c 2013 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. Re-publication of material from this volume requires permission by the copyright owners.
Addresses of the editors:
Thomas Daniel Ullmann Knowledge Media Institute The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA Adam Moore Knowledge and Data Engineering Group School of Computer Science and Statistics Trinity College Dublin, D2 Milos Kravcik RWTH Aachen University Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS) Ahornstr. 55 52056 Aachen Lucia Pannese imaginary srl Innovation Network Politecnico di Milano Via Mauro Macchi, 50 20124 Milano
How can awareness and reflection support learning in different settings (work, education, continuing professional development, lifelong learning, etc.). What are the roles that technology can play to support awareness and reflection in these contexts? This theme was covered in several topics of the workshop. The main interests were about the theoretical discussion of awareness and reflection in TEL and related concepts (e.g., collaborative learning, creativity techniques, experiential learning, etc.). The methodologies to identify, study and analyse awareness and reflection in the context of (technologyenhanced) learning. Besides theory and methodology the workshop informed about empirical studies about technology support for awareness and reflection. A special aim was to showcase technology (design, application, evaluation) supporting awareness and reflection. Here, the central question was how awareness and reflection technologies can help to enhance the learning experience, by researching learner’s awareness of social context, knowledge, artefacts and processes, and awareness and reflection in specific contexts, such as higher education, work-integrated learning, learning networks, etc.
The workshop included a paper session, demo and prototype slam as well as interactive sessions. The workshop provided a forum for presenting and discussing research on awareness and reflection in TEL, and created an interactive experience that connects participants’ research, current tools or latest prototypes and models with real end users’ learning experiences and requirements regarding reflection technology. Researchers and practitioners came together to work on the future agenda of ARTEL research and development (see the topic map below).
tive learning in order to better understand support actions for reflection in the workplace.
tions for the design of reflection tools.
an approach to determine how rare occurrence of reflections in writings are. Based on forum posts of online courses, a crowdsourcing approach was chosen to annotate sentences regarding several elements of reflections. These there then analysed to describe their frequency in texts. With this approach the intuition that reflections are rare in writings received empirical support.
places” by Prilla and Degeling describes the Talk Reflection App as socio-technical support for collaborative reflection. The paper makes the case for collaborative reflection and distinguishes between individual reflection and collaborative reflection (CR). Moreover, the authors present the evaluation of the Talk Reflection app in two medical cases and outline strengths and shortcomings of their approach.
current state of the Computer Supported Reflective Learning (CSRL) model developed in the MIRROR FP7 project. They introduce patterns to describe the reflective process. The evaluation of the model informs the refinements of the model, its notation, as well as usage instructions.
through collaborative, interactive visualizations of badges” describes the ”Navi Badgeboard”, a tool used on an interactive table to get an overview of the badges people have received during their learning. The tool aims at generating awareness of the goals and tasks required for a successful completion of a course.
The paper ”Feeler: feel good and learn better. A tool for promoting reflection about learning and well-being” by Durall and Toikkanen describes a combination of visualisation of learning performance in relation to individual well being to achieve a better learning progress. Their goal is to develop a tool, which spans approaches of the the quantified self community and of the field of learning analytics aiming at technological support for individual and collective reflection-after-action processes. ”SpirOnto: Semantically Enhanced Patient Records for Reflective Learning on Spiritual Care in Palliative Care” by Kunzmann, Roser, Schmidt, and Stiehl describes an approach in creating, using, and extending an ontology to support (reflective) learning on spiritual care. Their idea is to enrich documentation of interaction with patients on e.g. palliative wards with concepts from an ontology including elements of spiritual care for different cultural and other backgrounds in order to help workers improve their caring skills. ”REFLECT: Community-Driven Scaffolding for Voice-enabled Reflection on the Go” by Schmidt, Kunzmann, Attwell, Chan, Heinemann-Gru¨der, Hughes, Lan, Vratny, and
Future Challenges of Awareness and Reflection
TEL12). Workshop homepage: http://www.teleurope.eu/artel12. Proceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-931/.
ceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-790/
Workshop homepage: http://www.i-maginary.it/ectel2011/index. html
(ARPLE11). Workshop homepage: http://teleurope.eu/arple11. Proceedings: http://journal.webscience.org/view/events/The_PLE_ Conference_2011/paper.html#group_Proceedings_of_the_1st_ Workshop_on_Awareness_and_Reflection_in_Personal_Learning_ Environments
http://teleurope.eu/artel
Organization Committee
Program Committee
Supporting FP7 Projects Supporting FP7 Projects http://www.mirror-project.eu http://www.imreal-project.eu http://learning-layers.eu http://www.tellme-ip.eu/ http://wespot-project.eu 10
Papers and Demos on Awareness and Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Challenges of Awareness and Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Awareness and Reflection Workshop Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organization Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Program Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supporting FP7 Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Birgit R. Krogstie, Andreas P. Schmidt, Christine Kunzmann, John Krogstie, Simone Mora
Thomas Daniel Ullmann, Fridolin Wild, Peter Scott
Michael Prilla, Martin Degeling
Birgit R. Krogstie, John Krogstie, Michael Prilla
Sven Charleer, Joris Klerkx, Jose Luis Santos, Erik Duval
Eva Durall, Tarmo Toikkanen
Christine Kunzmann, Traugott Roser, Andreas P. Schmidt, Tanja Stiehl 3 3 5 5 8 9 13 29 41 53 69 83 91
Andreas P. Schmidt, Christine Kunzmann, Graham Attwell, Elizabeth Chan, Marius Heinemann-Gru¨der, Jenny Hughes, Wenlin Lan, Andreas Vratny, Andreas Heberle 97
Birgit R. Krogstie1, Andreas P. Schmidt2, Christine Kunzmann3, John Krogstie1,
Simone Mora1 1 Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway {birgitkr|john.krogstie|simonem@idi.ntnu.no}
2 Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany {andreas_peter.schmidt@hs-karlsruhe.de}
3 Pontydysgu, UK {kontakt@christine-kunzmann.de} Abstract: Reflection is a key activity for learning in organizations. While technology support for reflection on the individual and collaborative level is promising, it remains challenging to embed these learning activities into the organization. To better understand and support reflection in the workplace, it is important to see the mutual dependencies between reflective learning activities and knowledge maturing. In this paper, we seek to bridge the gap by presenting a conceptual model linking reflection and knowledge maturing. Based on the model we put forward three propositions: In reflective learning, expertise moderates knowledge maturing, discrepancies between knowledge elements trigger reflection, and the maturity of knowledge used in reflection influences the reflection process. We use findings from empirical studies in two care homes to support the propositions. We address implications for the design of technology enhanced reflection support by discussing a prototype reflection tool for care homes. 1
Introduction
Reflection is a key learning activity for organizations, but generally not very well
performed or supported [
Knowledge maturing [
The goal of this paper is linking the micro-perspective of reflective learning with a macro-perspective that embeds reflective learning processes into the organization. We 13 present an integrated model of reflective learning and knowledge maturing. We outline theoretical perspectives (section 2) and present a conceptual model and three propositions (section 3). We next present two cases (section 4) and use them to illustrate how our key propositions give insight about the cases (section 5) with implications for technology support (section 6). We conclude in section 7. 2
Background In this section we provide a background for our research contribution, addressing existing work on reflective learning and knowledge development in organizations. We identify a gap in current research with regard to how these processes are connected and argue that research on knowledge maturing can be used to fill the gap.
Reflective learning can be considered as the conscious reevaluation of experience
for the purpose of guiding future behavior, acknowledging the need to attend to
feelings, ideas and behavior [
Reflection can be individual, but can also be a collective activity [
Whereas individuals and groups may reflect to reconstruct and elaborate
experiences and thereby contribute to work-related problem-solving, an organizational
perspective on reflection sees reflection as a way of addressing organizational matters
and the implementation of structures and collective action: reflection is a collective
capacity to question assumptions [
To understand reflection at work, it is necessary to see the bottom-up and the
topdown perspectives in combination. The structures and collective actions implemented
from an organizational perspective have to support reflective processes as seen from
an individual and collaborative perspective [
To understand and support reflection, then, taking into account the organizational
perspective as well as that of individuals and groups, it would be helpful to explore in
more detail the connection between reflection and knowledge in an organization. The
reflection cycle model in [
Nonaka and Takeuchi’s theory on organisational knowledge creation [
The internalisation mode of knowledge creation is closely related to “learning by doing”; hence the internalisation process is deeply related to action. When tacit and explicit knowledge interacts, innovation emerges. Nonaka proposes that the interaction is shaped by shifts between modes of knowledge conversion. Adding Nonaka and Takeuchi’s ontological dimension of knowledge creation, we end up with the idealized spiral of organisational knowledge creation, which shows how the organisation can mobilise tacit knowledge created and accumulated at the individual level, organisationally amplified through the four modes of knowledge conversion and crystallised at higher ontological levels. Thus the authors propose that the interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge becomes larger in scale as the knowledge creation process proceeds up their ontological levels. The spiral process of knowledge creation starts at the individual level and potentially moves upwards through expanding interaction communities crossing sectional, departmental, divisional and possibly organisational boundaries. Note that it is not given that we want all knowledge to move to the organizational level
Knowledge maturing is a perspective on knowledge development that aims at
bringing together the manifold forms of knowledge inside organizations. Following
Nonaka’s knowledge spiral [
Knowledge maturing connects the characteristics of each of the phases to forms of learning and to characteristics of design tools, and shows what has to be accomplished for a transition. This leads to the insight that learning in early phases is more appropriate for those who have high level of expertise in the relevant area, while mature knowledge allows interaction with those considered novices.
Knowledge maturing not only considers the knowledge level, but also the artifacts that represent knowledge, such as notes, and documents, but also process models, or tags or taxonomy terms. While similar development phases can be identified in artifacts, e.g., associated with their formality, the relationship between knowledge and artifacts is more complex: artifacts can use a level of formality that is not appropriate for the knowledge maturity it represents, which has been found to be a common problem in enterprise information and knowledge management.
Furthermore, knowledge maturing also identifies activities that contribute [
Knowledge maturing is a promising perspective on knowledge development to
better link reflection to organizational knowledge development. Particularly the
identification of different characteristics of knowledge at different stages of maturity, based
on [
A Model Connecting Knowledge Maturing and Reflection In the previous section, we have identified that knowledge maturing appears to be a promising perspective to linking reflection with organizational knowledge development. For informing technology design for supporting reflection, we need to have a closer look at how elements of a reflection process are influencing and are influenced by knowledge maturing. We concentrate here on the interplay between the individual and the collective level. Towards that end, we have created a model by digesting the theoretical findings as outlined in the previous section and iteratively refining them with empirical findings that will be used in the following section.
