principles such as true-one-s...

Businesses face significant obstacles in interacting with public administrations across Europe. On the other hand there is recently a clear trend of governments to deliver electronic services ("e-government") through integrated, customer-oriented mechanisms ("one-stop government"). However, related efforts - both within and outside the European Uni...

Governments are employing modern information and communication technologies to better serve society. Raising the effectiveness of government as well as the quality of the civil service is obviously not only a matter of new technologies. It involves clear vision for the objectives, business process reengineering, business strategies for the informat...

MaTourA is a tourist advisory system about Greece that is being implemented in the parallel constraint logic programming language ElipSys. The purpose of MaTourA is to facilitate the work carried out in travel agencies by providing an interactive way to construct personalized tours, select predefined package tours and handle the underlying touristi...

Requirements specification and validation is recognized as a crucial part of the information systems' development process. This paper presents the VENUS integrated environment for requirements engineering. The underlying conceptual framework of VENUS combines the entity-relationship, object-oriented and rule-based paradigms for data and behaviour m...

The development of Information Systems which are effective (i.e. satisfy users' needs) and flexible enough to incorporate future changes of user requirements basically depends on the importance given to the requirements analysis stage and to the techniques employed for their development This paper presents a new approach to requirements analysis th...

Abstract Requirements specification and validation is recognized as a crucial part of the information systems" development process This paper presents the VENUS integrated environment for requirements engineering The underlying conceptual framework of VENUS combines the entity - relationship, object - oriented and rule - based paradigms for data an...

The authors introduce a rule-based object-oriented model and a novel graphical formalism capable of representing the behavior of information systems at the desired level of abstraction The graphical model, called rule-based net (RBN), is based on Petri nets and it can be considered as an abstraction of predicate transition nets (PrT nets). The form...

The tax collection process has been described as a bureaucratic one, that confines citizen involvement to the role of passive fulfillment of administrative and financial obligations. Active citizen participation, in the form of some political say on the allocation of collected taxes which could potentially improve and further legitimize tax collect...

This paper presents the current model for taxation and distribution of the taxes to government activities, and an alternative model is presented, according to which tax-payers can determine, to some extent, the way that the taxes they pay will be spent. The goal of this proposal is to increase citizen involvment and system transparency. The model p...

As testified by the established penetration of mobile devices world-wide, as well as the emergent enrichment of both informational and transactional mobile service content via protocols such as i-mode, mobile services may constitute the next technological leap in the advancement of electronic service delivery. The integration of mobile technology w...

The tax collection process has been described as a bureaucratic one, that confines citizen involvement to the role of passive fulfillment of administrative and financial obligations. Active citizen participation, in the form of some political say on the allocation of collected taxes which could potentially improve and further legitimize tax collect...