Designing Activities for Collaboration at Classroom Scale Using Shared Technology

Although researchers, teachers and policy makers broadly agree on the benefits of collaborative learning, there appears to be less clarity regarding how effective collaboration can be realised at classroom scale. Research in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), simulation-based learning and related fields has produced a considerable range of applications that aim to support collaboration in classrooms. Grounded in well-established theories of how humans learn, many such applications have shown promising results within the context of small research studies. However, most of those research-driven applications never matured beyond the prototype stage and few are available today as products that schools can easily use and adopt. Many systems lack flexibility or require too much time, hardware, technical skills or other resources to be effectively implemented. Furthermore, teachers can be overwhelmed by managing large groups of students engaged in complex, computer-supported tasks. This thesis investigates how forms of whole-classroom activity can be supported by combining shareable technologies with simulation, team play and orchestration. New designs are explored to help large groups engage and discuss at multiple scales (from pairs and small groups to the entire classroom) in ways that effectively include each student and use the teacher's limited resources efficiently. Moreover, this research aims to devise and validate a conceptual framework that can guide future design, orchestration and evaluation of such activities. Three in-situ studies were conducted to address these goals. The first study involved the design of a climate change simulation to support a professional training course. Iterative design and video analysis resulted in the formulation of the Collaborative Learning Orchestration for Verbal Engagement and Reflection (CLOVER) framework. This framework comprises a suite of conceptual tools and recommendations that aim to help designers and teachers create, orchestrate and evaluate decision-based simulations for whole-classroom use. Two follow-up studies were conducted to validate the usability and usefulness of CLOVER. One of them aimed to replicate the previous findings in a similar context and resulted in the design of a sustainable, whole-classroom simulation for students to discuss finance decisions. The other used CLOVER to expand an existing desktop application (a~language comprehension task for children) to classroom scale. In sum, the three studies provide substantial empirical evidence, suggesting that CLOVER-based applications can effectively reconcile learning needs (collaboration) and technological affordances (shareable devices) with the inherent benefits and constraints of teacher-driven, co-located environments. Furthermore, the findings contribute to a better understanding of what it means to design for sustainability in this context

Rethinking 'multi-user': an in-the-wild study of how groups approach a walk-up-and-use tabletop interface

Multi-touch tabletops have been much heralded as an innovative technology that can facilitate new ways of group working. However, there is little evidence of these materialising outside of research lab settings. We present the findings of a 5-week in-the-wild study examining how a shared planning application – designed to run on a walk-up- and-use tabletop – was used when placed in a tourist information centre. We describe how groups approached, congregated and interacted with it and the social interactions that took place – noting how they were quite different from research findings describing the ways groups work around a tabletop in lab settings. We discuss the implications of such situated group work for designing collaborative tabletop applications for use in public settings

Sharing bubbles: reflections on offline multi-surface scenarios

The iPad is typically perceived as a personal device, evoking the image of its owner tapping away - silently submerged in their private digital bubble. Here we portray iPads in a different light: Face-to-face play in groups, using connected and shared surfaces. Applying the bubble metaphor to multi-user cases, we ask the following questions: (a) How many people can be in one bubble together before it bursts? (b) Can multiple bubbles be connected, nested, etc. and what configurations are beneficial? (c) What design qualities are helpful in keeping beneficial bubble configurations intact and together, rather than bursting or floating away? By contrasting user observations from two multi-iPad scenarios, we illustrate the usefulness of 'bubble dynamics' as a lens for evaluating large offline social applications. We hope to inspire discussion of future use cases, evaluation methods and design recommendations

Herausforderungen für die Bildung im 21. Jahrhundert

Der erste Teil dieser Arbeit widmet sich einer Darstellung und Kontextualisierung von Herausforderungen für die Gesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert, aufgrund globaler Ressourcen- und Umweltveränderungen, und deren Betrachtung aus sozialwissenschaftlicher Sicht. Der zweite Teil widmet sich einer Veränderung der Vorstellungen von Sozialisation und Erziehung, insbesondere seit den 1960er Jahren. Die beiden Teile der Arbeit weisen keine unmittelbare Verbindung auf. Sie sind als wichtige Vorarbeit zu betrachten, für die der Arbeit zu Grunde liegende Frage, welche – im weitesten Sinne - Art von Mensch es für die Bewältigung der Transformations-Anforderungen in verschiedenen Szenarien des Übergangs zur postfossilen Gesellschaft braucht, und wie Erziehung/Bildung als steuerungsintendierte Elemente des individuellen Sozialisationsprozesses dazu beitragen können, Menschen die Entwicklung von Fähigkeiten, Welt- und Selbstvorstellungen zu eröffnen, die sie unterstützen, gestaltende oder zumindest anerkennende Elemente eines mehr oder weniger sanft regulierenden Veränderungsprozesses zu werden. Da diese grundlegende Fragestellung ohne Vorarbeit direkt auf die Kontexte von Sozialisation, und die Aspekte von Steuerungsinstanzen, wie beispielsweise das Schulsystem angewendet, der Komplexität des Betrachtungsfeldes nicht gerecht werden würde, bleibt dieses - die beiden Betrachtungsebenen verbindende - Kern-Element der Fragestellung in dieser Arbeit vorerst bewusst nur am Rande berührt, um in weiterer Bearbeitung an anderer Stelle aufgegriffen zu werden.The first part of this work is dedicated to explenations and contextualisations of the challenges that society migth have to face in the 21st century, because of global ressourcedepletion and changes in the environmental ecosystem, from a social scientific perspective. The second part is dedicated to the change of perceptions in socialization and education, especially since the 1960s. These both parts of the work are not immediately connected. They are seen as an important preparatory work, for the ground laying question, which – in the broadest meaning – kind of human being is needed for coping with the challenge of transformation within different scenarios of shift to a postfossil society, and how education as an interventioning system, and as part of the personal socialization process can contribute, to enable people in developing skills, world- and self-perceptions, that enable them to become shaping, collaborating, or at least not withholding actors of that transformation. As the ground laying question cannot be addressed on the context of socialization and its aspects within interventioning systems as education, without preparatory work, that core question, combining the two different contextual elements will not be addressed in this preparatory work, to be part of further processing of the subject

