Open plan and academe: pre- and post-hoc conversations

There now exists a strong body of evidence that creative workplaces can, in certain circumstances, exert beneficial influences on organisational cultures and outputs. Academia tends to resist such spaces and faculty buildings. The reasons are explored but the reactions of staff are not found to be different from those reported in the literature on general creative spaces. The success or failure of team oriented workspaces is in large part a socially constructed perception influenced by the manner of implementation and management. As elsewhere new workplaces are about new conversations. The cases studied lead to a model of the tensions inherent in workplace redesign.</p

Solved! Making the case for collaborative problem-solving

This report argues that the ability to solve problems with others is a crucial skill for our young people in the workplace of the future but the current education system does little to support it. Key findings Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) is an increasingly important skill to teach young people in order to prepare them for the future. Despite strong evidence for its impact, CPS is rarely taught in schools but if structured well it can reinforce knowledge and improve attainment. Significant barriers exist for teachers implementing this practice, from behaviour management to curriculum coverage, to task-design. For CPS to gain ground, a concerted shift is needed including teacher training, better resources and system level support. This report is part of Nesta’s ongoing commitment to equipping young people with the skills they need to succeed. It makes a series of recommendations on how organisations and policymakers can help support and embrace the implementation of CPS. Nesta is following this up with a series of small-scale pilots of aligned programmes in order to evaluate impact and explore how CPS can be implemented in a range of practical settings. Policy recommendations Stimulate production of quality collaborative problem-solving (CPS) resources and training, from primary education onwards. Fund existing, aligned programmes to scale and evaluate impact. Educate and involve the out-of-school learning sector and volunteer educators. Develop smarter collaborative problem-solving assessment methods. Help higher education organisations and MOOCs to track what works

Designing Awareness Support for Distributed Cooperative Design Teams

Motivation – Awareness is an integral part of remote collaborative work and has been an important theme within the CSCW research. Our project aims at understanding and mediating non-verbal cues between remote participants involved in a design project. \ud Research approach – Within the AMIDA1 project we focus on distributed ‘cooperative design’ teams. We especially focus on the 'material' signals – signals in which people communicate through material artefacts, locations and their embodied actions. We apply an ethnographic approach to understand the role of physical artefacts in co-located naturalistic design setting. Based on the results we will generate important implications to support remote design work. We plan to develop a mixed-reality interface supported by a shared awareness display. This awareness display will provide information about the activities happening in the design room to remotely located participants.\ud Findings/Design – Our preliminary investigation with real-world design teams suggests that both the materiality of designers’ work settings and their social practices play an important role in understanding these material signals that are at play. \ud Originality/Value – Most research supporting computer mediated communication have focused on either face-to-face or linguistically oriented communication paradigms. Our research focuses on mediating the non-verbal, material cues for supporting collaborative activities without impoverishing what designers do in their day to day working lives.\ud Take away message – An ethnographic approach allows us to understand the naturalistic practices of design teams, which can lead to designing effective technologies to support group work. In that respect, the findings of our research will have a generic value beyond the application domain chosen (design teams).\u

A review of teacher evaluation beliefs

Teacher evaluation beliefs have received a substantial amount of attention in the educational literature, but comparatively little attention from the belief research topics specially. As the driving force, evaluation resembles belief mention but lack the systemic description. On the base of the student-centered and teacher-centered philosophy, in the present paper, we provide a literature review to explore the essential factors of teacher evaluation beliefs (why, what, who, when and how), followed by the key problems of Chinese New Curriculum Reform as “why-aim”, “what-content”, “who-student-teacher relationship”, “how-method” and “when- time”. In line with the discussion of five factors of evaluation beliefs, we proposed six perspectives to inform educational researchers for the further researches

Supporting community engagement through teaching, student projects and research

The Education Acts statutory obligations for ITPs are not supported by the Crown funding model. Part of the statutory role of an ITP is “... promotes community learning and by research, particularly applied and technological research ...” [The education act 1989]. In relation to this a 2017 TEC report highlighted impaired business models and an excessive administrative burden as restrictive and impeding success. Further restrictions are seen when considering ITPs attract < 3 % of the available TEC funding for research, and ~ 20 % available TEC funding for teaching, despite having overall student efts of ~ 26 % nationally. An attempt to improve performance and engage through collaboration (community, industry, tertiary) at our institution is proving successful. The cross-disciplinary approach provides students high level experience and the technical stretch needed to be successful engineers, technologists and technicians. This study presents one of the methods we use to collaborate externally through teaching, student projects and research

Changing power relations in work based learning: Collaborative and contested relations between tutors, learners and employers

This is the author's pdf pre-print of a book chapter due to be published in 2011.This book chapter discusses some of the implications for the role of university tutors and the centrality of educational objectives in circumstances where there is a 'cultural shift' towards meeting the needs of learners and employers. The work based and integrative studies (WBIS) programme at the University of Chester is used as a case study to examine the changing power relations between university tutors, learners, employers and the university, compared to relations on traditional programmes

Motivation and mobile devices: exploring the role of appropriation and coping strategies

There has been interest recently in how mobile devices may be motivating forces in the right contexts: for example, one of the themes for the IADIS International Conference on Mobile Learning in 2007 was ‘Affective Factors in Learning with Mobile Devices’ (http://www.mlearningconf. org). The authors have previously proposed six aspects of learning with mobile devices in informal contexts that might be motivating: control over learners’ goals, ownership, fun, communication, learning-in-context and continuity between contexts. How do these motivational features relate to theoretical accounts of what motivates people to use mobile devices and learn in technology- rich contexts? In this exploratory paper we consider two different candidates for such theoretical approaches. One is technology appropriation—the process by which technology or particular technological artefacts are adopted and shaped in use. Two different approaches to technology appropriation are discussed in order to explore the relationship between the different aspects of appropriation and motivation; that of Carroll et al. and that of Waycott. Both appropriation frameworks have been developed in the context of using mobile devices, but neither has a specific focus on learning. By contrast, the second theoretical approach is Järvelä et al.’s model of coping strategies, which is specifically concerned with learning with technologies, although not with mobile technologies in particular. The paper draws on case-study data in order to illustrate and discuss the extent to which these two approaches are helpful in informing our understanding of the motivating features of using mobile devices for informal learning

Collaboration in Augmented Reality: How to establish coordination and joint attention?

Schnier C, Pitsch K, Dierker A, Hermann T. Collaboration in Augmented Reality: How to establish coordination and joint attention? In: Boedker S, Bouvin NO, Lutters W, Wulf V, Ciolfi L, eds. Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW 2011). Springer-Verlag London; 2011: 405-416.We present an initial investigation from a semi-experimental setting, in which an HMD-based AR-system has been used for real-time collaboration in a task-oriented scenario (design of a museum exhibition). Analysis points out the specific conditions of interacting in an AR environment and focuses on one particular practical problem for the participants in coordinating their interaction: how to establish joint attention towards the same object or referent. Analysis allows insights into how the pair of users begins to familarize with the environment, the limitations and opportunities of the setting and how they establish new routines for e.g. solving the ʻjoint attentionʼ-problem