Collocated Collaboration Analytics: Principles and Dilemmas for Mining Multimodal Interaction Data

© 2019, Copyright © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Learning to collaborate effectively requires practice, awareness of group dynamics, and reflection; often it benefits from coaching by an expert facilitator. However, in physical spaces it is not always easy to provide teams with evidence to support collaboration. Emerging technology provides a promising opportunity to make collocated collaboration visible by harnessing data about interactions and then mining and visualizing it. These collocated collaboration analytics can help researchers, designers, and users to understand the complexity of collaboration and to find ways they can support collaboration. This article introduces and motivates a set of principles for mining collocated collaboration data and draws attention to trade-offs that may need to be negotiated en route. We integrate Data Science principles and techniques with the advances in interactive surface devices and sensing technologies. We draw on a 7-year research program that has involved the analysis of six group situations in collocated settings with more than 500 users and a variety of surface technologies, tasks, grouping structures, and domains. The contribution of the article includes the key insights and themes that we have identified and summarized in a set of principles and dilemmas that can inform design of future collocated collaboration analytics innovations

How to capitalise on mobility, proximity and motion analytics to support formal and informal education?

© 2017, CEUR-WS. All rights reserved. Learning Analytics and similar data-intensive approaches aimed at understanding and/or supporting learning have mostly focused on the analysis of students' data automatically captured by personal computers or, more recently, mobile devices. Thus, most student behavioural data are limited to the interactions between students and particular learning applications. However, learning can also occur beyond these interface interactions, for instance while students interact face-to-face with other students or their teachers. Alternatively, some learning tasks may require students to interact with non-digital physical tools, to use the physical space, or to learn in different ways that cannot be mediated by traditional user interfaces (e.g. motor and/or audio learning). The key questions here are: why are we neglecting these kinds of learning activities? How can we provide automated support or feedback to students during these activities? Can we find useful patterns of activity in these physical settings as we have been doing with computer-mediated settings? This position paper is aimed at motivating discussion through a series of questions that can justify the importance of designing technological innovations for physical learning settings where mobility, proximity and motion are tracked, just as digital interactions have been so far

The TA Framework: Designing Real-time Teaching Augmentation for K-12 Classrooms

Recently, the HCI community has seen increased interest in the design of teaching augmentation (TA): tools that extend and complement teachers' pedagogical abilities during ongoing classroom activities. Examples of TA systems are emerging across multiple disciplines, taking various forms: e.g., ambient displays, wearables, or learning analytics dashboards. However, these diverse examples have not been analyzed together to derive more fundamental insights into the design of teaching augmentation. Addressing this opportunity, we broadly synthesize existing cases to propose the TA framework. Our framework specifies a rich design space in five dimensions, to support the design and analysis of teaching augmentation. We contextualize the framework using existing designs cases, to surface underlying design trade-offs: for example, balancing actionability of presented information with teachers' needs for professional autonomy, or balancing unobtrusiveness with informativeness in the design of TA systems. Applying the TA framework, we identify opportunities for future research and design.Comment: to be published in Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 17 pages, 10 figure

LATUX: an Iterative Workflow for Designing, Validating and Deploying Learning Analytics Visualisations

Designing, validating, and deploying learning analytics tools for instructors or students is a challenge that requires techniques and methods from different disciplines, such as software engineering, human–computer interaction, computer graphics, educational design, and psychology. Whilst each has established its own design methodologies, we now need frameworks that meet the specific demands of the cross-disciplinary space defined by learning analytics are needed. In particular, LAK needs a systematic workflow for creating tools that truly underpin the learning experience. In this paper, we present a set of guiding principles and recommendations derived from the LATUX workflow. This is a five-stage workflow to design, validate, and deploy awareness interfaces in technology-enabled learning environment. LATUX is based on well-established design processes for creating, testing, and re-designing user interfaces. We extend existing approaches by integrating the pedagogical requirements needed to guide the design of learning analytics visualizations that can inform pedagogical decisions or intervention strategies. We illustrate LATUX in a case study of a classroom with collaborative activities. Finally, the paper proposes a research agenda to support designers and implementers of learning analytics interfaces

An automatic approach for mining patterns of collaboration around an interactive tabletop

Learning to collaborate is important. But how does one learn to collaborate face-to-face? What are the actions and strategies to follow for a group of students who start a task? We analyse aspects of students' collaboration when working around a multi-touch tabletop enriched with sensors for identifying users, their actions and their verbal interactions. We provide a technological infrastructure to help understand how highly collaborative groups work compared to less collaborative ones. The contributions of this paper are (1) an automatic approach to distinguish, discover and distil salient common patterns of interaction within groups, by mining the logs of students' tabletop touches and detected speech; and (2) the instantiation of this approach in a particular study. We use three data mining techniques: a classification model, sequence mining, and hierarchical clustering. We validated our approach in a study of 20 triads building solutions to a posed question at an interactive tabletop. We demonstrate that our approach can be used to discover patterns that may be associated with strategies that differentiate high and low collaboration groups. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

MTFeedback: Providing notifications to enhance teacher awareness of small group work in the classroom

© 2014 IEEE. The teacher has very important roles in the classroom, particularly as manager of most resources for learning activities and in providing timely feedback that can enhance learning. But teachers need to be aware of students' achievements and weaknesses to decide how to time feedback. We present MTFeedback, a system that harnesses the new affordances of interactive tabletops to generate automatic notifications about small group collaborative tasks for the teacher in real-time. We deployed the system on a teacher's hand-held dashboard, which supports orchestration of a multi-tabletop environment, the MTClassroom. We validated our approach in authentic (in-the-wild) classroom activities, with 95 higher education students and three teachers across two sets of six classroom sessions. We evaluated the impact of presenting notifications on feedback that teachers provided to students. The notifications were based on qualitative comparisons of students' artefacts against a representation of both expert knowledge and a set of common misconceptions. We demonstrate that our approach can successfully be deployed in the classroom to generate notifications that help the teacher direct their attention more effectively to provide relevant feedback to their students in small group learning activities