Designing a large multi-player simulation game to encourage critical debate

There is great potential to design digital simulation games as part of professional training settings. However, there is little research on how a large group in a classroom or seminar can all play at the same time. In this paper we describe the design and first in-the-wild deployment of the 4Decades game, which involves up to 30 players simultaneously in a simulation of global climate economics. Using a network of shared devices and ambient displays, a fast-paced collaborative game enabled players to reflect on prior learning, strategy making and their critical understanding of the simulation

From participatory to contributory simulations: changing the game in the classroom

There is much potential for supporting collaborative learning with interactive computer simulations in formal education and professional training. A number of simulations have been developed for single user and remote interaction. In contrast, our research is concerned with how such learning activities can be designed to fit into co-located large group settings, such as whole classrooms. This paper reports on the iterative design process and two in-the-wild evaluations of the 4Decades game, which was developed for a whole classroom of students to engage with a climate simulation. The system allows students to play and change the rules of the simulation, thereby enabling them to be actively engaged at different levels. The notion of Contributory Simulations is proposed as an instructional model that empowers groups to make informed, critical changes to the underlying scientific model. We discuss how large-group collaboration was supported through constraining an ecology of shared devices and public displays

Shazam For Bats: Internet of Things for Continuous Real-Time Biodiversity Monitoring

Biodiversity surveys are often required for development projects in cities that could affect protected species such as bats. Bats are important biodiversity indicators of the wider health of the environment and activity surveys of bat species are used to report on the performance of mitigation actions. Typically, sensors are used in the field to listen to the ultrasonic echolocation calls of bats or the audio data is recorded for post-processing to calculate the activity levels. Current methods rely on significant human input and therefore present an opportunity for continuous monitoring and in situ machine learning detection of bat calls in the field. Here, we show the results from a longitudinal study of 15 novel Internet connected bat sensors—Echo Boxes—in a large urban park. The study provided empirical evidence of how edge processing can reduce network traffic and storage demands by several orders of magnitude, making it possible to run continuous monitoring activities for many months including periods which traditionally would not be monitored. Our results demonstrate how the combination of artificial intelligence techniques and low-cost sensor networks can be used to create novel insights for ecologists and conservation decision-maker

Watch Less and Uncover More: Could Navigation Tools Help Users Search and Explore Videos?

Prior research has shown how ‘content preview tools’ improve speed and accuracy of user relevance judgements across different information retrieval tasks. This paper describes a novel user interface tool, the Content Flow Bar, designed to allow users to quickly identify relevant fragments within informational videos to facilitate browsing, through a cognitively augmented form of navigation. It achieves this by providing semantic “snippets” that enable the user to rapidly scan through video content. The tool provides visuallyappealing pop-ups that appear in a time series bar at the bottom of each video, allowing to see in advance and at a glance how topics evolve in the content. We conducted a user study to evaluate how the tool changes the users search experience in video retrieval, as well as how it supports exploration and information seeking. The user questionnaire revealed that participants found the Content Flow Bar helpful and enjoyable for finding relevant information in videos. The interaction logs of the user study, where participants interacted with the tool for completing two informational tasks, showed that it holds promise for enhancing discoverability of content both across and within videos. This discovered potential could leverage a new generation of navigation tools in search and information retrieval

Design in the Wild: Interfacing the OER learning journey

Open Educational Resources (OERs) such as talks, lectures, texts, slideshows, and online activities, offer much potential for people to study a broad range of topics. However, the choice among millions of OERs can be overwhelming and many learners give up on their goals prematurely. Our ongoing research aims to help self-directed learners study effectively and enjoyably by providing a personalized route through appropriately prioritized OERs. However, there are many aspects that can be considered including motivation, getting lost, determining whether to continue, and what resource to look at next. How can we begin to design an interface that can support these? To this end, we describe our iterative ‘design in the wild’ approach, showing how it helped us to determine how to operationalise and support these aspects and, in doing so, provide us with a way of assessing the overall learning experience

X5Learn: A Personalised Learning Companion at the Intersection of AI and HCI

X5Learn (available at https://x5learn.org ) is a human-centered AI-powered platform for supporting access to free online educational resources. X5Learn provides users with a number of educational tools for interacting with open educational videos, and a set of tools adapted to suit the pedagogical preferences of users. It is intended to support both teachers and students, alike. For teachers, it provides a powerful platform to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute open courseware produced by others. These can be videos, pdfs, exercises and other online material. For students, it provides a scaffolded and informative interface to select content to watch, read, make notes and write reviews, as well as a powerful personalised recommendation system that can optimise learning paths and adjust to the user's learning preferences. What makes X5Learn stand out from other educational platforms, is how it combines human-centered design with AI algorithms and software tools with the goal of making it intuitive and easy to use, as well as making the AI transparent to the user. We present the core search tool of X5Learn, intended to support exploring open educational materials