As depicted in Figure 2, we have introduced the two main levels: the individual
level and the level of collective knowledge. On the individual level, it is useful to
distinguish between experience, expertise, and background motivation. An important
basis for reflection is the set of individual experiences, an experience being “the total
response of a person to a situation, including behavior, ideas and feelings” [
Individual knowledge develops from an aggregation of these experiences, but
experiences clearly go beyond knowledge as they capture the context in which they
have been made. Individual knowledge and experiences in turn, form part of
expertise. This is in line with [20] who identifies knowledge, experience (as in how long /
how many times one has been doing something), and problem solving as fundamental
components [20]. Background motivation finally captures that reflection on the
individual level is not only connected to expertise, but has an underlying complexity of
goals/motives of the individual. This is particularly important as early phases of
knowledge maturing are driven by individual motives [
On the collective side, knowledge maturing adopted a pragmatic view that collective knowledge is an abstraction of individual knowledge of the members of the collective [21].The relationship is not a simple sum. Individual knowledge can exist without turning into collective knowledge, if it does not become effective on the collective level (e.g., knowledge related to private activities). On the other hand, collective knowledge always depends on the learning of individuals.
Artifacts are manifestations, touchable or visible items, either in physical or
electronic form [
To characterize reflection, the reflection session as a time-limited activity, planned
or spontaneous, individual or collaborative has been introduced [
Based on these basic conceptualizations, three main propositions have been derived based on a theory-driven analysis of real-world examples, which characterize the relationship between reflection and knowledge maturing: Proposition 1) Expertise moderates knowledge maturing through reflection. Following the observation from knowledge maturing that expertise has a major influence on individuals’ capabilities to interact with knowledge of different characteristics, we can also find different approaches to reflection between novices and experts in a field. Novices tend to take collective knowledge for granted, and reflect on their understanding and internalisation of the collective knowledge, while more experienced individuals also challenge existing collective knowledge. Particularly in collaborative reflection sessions, it is important to consider that novices will bring in unfiltered and less interpreted experiences, but will need more experienced individuals to actually bring about the development of collective knowledge.
Proposition 2) The maturity of knowledge used in reflection moderates the
reflection process. Generalizing the findings from [
Discrepancy between collective and individual knowledge and/or experiences can lead to challenging the collective knowledge and thus developing it towards a higher degree of maturity. It can also lead to individual learning from collective knowledge, and to increased knowledge in appropriating collective knowledge.
Discrepancy between collective knowledge and artifacts include overformalization, when artifacts are presented to be more mature than the knowledge they represent, particularly if associated with requirements for compliance. This can lead to challenging the knowledge/artifact, workarounds, and to re-developing the artifact. Discrepancy between collective knowledge and artifacts can also result from under-formalization, e.g. when information is not appropriately recorded. This can lead to re-development of the artifact. Also the characteristics of interaction can differ from the characteristics of knowledge, e.g., when knowledge is in a phase where changeability and openness prevail, but the interaction possibilities restrict this, e.g., through access rights and lack of possibilities for contribution.
In the next section we present two cases from care homes. This is a type of workplace in which reflective practice is relatively established and recognized as important, giving good opportunities to collect data on the interplay of reflection and knowledge maturing. In Section 5 we use the cases to illustrate the relevance of our three propositions. 4
Cases: Work and reflective learning in two care homes In this section we present two cases from care homes: Case 1 (The Rose Garden) and Case 2 (The Community Care Home). The homes are located in different European countries. The residents of the homes are generally elderly people, many suffering from dementia. Our focus in both of the cases is the work of the carers. This section presents the research approach and gives some general context about the two cases.
The Rose Garden Care Home (Case 1) We conducted an exploratory case study addressing work and reflection among carers at the Rose Garden, a small-sized, private residential care home. We observed over two days, mainly in the lounges in which the residents spend most of their day receiving care from a team of carers. We conducted brief interviews and talked informally with different categories of staff (including owner, manager, and nurses) when possible. We collected data on the (at the time largely paper based) information infrastructure. Photography and note taking were restricted due to residents’ privacy.
Three in-depth interviews (each 60-90 minutes) with carers (C1, C2 and C3) about their work and workplace learning are the main source of data from the case. C1, who had been working in the home for three months, is in her early 20s. C2, having worked in the Rose Garden for about a year, is in her mid 20s. She is a team leader in the home and an educated nurse from her home country, waiting for accreditation to be a nurse also in her current country. C3 is a senior carer in her mid 40s, with many years of experience from care work. The three carers were selected to cover different degrees of experience, and was the largest group that could be taken out of their daily work for interviews. The interviews took place in the lunchroom, largely undisturbed, and were audio recorded and fully transcribed.
A prior study exploring the data from the care home from a different research perspective indicated that the relationship between carers’ reflection and the development of knowledge in the organization were important to the reflective learning. This along with the theoretical work presented in Section 3 guided a detailed data analysis of the carer interviews with a focus on key aspects from the model in Fig. 2. The analysis confirmed the relevance of the propositions presented in section 3; we selected an illustrative set of examples in section 5. In what follows we provide a brief description of relevant aspects of the work and learning practices at the Rose Garden, to give a context for the examples:
In the country of this study, there are no requirements for formal qualifications to start working as a carer. The majority of the care staff at the Rose Garden is young and inexperienced (e.g. C1), and the turnover is high.
