=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-280/paper-20
|storemode=property
|title=Applying Sensemaking in a Mobile Learning scenario
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-280/p05.pdf
|volume=Vol-280
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ectel/ZuritaBAB07
}}
==Applying Sensemaking in a Mobile Learning scenario==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-280/p05.pdf
Applying Sensemaking in a Mobile Learning scenario
Gustavo Zurita1, Pedro Antunes2, Nelson Baloian3, Felipe Baytelman2
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, 1Information Systems Department - Business
School, 3Computer Science Department – Engineering School. 2University of Lisboa,
Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciencies.
gzurita@fen.uchile.cl;paa di.fc.ul.pt; nbaloian@dcc.uchile.cl; fbaytelm@dcc.uchile.cl
Abstract. In this work, a new type of collaborative learning activity is proposed in order to
enable students to explore and understand information in highly mobile situations. We call
this “mobile sensemaking” and is based on people engaged in multiple parallel, rapid and
ad-hoc interactions, rather than structured decision processes. This activity takes place in a
traditional classroom context, thus proposing a new way to design more participative and
active “lectures”. Mobile sensemaking proposes a proximity model and uses mobile
computing devices in order to carry on collaborative activities according to the domain
context and physical proximity.
1 Introduction
With the help of appropriate mobile technology and applications, teaching and learning activities are
expected to achieve higher levels of engagement, better adaptation to individual and group learning
needs, higher learning rates, and better quality of time utilization and a better flexibility of teaching
for the instructors. Over the last recent years many systems based on mobile computing technology
have been developed for supporting collaborative learning of students in the classroom. Despite of
this fact, the basic learning process has remained largely unchanged throughout this time. Many
educators agree that the main drawback of the traditional classroom lecture – the one placing teachers
as the major focus of attention and most critical resources – is the reduced level of interaction and
engagement between teachers and students, and among the students themselves thus negatively
affecting the motivation. The limited interaction possibilities in traditional classroom lectures
originates a set of problems regarding students’ attention and motivation, reduced teachers’ awareness
of the actual learning accomplishments, and lack of flexibility for handling the necessary adjustments
regarding the teacher’s and students’ goals.
Our endeavor is to improve interactivity in the classroom while still keeping the learning process
efficient in terms of resources and time. We have strong reasons to believe that mobile technology
provides a technological platform capable to support the levels of interactivity required by the active
learning process, and we are building software mechanisms to conserve the teachers’ effort in this
process. In this paper we show how wirelessly interconnected handheld computing devices may
improve interactivity in the classroom involving university students in more sophisticated interactions
than those expected in classic lectures, which in turn will foster motivating collaborative learning,
[10]. The focus of this technology is to improve information sensemaking in the classroom, i.e. the
students’ ability to collectively explore and understand information [12] while shifting the teacher’s
role to the backstage, performing supporting but not coordinating the assigned tasks.
2 Learning environment
Our learning environment considers a common classroom situation where a teacher assigns the task
of analyzing a large collection of documents to a large group of students. These documents are related
in some way, but the relationships must be discovered by the students through exploration and
collaboration. When the task is successfully accomplished, the students should have built a coherent
list of topics and identified their most significant relationships, thus defining a strategic view over the
proposed research topic, without having every student to read all the documents.
The task enfolds as follows. Each student receives one or two documents from the teacher and is
asked to find out the main topics addressed by those papers. This individual task should then
contribute to the collaborative effort. Students are expected to share their findings with others,
identifying common topics, establishing relationships, and avoiding misjudgments. This should
follow in a paced and informal way, avoiding loosing time waiting for individual students to deliver
their contributions, and in particular avoiding loosing too much time discussing their divergences as a
group. Instead, students are encouraged to engage in parallel negotiations with multiple parties to
solve their differences and reach consensus. Overall, the students assume the central role in the
decision process, while the teacher is sent to backstage, coaching and encouraging students, assessing
their accomplishments, although not coordinating the assigned task. The fundamental aim of this task
is to engage students in the sensemaking process. The sensemaking process was proposed by Weick
[13] as a primary mechanism for organizations to explore and understand information. Sensemaking
is an ongoing process aiming to create order and make retrospective sense about some event or
collection of events. It has also been associated to preliminary decision-making activities like
“understanding the situation” or “getting the picture” [4]. Sensemaking is also inherently
collaborative [8], meaning that the several mechanisms defined by sensemaking (ecological change,
enactment, selection, retention) rely on the capabilities of a community of people to identify cues,
update and share information, identify possible actions and provide feedback on those actions.
