Kate Thompson

Supporting collaborative design activity in a multi-user digital design ecology

Across a broad range of design professions, there has been extensive research on design practices and considerable progress in creating new computer-based systems that support design work. Our research is focused on educational/instructional design for students learning. In this sub-field, progress has been more limited. In particular, neither research nor systems development have paid much attention to the fact that design is becoming a more collaborative endeavor. This paper reports the latest research outcomes from R&D in the Educational Design Studio (EDS), a facility developed iteratively over four years to support and understand collaborative, real-time, co-present design work. The EDS serves to (i) enhance our scientific understanding of design processes and design cognition and (ii) provide insights into how designers work can be improved through appropriate technological support. In the study presented here, we introduced a complex, multi-user, digital design tool into the existing ecology of tools and resources available in the EDS. We analysed the activity of four pairs of teacher-designers during a design task. We identified different behaviors - in reconfiguring the task, the working methods and toolset usage. Our data provide new insights about the affordances of different digital and analogue design surfaces used in the Studio. We developed a F2F design for learning tool that sits in an educational design studio.We carried out an evaluation both with expert users of the EDS and teacher/designers.F2F learning design enhances mutual awareness and fluid perception-action loops.Designing educational design tools should carefully consider the set, social and epistemic aspects.

An Actionable Approach to Understand Group Experience in Complex, Multi-surface Spaces

There is a steadily growing interest in the design of spaces in which multiple interactive surfaces are present and, in turn, in understanding their role in group activity. However, authentic activities in these multi-surface spaces can be complex. Groups commonly use digital and non-digital artefacts, tools and resources, in varied ways depending on their specific social and epistemic goals. Thus, designing for collaboration in such spaces can be very challenging. Importantly, there is still a lack of agreement on how to approach the analysis of groups experiences in these heterogeneous spaces. This paper presents an actionable approach that aims to address the complexity of understanding multi-user multi-surface systems. We provide a structure for applying different analytical tools in terms of four closely related dimensions of user activity: the setting, the tasks, the people and the runtime co-configuration. The applicability of our approach is illustrated with six types of analysis of group activity in a multi-surface design studio.

Discovering indicators of successful collaboration using tense: automated extraction of patterns in discourse

This paper describes a technique for locating indicators of success within the data collected from complex learning environments, proposing an application of e-research to access learner processes and measure and track group progress. The technique combines automated extraction of tense and modality via parts-of-speech tagging with a visualisation of the timing and speaker for each utterance developed to code and analyse learner discourse, exploiting the results of previous, non-automated analyses for validation. The work is developed using a dataset of interactions within a multi-user virtual environment and extended to a more complex dataset of synchronous chat texts during a collaborative design task. This methodology extends natural language processing into computer-based collaboration contexts, discovering the linguistic micro-events that construct the larger phases of successful design-based learning.

The synthesis approach to analysing educational design dataset: Application of three scaffolds to a learning by design task for postgraduate education students

The aims of the Synthesis and Scaffolding Project were to understand: the role of specific scaffolds in relation to the activity of learners, and the activity of learners during a collaborative design task from multiple perspectives, through the collection and analysis of multiple streams of data and the adoption of a synthesis approach to the research. The Synthesis Approach to Analysing Educational Design (SAAED) dataset is comprised of video, audio and image files, transcripts of the discourse, as well as copies of physical artefacts generated by three groups of three postgraduate education students during a 90-minute design session. The data were collected in January 2013. Each group was given a different scaffold related to the design process, the social interactions or the use of the tools available to the participants. Researchers interested in analysing the SAAED are required to sign a collaborator agreement to become part of the project team.

Analytics-enabled teaching as design: reconceptualisation and call for research

As a human-centred educational practice and field of research, learning analytics must account for key stakeholders in teaching and learning. The focus of this paper is on the role of institutions to support teachers to incorporate learning analytics into their practice by understanding the confluence of internal and external factors that influence what they do. In this paper, we reconceptualise `teaching as design for `analytics-enabled teaching as design to shape this discussion to allow for the consideration of external factors, such as professional learning or ethical considerations of student data, as well as personal considerations, such as data literacy and teacher beliefs and identities. In order to address the real-world challenges of progressing teachers efficacy and capacity toward analytics-enabled teaching as design, we have placed the teacher - as a cognitive, social, and emotional being - at the center. In so doing, we discuss potential directions towards research for practice in elucidating underpinning factors of teacher inquiry in the process of authentic design.