Carers and residents spend much of their time in daily lounges. Medical supervision and administration of drugs are done by a nurse. Medical status information about residents is documented by the carers in various charts/reports. One of the carers on the team is team leader (e.g. C2) responsible for coordination and reporting. There is one senior carer (C3) in the home, acknowledged for her expertise. She is consulted by less experienced carers on care work, and by management to help e.g. in changing a care plan or take care of a difficult conversation with relatives of a resident.
The carers often have to handle challenging situations with residents. This requires knowledge about the resident (e.g. life history, prior interests) and general knowledge about care work. The Rose Garden follows a philosophy of personcentered care: Focus is the person with her life history, interests and integrity [24] To convey the care principles internally to staff and externally in marketing, a model of person-centered care is used. A diagram of the model is found on the wall in areas frequently visited by staff and visitors. The model includes a representation of the main psychological needs of people with dementia (see description in Section 6), connected to the process of care work, with personhood as a core element. The model is generally focused on care principles, not detailed procedures.
Doing care work in the lounge, the carers talk aloud. They explain to the residents what is happening and frequently ask their opinion or consent, in line with person20 class session begins. We can assume students wish to reflect on their progress through these regular visits. However, they seem less interested in other students’ achievements. 5.2
Navi Surface While we will evaluate further prototypes of Navi Surface during course sessions, this initial evaluation of the tabletop display application took place during a poster session just before the end of the CHI course. This gave us the opportunity to not only evaluate the tool with CHI students but also outsiders. 14 students walked up to the tabletop to test the application using the think-aloud protocol. Students were left to experiment alone or in group and hints were only given when the participant(s) got stuck. Student actions were recorded on video and they were given a questionnaire afterwards. 10 students approached and tested the tabletop in groups: 2 groups of 2 students and 2 groups of 3. Not all students were part of the CHI course.
The application received a SUS score of 71 which is just above average. However, only taking into account the CHI course students, the application received a score of 77. We assume that due to the abstract nature of the data, in its current form, Navi Surface does not give enough insight on the course content which makes it harder to use for outsiders. We will discuss how we can improve this further in section 6.
The goal of Navi Surface is to provide better understanding of the data and thus also increase awareness through collaborative interaction. This collaborative interaction should also ignite further discussions to create a deeper reflection.
Figure 7 contains box plots of the results of the 5-scale Likert questionnaire (1 - Strongly disagree, 2 - Strongly agree). Students do not believe their awareness of class progression was in any way improved. This result was expected as the first prototype only shows badges for the students dragged into the Playfield area. Only after dragging all names onto the tabletop would the user get a better idea of class status regarding the awards. As badges are only shown per period, an overview of the entire course length is also not available.
Navi Surface was built with multi-user collaboration in mind and while a single user experience is possible, it was not the goal of the application. This matches our finding in the questionnaire: there was a preference of using the tool in group. There was also an interest in using the tool together with a teacher.
Observation of the students while using the tool also confirmed that collaboration improved the reflection process as students understood the tool and the data much quicker. After getting a good grasp of what Navi Surface provided, they spontaneously started discussing their progress based on the badges. They reflected on why and how certain badges were achieved and others were not. They also experienced this collaboration to be more fun.
On the other hand, students faced with Navi Surface by themselves were more hesitant and needed input from the observer to continue using the tool. While the questionnaires confirm that they prefer to use it in group, it is clear that without the collaboration and social discourse this interaction enables, the actions are less spontaneous and much less deeper reflection occurs.
The tool was also tested on students who were not part of the CHI course. This however proved less successful especially with students faced with the tool by themselves. As Navi Surface does not provide any details on the actual data behind the badges (blog posts, comments and tweets), the data is very unclear to outsiders. This also affected the SUS score (see above). In section 6, we will discuss how we can provide more detailed information and hereby also make Navi Surface more interesting to outsiders. 6
Conclusion and Future Work Learning dashboards provide a means of visualizing the abundance of traces which learning analytics allows us to collect from students. We look at simplifying the data by emphasizing the more important student activities and course goals and visualizing these through badges.
While the personal dashboard has improved perceived awareness with students and the overview of class progress was deemed valuable by teachers and teacher assistants, we believe Navi Surface has more potential in helping awareness and reflection with students through its collaborative nature. In its current state, Navi Surface already enables students to understand the data quicker and plays a catalyst in discussions. Navi Surface makes the process fun and students show interest in using this tool with class mates but also with teachers.
More evaluations will give us deeper insights and we believe that there are still many unexplored possibilities which makes further development of this tool very interesting. By simply adding more course data to the visualizations and allowing students to drill down on badges to reveal more data, students could discover why and how certain badges have been awarded (e.g. the specific blog post or comment that triggered a badge), creating a better insight of the progress and a deeper reflection on the learning process.
Adding more detailed course data to the visualization does not only benefit student and teacher, but could help outsiders comprehend the inner workings of a course better. Open school days can help students choose their future classes based on the real data provided through Navi Surface. Parents’ evenings can become more interactive as parents and teacher can utilize the tabletop to dig deeper into the details of the learning process of son or daughter.
While we mainly work with blog and Twitter data, Navi Surface can easily be extended to support even richer learning analytics data. Students in a more inquiry based learning environment leave behind richer artifacts (e.g. photographs, geographical coordinates) which could provide even more interesting visualizations and therefore an even better insight through Navi Surface. Even MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) can benefit from the abstraction to badges and the visualization through Navi Surface.
