Vidminas Vizgirda | Informatics Homepages

Hi 👋😊! I'm Vidminas (most people call me Vid) and I am a PhD student in the Institute of Language Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. My supervisor is Fiona McNeill.

I am looking for ways to improve search for educational resources of all kinds, so that teachers in schools across the world can reuse each others' work instead of creating their own materials all the time.

Originally, I come from Lithuania, although I grew up in Luxembourg and moved to Edinburgh for my undegraduate degree in computer science and management science. I am always keen to chat about teaching and machine learning applications in education, feel free to get in touch!

You can find out more about my background on my LinkedIn profile.

Research

[2021-.] Facilitating Discoverability of Educational Resources in Schools in Scotland

_{PhD Thesis}

This project is about investigating the needs and challenges of primary and secondary school teachers in Scotland involved in finding, using, and sharing educational resources online. The first exploratory stage involves interviews with primary and secondary school teachers, teacher trainees, and other school staff to define the processes involved and how these processes are situated in teachers’ work context. The second stage will be a review of existing tools that facilitate these tasks. Thirdly, iterative design and prototype evaluation studies will be carried out to experiment with potential improvements to online resource discoverability. This project is largely building on the previous work Supporting the Discoverability of Open Educational Resources: On the Scent of a Hidden Treasury (2019).

[2023] ‘You are you and the app. There’s nobody else.’: Building Worker-Designed Data Institutions within Platform Hegemony

_{Jake M L Stein, Vidminas Vizgirda, Max Van
Kleek, Reuben Binns, Jun Zhao, Rui Zhao, Naman Goel, George
Chalhoub, Wael S Albayaydh, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2023. ‘You are
you and the app. There’s nobody else.’: Building Worker-Designed
Data Institutions within Platform Hegemony. In Proceedings of
the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York,
NY, USA, 26 pages.}

DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581114
Information asymmetries create extractive, often harmful relationships between platform workers (e.g., Uber or Deliveroo drivers) and their algorithmic managers. Recent HCI studies have put forward more equitable platform designs but leave open questions about the social and technical infrastructures required to support them without the cooperation of platforms. We conducted a participatory design study in which platform workers deconstructed and re-imagined Uber's schema for driver data. We analyzed the data structures and social institutions participants proposed, focusing on the stakeholders, roles, and strategies for mitigating conflicting interests of privacy, personal agency, and utility. Using critical theory, we reflected on the capability of participatory design to generate bottom-up collective data infrastructures. Based on the plurality of alternative institutions participants produced and their aptitude to navigate data stewardship decisions, we propose user-configurable tools for lightweight data institution building, as an alternative to redesigning existing platforms or delegating control to centralized trusts.

DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581114

Information asymmetries create extractive, often harmful relationships between platform workers (e.g., Uber or Deliveroo drivers) and their algorithmic managers. Recent HCI studies have put forward more equitable platform designs but leave open questions about the social and technical infrastructures required to support them without the cooperation of platforms. We conducted a participatory design study in which platform workers deconstructed and re-imagined Uber's schema for driver data. We analyzed the data structures and social institutions participants proposed, focusing on the stakeholders, roles, and strategies for mitigating conflicting interests of privacy, personal agency, and utility. Using critical theory, we reflected on the capability of participatory design to generate bottom-up collective data infrastructures. Based on the plurality of alternative institutions participants produced and their aptitude to navigate data stewardship decisions, we propose user-configurable tools for lightweight data institution building, as an alternative to redesigning existing platforms or delegating control to centralized trusts.

[2023] GO-GN Open Research Handbook

_{Farrow, Robert; Weller, Martin; Pitt, Rebecca; Iniesto, Francisco; Algers, Anne; Almousa, Samia; Baas, Marjon; Bentley, Penny; Bozkurt, Aras; Butler, Walter; Cardoso, Paula; Chtena, Natascha; Cox, Glenda; Czerwonogora, Ada; Dabrowski, Michael T.; Darby, Robert; DeWaard, Helen; Kathy, Essmiller; Johanna, Funk; Jenni, Hayman; Emily, Helton; Huth, Kate; Hutton, Sarah C.; Iyinolakan, Olawale; Johnson, Kathryn R.; Jordan, Katy; Kuhn, Caroline; Lambert, Sarah; Mittelmeier, Jenna; Nagashima, Tomo; Nerantzi, Chrissi; O'Reilly, Jessica; Paskevicius, Michael; Peramunugamage, Anuradha; Pete, Judith; Power, Virginia; Pulker, Hélène; Rabin, Eyal; Rets, Irina; Roberts, Verena; Rodés, Virginia; Sousa, Lorena; Spica, Elizabeth; Vizgirda, Vidminas; Vladimirschi, Viviane and Witthaus, Gabi (2023). The Go-GN Open Research Handbook. Milton Keynes: Global OER Graduate Network.}

The GO-GN Open Research Handbook \| Open Research Online
This Handbook draws together work done between 2020 and 2023 by members of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN). GO-GN is a network of PhD candidates around the world whose research projects include a focus on open education.

[2022] GO-GN Research Review 2022

_{Farrow, R., Baas, M., Cardoso, P., Cox, G., Czerwonogora, A.,
DeWaard, H., Essmiller, K., Helton, E., Huth, K., Iniesto, F.,
Johnson, K. R., Peramunugamage, A., Pitt, R., Sousa, L.,
Vizgirda, V. and Weller, M. (2022). GO-GN
Research Review 2022. Global OER Graduate Network}

Research Review 2022 \| GO-GN
This report summarises some state-of-the-art research relevant to open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP) that was published recently. The reviews of these articles were written by doctoral and post-doctoral researchers who work in relevant fields and are members of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN).

[2020-21] Fill in the World: gamification in children's online language learning

_{BSc Computer Science and Management Science (Honours)
Project}

Archived report	List of 2020-21 outstanding informatics projects	Archived data [DOI: 10.7488/ds/3034]
This project is about the design, implementation, and evaluation of “Fill In The World” – a gamified language learning application for primary school children. The game allows children to learn English vocabulary through creative and collaborative exploration, unlike any of the explored existing applications. Following usability evaluation, it was established that the game still needs to be improved and extended before it could be implemented in classrooms or used for research about the effectiveness of individual gamification elements.

Vidminas Vizgirda BSc (Hons), AFHEA