3 Context and Proximity in the learning environment
According to Dey [2], context is defined as any information that can be used to characterize the
situation of an entity. An entity is anything relevant to the interaction between a user and an
application, such as a person, a place or an object, including the user and the application themselves.
In general terms, context is typically the location, identity and state of people, groups, and
computational and physical objects.
Dix et al. [3] describe four generic forms of context that influence interaction with mobile devices:
infrastructure, system, domain and physical context. Our approach explores one form of context
defined by Dix [3]: the domain context. The domain context in our scenario is relatively complex
because it combines individual and group work in a very fluid way. Students serendipitously move
around the classroom forming temporary groups and holding ad-hoc interactions. The information
about when groups were set up, who belonged to those groups and what interactions occurred
characterizes the domain context in our scenario. This domain context should be maintained by
technology to facilitate sensemaking, since it improves the retrospective understanding of the
situation. The absence of domain context would represent an additional effort from the participants,
who would have to search endlessly for hints about previous interactions with other students, the
common topics that were found and decisions made. We thus believe that the combination of
proximity and context is a key aspect for supporting sensemaking in the classroom using handheld
computing devices. We define two fundamental types of proximity contexts:
• Environmental proximity - The students perform their activities in the classroom.
Environmental proximity contributes to define them as a group and to consolidate their expected
behavior as group. Environmental proximity is thus associated to the production, sharing and
sensing of topics in the classroom.
• Close proximity - The students engage together in very proximate face-to-face interactions, to
avoid disturbing other students who may be engaged in their own interactions. Close proximity
is associated to a face-to-face collaborative workspace, where two or more students share
information and discuss about specific topics, their relevance and possible relationships.
4 Proximity for Mobile Sensemaking
When two or more students are close to each other and wish to collaborate, the handheld computing
devices will automatically activate a Close Proximity Context (CPC). The following rules apply to
CPC management: a) the CPC is automatically activated when two or more handheld devices are
connected together at the very proximate physical level (e.g. using IRDA); b) the students engaged in
the same CPC automatically share their workspace and the information belonging to the shared
workspace is also part of the CPC; and c) the CPC is automatically deactivated when physical
connectivity is lost. Focusing on the whole classroom, we also define an Environmental Proximity
Context (EPC): a) the EPC is automatically activated when several handheld devices are
interconnected at the physical level (e.g. using WiFi); and b) the students might interact with their
devices to request becoming proximate to students for which some similarity has been indicated to
them.
Further discussed below according to several situations.
Environmental proximity situation. Teacher and students share the same classroom, and their
handheld devices share the same (Wi-Fi) network. Therefore they are potentially engaged in the same
EPC. However, not all students are effectively engaged in the EPC at a specific time, because they
may be engaged in a close proximity situation . Within the EPC, when a student produces a topic, it is
distributed to the other students’ handheld devices. The devices compare their current list of topics
with the distributed topic and, if there is some similarity matching, the student will be notified. Note
that unrelated topics are filtered out, but they may become related later on, when students change their
list of topics. If a student wishes to discuss with the student that produced the topic, she will invoke an
engagement protocol, which is described next. EPC is useful when the student considers that the face-
to-face interactions he/she made so far are not enough and whishes to find out possible relations
between her topics and those from other students present in the same classroom. Those students may
also include those with whom he/she already had a CPC interaction.