With few developments, many new possibilities open up. We will therefore continue our research into badges and tabletop displays as a way of improving awareness and reflection in the class room and beyond. 7
Acknowledgement The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No 318499 - weSPOT project.
Feeler: feel good and learn better A tool for promoting reflection about learning and Well-being
Eva Durall1, Tarmo Toikkanen1 1Learning Environments research group. School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Aalto
University. Helsinki, Finland {eva.durall, tarmo.toikkanen}@aalto.fi Abstract. In this paper we present Feeler, a design-in-progress tool for visualization of learning performance and well-being with the aim of fostering reflection and awareness. The project combines two currently promising areas such as Personal Informatics and Learning Analytics in order to encourage learners to reflect about their lifestyle and its impact on their learning capabilities. It is expected that allowing learners to capture and visualize quantitative data about their states and habits will offer them rich materials that support individual and collective reflection-after-action processes. This project builds on participatory design and a research-based design process. Currently, the project is in a product design stage. The aim of the project is to develop a working prototype that follows a slow technology approach that can be tested in learning contexts.
Keywords. research-based design, information visualization, reflection, awareness, learning analytics, personal informatics 1 Saga has difficulties to stay focused on her studies and she feels stressed because she can hardly complete the tasks. In a tutoring session, Saga’s tutor suggests her that doing some regular exercise could actually help her to stay focused. Although Saga is skeptical, her tutor convinces her to use Feeler, a system that monitors her concentration levels and the amount of physical activity she has during a certain amount of time.
Feeler combines a head band that tracks brain activity and smart textiles to visualize the data. Small led lights are integrated in two wool wrist bands and they blink when the person loses attention for a certain time. Thanks to this gentle reminder Saga is more aware of her current capabilities and acts according to what her body needs. The light signal helps her to decide when to change the type of task or take a break. Data about exercise habits is registered through a mobile app. Information about concentration levels and physical activity is displayed in a screen. This allows Saga to identify patterns between the amount of physical activity and how long she is able to keep her attention. After a while of using Feeler, Saga realizes that after moderate exercise, she is able to keep concentrated for longer periods of time. She discusses this with her peers and with her tutor and gets some suggestions about how to better plan her schedules. 2
Quantified-Self: a Tool for Self-Understanding
In many societies, computers have become an everyday tool that has adopted diverse
forms: laptop, smartphones, tablets… The combination of these devices with Internet
access and sensors has allowed people to collect data about a myriad of personal
aspects dealing with physiology, behavior, habits and thoughts. In this context, the
Quantified-Self movement has appeared as a way to develop self-knowledge through
data. The availability of measurable personal data can be used, as [
Personal informatics, also known as Quantified-Self, has become quite popular in fields dealing with sports and health. In sports, some of the currently well-known body tracking products include Nike+ and its fuelband1, Fitbit2, RunKeeper3 and Moves4. Concerning wellbeing, applications such as Withings5, HeartMath6, mindbloom7 and Ubifit Garden8 offer opportunities to users to learn about their progression and undertake new challenges concerning healthy habits.
In the field of e-learning, learning analytics takes advantage of the possibilities of
data monitoring in order to understand and improve teaching and learning. Despite the
intention is to empower teachers and learners, some critical voices [
Considering the key role of self-knowledge for self-regulation and metacognition,
self-understanding should be at the center of systems that monitor student data. In this
sense, some authors [
Nike+ fuelband. http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/nikeplus-fuelband Fitbit. http://www.fitbit.com/ Runkeeper. http://runkeeper.com/ Moves. http://www.moves-app.com Withings. http://www.withings.com HeartMath. http://www.heartmath.com/ Mindbloom. https://www.mindbloom.com/lifegame Ubifit Garden. http://dub.washington.edu/projects/ubifit being, might be worth to be taken into consideration since they can impact learning performance. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to learning analytics since we combine data about well-being with learning performance. The research question that drives this project focuses on how to foster reflection about learning capabilities in relation to a person's well-being. 3
Visualizing the Data for Reflecting
Making sense of large datasets composed by numerical and textual information can be
handled much easier if the information is visualized. Due to the power of images for
synthesizing complex information, information visualization has been recognized as a
powerful tool for reducing cognitive load, offloading short-term memory, allowing
for easier comparisons, and generally facilitating inferences [
According to [
[
Visualizing the data can be a powerful resource for supporting reflection,
individual or in groups, and therefore gaining awareness. Considering the strong link between
reflection and learning [
Some of the research questions that emerge in this context, is how to make large
volumes of data meaningful for users. How should this data be displayed in order to
improve self-understanding, reflection and awareness? One answer to this question
can be found in the design philosophy underlying slow technology. According to [
The visualization of information dealing with learning and well-being through
smart textiles could be perceived as an object for reflection in the sense that it
encou9 Spotfire. TIBCO Software. http://spotfire.tibco.com/discover-spotfire
10 Wikimapia. http://wikimapia.org
11 Many-Eyes. http://many-eyes.com
rages the person to take some time to think about his/her habits. Smart textiles, also
known as electronic textiles or e-textiles, refer to the use of electronic components
and advanced fibers in garments [
Methods
To design tools that effectively assist self-reflection, it is crucial to understand how
people think about well-being and learning in relation to their everyday practices. For
this reason, the project builds on a research-based design process [
