Merja Bauters

Knowledge Practices Environment: Design and Application of Technology for Trialogical Learning

Current networked society present learners with challenges that cannot be sufficiently coped with in educational contexts that are characterized by transmission or participation epistemologies on learning. To address these challenges, the trialogical approach to learning is introduced which focuses on the ways in which people and their communities create knowledge through the tool-mediated development of shared objects. Supporting sustained collaborative knowledge creation requires learning technology that is modular and extensible rather than monolithic and fixed in nature which characterizes most existent learning technologies. The current paper presents the design considerations and the application of the KP-environment which aims to support these object-oriented practices.

Modular Audio Story Platform for Museums

Museums are seeking different ways to attract and engage audiences. Digital stories in various forms have been utilized as one approach to increase audience experience. This paper presents how to bring audio stories as a part of museum?s activities by developing a modular audio story platform. Most of the functionality is included in Android applications, which allow visitors to attach stories with emotions to artifacts, share stories with other visitors and enrich existing stories with sounds. All the audio files, linking of the artifacts and related audio files are managed by audio digital asset management system. Our platform supports curated audio stories, but the main emphasis is in the visitors? audio stories. We differentiate from the other digital storytelling systems by attaching emotions onto the visitor stories, and combining the soundscapes and audio stories as visitor modified audio stories.

Mobile soundscape mixer : Ready for action

Today, cultural organizations such as museums are seeking new ways to attract and engage audience. Augmented reality based applications are seen very promising. The target is to provide more interactive experiences for an audience with high familiarity of digital interaction. So far, visual presentation has been dominant in augmented reality systems. In contrast to this trend, we have chosen to concentrate on audio augmentation as user generated soundscapes. This paper discusses our approach, focusing on how to design and develop an easy-to-use and smoothly working Android application, which increases user interaction by developing soundscapes from building blocks stored in audio digital asset management system. We have successfully implemented applications for Android platform and evaluated their performance.

KPE (Knowledge Practices Environment) Supporting Knowledge Creation Practices in Education

Many activities have moved to the Web, offering a medium for numerous everyday tasks related to home, community, office, education, etc. A constant flow of new tools, use trends, services and terminologies now forms part of people’s daily lives (Candy, 2002). The landscape of tools changes constantly and the tools are complemented by a new generation of open source and access tools, social media tools, services, and enhancements.

Creating and Sharing Knowledge Through Experiences: A Case Study with Ach so! in Healthcare Education

This paper reports results from a case study that investigated creating and sharing knowledge arising from experiences with the Ach so! mobile app for video annotation in healthcare education. The qualitative content analysis of the interview data indicated that Ach so! enhanced reflection when the students saw their action from videos and thus were able to evaluate their own and group performance as external observers and to create knowledge on their experiences. Ach so! promoted knowledge sharing when the students together reflected their performance and annotated successful and failed incidents. Research outcomes contributed to the design of the Ach so! and workplace practices, and suggested applying Ach so! to dynamic learning contexts and scaling the applicability of Ach so! to informal and non-formal learning contexts at workplaces.

Experience in Design and Learning Approaches – Enhancing the Framework for Experience

In design and learning studies, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to experience. Many design approaches relate experience to embodiment and phenomenology. The growth in the number of applications that use the Internet of Things (IoT) has shifted human interactions from mobile devices and computers to tangible, material things. In education, the pressure to learn and update skills and knowledge, especially in work environments, has underlined the challenge of understanding how workers learn from reflection while working. These directions have been fuelled by research findings in the neurosciences, embodied cognition, the extended phenomenological–cognitive system and the role of emotions in decision-making and meaning making. The perspective on experience in different disciplines varies, and the aim is often to categorise experience. These approaches provide a worthwhile view of the importance of experience in learning and design, such as the recent emphasis on conceptual and epistemological knowledge creation. In pragmatism, experience plays a considerable role in research, art, communication and reflection. Therefore, I rely on Peirce’s communicative theory of signs and Dewey’s philosophy of experience to examine how experience is connected to reflection and therefore how it is necessarily tangible.

Audio Story and AR Platform for Youth Engagement

We have developed an audio story sharing and audio augmented reality platform for cultural institutions. Using the platform, cultural institutions can develop creative extracurricular activities. Our platform contains backend service for audio content management and three separate Android applications to support audio story sharing and augmenting reality with soundscapes. This paper introduces the results from two workshops, suitable as extracurricular activities for students that have utilized the platform. To assess how students experience workshops and the platform we have developed an instrument to measure engagement. Our instrument is based on student engagement research. With this instrument we are able to analyze not just the engagement as a whole but also the behavioral, emotional and cognitive engagement components. Workshops create holistic experiences; thus, we need to take into account the platform and context when measuring user engagement.

A Community Information System for Ubiquitous Informal Learning Support

There are many mobile apps supporting informal learning tasks like sense-making out of multimedia materials. However, regardless how well these have been implemented, their scope and scalability is limited either by over-specialization and consequently limited transferability or by over-generalization - with a lack of informal learning support for most Web 2.0 apps. Our cloud-based mobile Web information system approach is theoretically founded and designed for scalability in informal learning. As a proof of concept we present a semantic video annotation scenario for supporting informal learning at workplace. As the approach has been designed for community learning analytics, we can present results from a preliminary evaluation. We conducted our research with a strong commitment towards open source software development, so that our solutions are already available and can have impact beyond the usual scope of a funded project.