Engagement protocol. First, the protocol requires acceptance from the invoked party. In case of
acceptance, the parties must become face-to-face. Since the technology does not identify the students,
the engagement protocol must utilize a scheme that does not require identification. The adopted
solution involves Hot-Spots: the handhelds requests both parties to move towards a specific Hot-
Spots . Hot-Spots are a specific location in the environment . The Hot-Spot selection may depend on
load balancing. When students come face-to-face, we have a close proximity situation.
Close proximity situation. The students in this situation are face-to-face and share a CPC. Their
handheld devices automatically establish a temporal ad-hoc network connection (IRDA).
Furthermore, their devices will provide a shared workspace, where topics may be collaboratively
edited and linked with other topics present in any one of the participants’ handheld devices. This
allows effectively exchanging and sharing topics and links across multiple devices in an epidemic
way, whenever students engage in new close proximity situations.
Disengagement protocol. The disengagement protocol occurs when one student considers that
the face-to-face interaction is completed, and perhaps other students could be contacted. The
disengagement occurs when the student moves away from the face-to-face interaction and the
(IRDA) network connection is lost. Then, the student is again in the environmental proximity
situation. As mentioned, the contextual information associated to the face-to-face interaction is
preserved in the CPC.
5 Description of the Mobile Sensemaking Application
The application delineated in the previous sections has been implemented using a rapid development
platform for mobile applications. This platform offers generic support for sketching, pen-based
graphical objects manipulation, automatic ad-hoc network establishment, and object distribution and
replication, MCSketcher [15], Participatory Simulations [16]. Also, as described in [16], the
framework is able to recognize when to users engage in a face-to-face encounter, aligning their
handheld devices. In this section we describe how these features were used to build the mobile
sensemaking application. Most interaction with these UIs is done with pen gestures, because it is the
natural way for a user to control a handheld device.
Paper Distribution. The initial UI allows the teacher to assign papers to each student. On the left
part of the handheld screen, a list with student-icons represents all students attending to the activity.
This list is populated automatically by recognizing which devices are running the application within
the wireless network range. On the right part, a list with document-icons represents all documents
available for reading. In order to fill up this list, the teacher may click on the “add document” icon or
the “add folder icon,” both located at the beginning of the file list. Clicking opens a file browser
dialog or a directory browser dialog, loading a single selected file or all documents within selected
directory into the list. To assign a paper to a student, the teacher must drag its document-icon over the
student-icon. These actions may be repeated several times, assigning multiple papers to a student and
multiple students to a paper.
Paper reviewing and topics linking. Once a paper has been assigned, its icon appears in the
students’ handheld UI. The student may double click any document-icon to trigger the document
reader application and view the assigned paper. Document-icons appear in the lower part of the UI, so
the rest of the UI is empty and available for writing or drawing topics related to the assigned papers.
Once a topic is typed or sketched, the student may link it to one of the assigned papers by drawing a
connecting line. When this happens, the system recognizes the gesture and establishes a link between
the topic and the paper, represented by an arrow. A topic may be linked to several documents, and a
document may be linked to multiple topics. Repeating the “link gesture” unlinks the topic from the
document, allowing the student to correct links created accidentally. Also, drawing a “cross gesture”
can delete topics generated by the student.
Sharing privileges and information sharing. The system allows students to choose in which
way they want to share generated knowledge. In this case, each link may be configured as “public”,
“face-to-face only” or “private”. When a connection between a document and a topic is configured as
public, all students in the activity may access such information through the “Topic search screen” or
“face-to-face discussion”, both described next. If it is configured as face-to-face only, such
information will be revealed when two students engage into a face-to-face discussion, allowing the
unconfident student to talk about the idea with another participant. When a topic link is configured as
private it won’t be available to other students under any interaction mode until the student changes its
configuration. Students may configure a link access by double clicking it on the screen using the
handheld stylus. When this occurs, a small floating palette will offer the three available states that the
user can click. Each link between documents and topics displays a small icon representing its sharing
configuration. Links are created with “face-to-face only” privileges by default.