At the moment, 6 exploratory interviews have been realized to people aged between 24-60 years old that combine work and studies and that are concerned about their well-being. The interviewees were asked to take some pictures and write a short text about how they would represent well-being, health and mindfulness in their everyday life. Images and texts were adapted to a card layout and used during the interviews as a starting point of the conversation. The information gathered during the interviews informed the participatory design session that took place during the 2nd Multidisciplinary Summer School on Design as Inquiry18. The workshop helped to 12 Georgia Tech Wearable Mother BoardTM http://www.gtwm.gatech.edu/ 13 http://www.ugent.be/ea/textiles/en/projects/afgelopenprojecten/Proetex.htm 14 Nike Hyperdunk+. http://swoo.sh/17nJBtl 15 Midi controller jacquet. http://kck.st/ZX78u2 16 Fashioning technology. http://www.fashioningtech.com 17 E-motion project. http://www.design.udk-berlin.de/Modedesign/Emotion 18 2nd Multidisciplinary Summer School on Design as Inquiry. http://bit.ly/1cmOunJ gain insights of people’s understanding of learning and well-being, as well as to brainstorm some ideas about what aspects could be worth to quantify and how to visualize the data. In the short-term, next steps include the development of the concept design, building of low-fi prototypes and the organization of more participatory design sessions. The aim of the project is to develop a working prototype that can be tested in learning contexts. 5
Feeler prototype
Feeler is a tool, currently still under development, that allows learners to monitor some aspects of their well-being, such as the amount of physical activity and concentration levels, in order to improve their learning. Feeler will combine data about personal well-being with metadata of learning materials such as the amount of time a student has logged into the system and the times when she connected. The reason for using learning analytics is for increasing understanding about the conditions in which a person is more willing to learn.
It is expected that this tool will support learners’ reflective thinking about their
lifestyle and the impact it has in their learning capabilities. By focusing in a personal
matter such as well-being, the tool connects with some of the elements outlined by [
Early prototypes of the suggested tool (fig.1) are based on the use of a headband that monitors the brain activity, for instance the Melon band19 and a mobile app that tracks physical activity (Moves5). The head band can register different states of mental activity in order to determine a person’s level of focus. Information about how much concentrated is the person for a specific amount of time would be displayed through a smart wool bands placed in the person’s wrists. Depending of the concentration level, some led lights would activate. The more concentrated you are, the more intense would be the lights sparkling in the wool bands. Less levels of concentration would be associated to less intensity of the lights. Information about physical activity is monitored through the mobile app Moves. In this case, no specific action nor extra device are required. Once downloaded the app, the person just has to carry her phone wherever she goes and it will detect the type of activity performed (walk, run or cycle), the duration and the distance travelled. 19 Melon. http://kck.st/13uYmbQ
Fig. 1. Sketches of Feeler prototype.
Data about the level of focus and physical activity will be displayed together through a screen (fig. 1). The intention is to allow the person to observe trends, get into details and establish correlations. By offering the users different levels of reading, we expect they would engage in reflection processes that can lead to meaningful group discussions. 6
Conclusions
The underlying assumption of the research is that information visualization can be a powerful tool for encouraging reflection and awareness. By drawing the attention to learning and well-being, the project combines two currently promising areas such as Personal Informatics and Learning Analytics. It is expected that allowing learners to capture quantitative data about their states and habits will offer them rich materials that support reflection processes.
Even if Feeler can be used in very different settings, we consider that the tool has
great potential in higher education since reflective practices help facing life’s
challenges and encourages attention and analysis habits key for addressing the problems
of society [
Regarding the design of the prototype, slow technologies bring inspiring since, rather than designing for effective work, the aim is to foster reflection. In this sense, some initial sketches focus on smart textiles for displaying the information following a slow approach. In this sense, we consider that not only the tool, but the design as well should support reflective practices.
References
Christine Kunzmann1, Traugott Roser2, Andreas P. Schmidt3, Tanja Stiehl4 1Pontydysgu, UK {kontakt@christine-kunzmann.de}
4 University of Münster, Germany {traugott.roser@uni-muenster.de} 3 Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany {andreas_peter.schmidt@hs-karlsruhe.de} 4 Center of Pediatric Palliative Care, LMU Munich, Germany {tanja.stiehl@med.uni-muenchen.de} Abstract. Ontologies as shared understanding of a domain of interest can support reflective processes in spiritual care. Such an ontology has been extracted from an empirical analysis of historic patient records, which has identified a key structure. This ontology is supposed to support the reflective learning process of the palliative care team, which is interdisciplinary. A first prototype for a semantically enhanced patient care documentation system has been developed which embeds links to spiritual care into practice and helps to create awareness among other disciplines about the systematic nature of spiritual care.
Keywords: ontologies, spiritual care, patient documentation, reflection 1
Palliative care is a challenging multidisciplinary field where different perspectives need to complement each other, including nurses, doctors, social workers but also the frequently neglected aspect of spiritual care. Particularly this aspect has become more complex as a consequence for an increasingly multi-cultural society with a myriad of religious and spiritual ideas and beliefs.
Currently there is little awareness about spiritual aspects in palliative care in adjacent professions (such as physicians or nurses), and the perceived significance of this part of palliative lags behind other professions. This is due to spiritual care not being explicitly represented in boundary objects between the professions, most notably in patient records, but also due to lack of evidence about the effectiveness of spiritual interventions beyond anecdotal evidence.
An analysis of their work and learning practices has revealed that due to the demanding nature of palliative care, reflective practice can already be identified on a regular basis, particularly as regular, but informal group meetings, and as institutionalized “supervision” in larger time intervals. This is an important element of coping strategies. In these reflection sessions, narratives about patients (from varying timeframes) are used to deepen the understanding about individual cases, but also to discover patterns across cases, to rationalise encounters of everyday practice. Team members have developed a remarkably rich understanding of their work through these practices.
To promote the understanding of spiritual care, building upon those reflective practices seems to be a very promising approach. Therefore the work presented in this paper has concentrated on identifying and designing artefacts that can act as boundary objects and support the reflective learning process and that can promote the maturing of knowledge, especially through two activities: getting an overview about individual cases and discovering patterns across cases.
The key idea of the approach is a spiritual care ontology, which represents a shared understanding of the domain accessible to all involved professions. This ontology is used to enhance patient records, represents a scaffold for reflection sessions, and captures evidence about relationship between patient situations and effective interventions.
In the following sections, we present the ontology and how it was developed (section 2) and the concept of how it is designed to support the (collective) learning process (section 3) before we present a first prototype in section 4. 2
In order to come up with a meaningful and relevant ontology, an empirical approach has been chosen to develop the ontology (more details on the process are described in Stiehl et al. (2011)). As a first step, a qualitative empirical analysis of 143 records of patients between 2004 and 2010 has been conducted. The concepts found were iteratively integrated into an (informal) ontology using concept maps. This ontology was discussed with practitioners in workshops for relevance and comprehensibility to align the empirical results with the needs in everyday practice.
The structure of the resulting ontology can be decomposed into the following key elements:
Facts about a patient or its social environment including relatives and friends (expressed as direct properties). This includes demographic data, information about course of disease and care status, but also the cultural background (e.g., religion, migration background, or whether an individual has been raised in rural or more urban areas).
Observations that led to the identification of the facts (having a timestamp and a possibly rich description of the observation.
Spiritual concepts that interpret facts (and thus also observations). This includes a large set of concepts, such as eternity and finiteness, eternal love, love, guilt, purity, powerlessness vs. almightiness, or autonomy. The links to observable behaviour or facts are context-dependent interpretations – different individuals link the same “facts” to different concepts, depending on their background and personal expectations. The spiritual concepts originate from spiritual traditions, but are not limited to a single religion, which is particularly important with the increasing diversity in religion and culture within society. Spiritual interventions are possible spiritual care activities. These can include active spiritual support, meaningful silence, pastoral interviews, practical consultancy, or rituals.
It is important that there is a connection between these key concepts. Observations lead to facts about a patient (or their relatives). These can be linked to spiritual concepts, such as concepts of death, purity, or forgiveness. These links show needs and unresolved spiritual conflicts that are particularly important in palliative care processes. It should be noted that spiritual care is necessary for the patient, but also for the relatives, and even for the palliative care team. Finally, the spiritual care interventions link to spiritual concepts so that the identification of concepts can help to identify appropriate interventions (and their contextualization). Such interventions could be anointing in a catholic tradition, but also ritual cleansing in other cultures. But it could also identify topics for pastoral interviews. A small example of the ontology is shown in figure 2 (the whole ontology consists of more than a hundred elements).
This ontology does not only allow for representing the knowledge about a patient and their social environment in a systematic way; it also represents to a certain degree the knowledge about appropriate spiritual care by providing the relevant concepts and identifying the possible interventions, which is an analogy to diagnosis and treatment in medical care. 3
Ontology & the Loops of Learning The ontology is not only intended to act as a boundary object (together with the patient record) between the disciplines, but also as a bridge between operational and reflective processes, which is common in reflective learning:
On the operational level, carers document their activities as well as any observations on the state or other aspects deemed to be potentially relevant. This usually takes place in a chronological way. Palliative care processes, however, often extend over long periods of time (it also has to be taken into account that not only the patient, but also relatives are to be cared for). The key idea is that by annotating these incrementally collected notes with concepts from the ontology, a system can tie together distant observations about (possibly) the same aspect. Also the ontology can guide towards possibly neglected aspects.
This forms then the basis for reflection about individual cases. Reflection is already institutionalized as regular meetings. The ontology can help as a structure to have a systematic look at aspects that might be relevant for spiritual care. It is important to note that these observations are typically made by the various disciplines and need to be put together to have a reasonably complete overview. The structure of the ontology can show gaps of information and its use promotes awareness and understanding of relevant spiritual care aspects. On a longer timescale, multiple cases can be analysed to enhance the body of evidence about effectiveness of spiritual care interventions in certain contexts. Patterns can be discovered, such as differences in age with respect to dealing with the prospect of dying (such as asking why). Such patterns can be then used to further enhance the ontology and can feed into targeted research activities. 4
The System A first prototype for a novel patient documentation system that is guided by the ontology has been developed in a participatory design approach. The resulting system is based on a flexible backend implemented in Java ontop of Sesame RDF store and Lucene for fulltext search. The front-end is has been implemented for Windows Tablets and laptops in C# using the Windows Presentation Framework. The front-end is designed to support offline operation so that the application does not depend on network coverage at all times.
The prototype allows for entering notes about patients in a chronological way. In a simple interface, the user can assign concepts from the ontology to the note. Only a small part of the ontology is static (in the sense that it can only be changed by an administrator); apart from that, users can extend the concepts in the ontology if they find that something relevant is missing (or rename concepts introduced by others, e.g., after a discussion in a meeting). This supports the gradual maturing of the ontology, not only as part of the reflective sessions, but also as part of everyday practice by capturing aspects that are not yet covered by the ontology.
Outlook While spiritual care is often belittled as lacking evidence of its effectiveness compared to other disciplines in palliative care, the development of the ontology has already shown that spiritual care follows a systematic approach. This systematic approach is made visible through the general structure of the ontology that has been derived from historic patient records: observations/facts, spiritual concepts as interpretations, and spiritual care interventions. Workshops with physicians, social workers, and carers have shown that the ontology can act as a boundary object between the disciplines and can create awareness about spiritual care and its relevance for holistic care.
A first prototype has been built that demonstrates a novel approach to care documentations where observations can be associated with spiritual care concepts in a lightweight way. This opens the possibility for enhancing the reflection on the individual patient (that already takes place) with a structured representation about individual cases (e.g., to more easily discover gaps), and for developing spiritual care knowledge further (by analysing across cases and collecting the experiences).
We are aiming at trialling the prototype and gaining additional evidence about how such an ontology can enhance both practice and associated learning processes.
Acknowledgements. This work is supported by the European Commission under the FP7 project LAYERS (no. 318209), http://www.learning-layers.eu. We wish to thank the student teams at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences for their effort to create the first prototype. They were part of the International Business Solutions Project in the Business Information Systems program, which has received a teaching award from the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung supporting its further internationalization.
References Stiehl, Tanja, Führer, Monika, Roser, Traugott, Kunzmann, Christine, Schmidt, Andreas (2011). Describing spiritual care within pediatric palliative care. An ontology-based method for qualitative research In: 12th Congress of the European Association for Palliative Care 2011, Portugal, 2011
Andreas P. Schmidt2, Christine Kunzmann1, Graham Attwell1, Elizabeth Chan2, Marius Heinemann-Grüder2, Jenny Hughes1, Wenlin Lan2, Andreas Vratny2, Andreas Heberle2 1Pontydysgu, UK 2 Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany Abstract. REFLECT is a mobile app that promotes a regular reflective routine. It is voice-based so that it can be used, e.g., while driving a car or in similar situations. The reflection session is scaffolded through decks of questions that can be configured by the user and shared with others, who in turn can reuse the questions.
Keywords: Reflection, prompts, scaffolding 1 Reflective learning is seen as one of the key activity for workplace learning that is most neglected because of time pressure in everyday business. This particularly applies to General Practitioners (GPs) who are on a tight schedule between slots for consultation and home visits. From the need to make learning activities traceable for re-certification, there is, however, an interest from doctors to reflect on learning experiences and to follow-up on learning opportunities arising from everyday practice. Key approach is to create reflection opportunities by utilizing time slots like when driving in the car from/to a home visit, or commuting. 2
Concept The key idea behind REFLECT is that reflection support is based on voice interactions, which allows for hands-free operation. Users can record their reflection sessions, and the system transcribes it and sends it to them via e-mail for further processing, e.g., for including in a personal note-taking or task management tool, or a personal portfolio for future reference.
But reflection also needs scaffolding, particularly if it is supposed to take place embedded into working processes like in-between home visits. This is achieved through recording the reflection session in the form of a structured interview along a deck of questions. The app reads the question (via text-tospeech) and then records the user’s responses. Via special voice commands (e.g., “next question”), the user can skip questions.
Useful questions for reflection cannot be predefined by the app designer, as they are situationdependent (reflecting on the day/last patient, reflection on a longer period of time, reflecting after a training session) and there is no general knowledge about (i) which situations are relevant, and (ii) which questions are useful for which type of user. Therefore the app is complemented by a web-based interface that allows for choosing decks of questions that have been shared by others, for rating their usefulness, and – as soon as the learning becomes more confident and experienced in reflective practice to Figure 1: Android app define own new questions and to share them with others.
This results in a lightweight and community-driven approach to scaffolding reflection, which also provides the opportunity for maturing the collective knowledge how to best structure such reflection sessions.
System The system consists of an app to be installed on a smartphone or tablet (the current version requires Android 4.1 or higher – other systems are planned), and a web-based backend. The app allows for choosing a deck of questions, reads the questions to the user and transcribes the responses of the user and reacts voice commands. Towards that end, the Google Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text APIs are used. While this voice recognition does not deliver 100% accuracy, first tests have shown that under realistic conditions (e.g., in a car) the system produces a sufficient of quality of the resulting transcript to be useful for the user.
The backend is based on PHP, and users the Bootstrap framework. It gives the user the possibility to configure decks of questions, share them with others, use shared questions from others and rate them.
The app is available from the Google Play Store under http://goo.gl/m0vBc As part of the Learning Layers project, this app is planned to be evaluated with a larger number of users as part of General Practitioners’ everyday work practice. Furthermore, it is planned to complement the Android app with an iOS solution to cover the different types of smartphones used by the target group.
Acknowledgements. This work is supported by the European Commission under the FP7 project LAYERS (no. 318209), http://www.learning-layers.eu. The development was undertaken by a student team in the International Business Solution Project (IBSP) course within the Business Information Systems program at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. The course concept has received a “Fellowship for Innovations in University Teaching” from the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, which supports its further internationalization.