Related topic search and environmental sharing. As described in section 4, the activity
encourages students to interact either in close proximity or environmentally. Students may access all
knowledge generated by others configured as “public” by their authors. The “topics map” screen
displays a diagram where every student is represented by his/her icon, including the current user
centered in the middle of the screen. Each student icon is surrounded by its public topics, in a star
diagram fashion. Smart text matching algorithms simplify the search process by organizing the topics
map according to the student’s interests. Topics similar to the current student’s ones are displayed
closer to the center, drawn in darker color if their similarity reaches a high level. The participant
distribution in the screen depends on overall topics likeness: other students may be located near the
center when they have a high number of coincidences between his/her topics and current student’s
ones.Originally, the screen is zoomed in order to display the closest participants only. The user can
drag the screen to navigate through the entire list of participant holding and dragging the stylus. Also,
the user may zoom in or out clicking the magnifier icons or dragging the zoom slider at the right of
the screen. Finally, the user can double click another student’s icon when he/she is interested in this
particular student’s topics or wants to invite him/her to a face-to-face encounter. Based on these
simple pen-based gestures each student may browse all public topics.
Interacting with other students. Students enter the interaction screen by double clicking another
participant icon in the “topics map” screen or engaging in a proximity face-to-face interaction. The
first alternative allows a user to interact in an independent and one-way only, and the second one
establishes a two-way interaction. In the interaction screen, the lower region of the screen belongs to
the current student, while the upper region corresponds to the other user. The icons of documents
assigned to both students are displayed beside the students’ icons. These files icons may be double
clicked triggering a secondary reader application, as mention before. Also, such icons are surrounded
with their topics and their links to the documents. In case the interaction is triggered by a face-to-face
encounter, all links configured as public and as available in face-to-face interactions are shown. When
the interaction is activated from the “topics map” screen and the other student is not in front of the
current user, only public topic links will be displayed. A student may manually link his/her topics
with the other students’. To create a link between two topics he/she has to draw a line connecting their
labels, in the same way as he/she linked the topics with the documents in the topics definition screen.
Topic to topic links show an arrowhead according to which student created it. In case both students
agree on such relation, having the two of them drawn the same link, the line will have arrowheads in
both ends and get highlighted. Automatically created links always display as a two-way link. Finally,
students may link their documents directly to the other users’ topics. Topic-document’s links are
created using the same link gesture available in the “topics definition” screen. By doing this, topic
label will be relocated in the center of the screen, showing its links to documents of both students.
Engagement invitation. A student can invite another participant to take part in a face-to-face
interaction, in order to access to his/her “face-to-face only” topics and links. Invitations are generated
in the interaction screen drawing a line between both students’ icons. This will show a dialog which
allow the students to make a rendezvous appointment in a certain a hot spot. The invited student will
get an alert in his/her device inviting him/her to meet in the appointed location. Such alert has a
“dismiss” icon, which will cancel the invitation. In this case, the first user will be notified of such
response. In case the invited student accepts the proposal, both participants will meet in the assigned
place and start a face-to-face interaction, as described before, entering the interaction screen.
6 Discussion & Conclusions
The use of handheld computers to support learning has attracted the attention of many authors.
Among the earliest works we can cite is described in [5]. More works are described in [14] and [9]. In
all cases, the reason for having mobile devices is to support the social face-to-face interaction and to
achieve high levels of activity in the classroom, avoiding passivity of the students. The importance
and potential of context in general and awareness in particular was discovered very early in the short
history of the development of collaborative mobile applications. In [6] the author presents a works
showing how context information can be used in different application areas, e.g. tourist guidance,
exhibition guidance, e-mail, shopping, mobile network administration, medical care and office visitor
information. In these studies, the location of the user is the main attribute used in the context-
adaptation. In [1] the authors show the value of context information and social awareness for
developing an application to support collaboration between experienced and novel doctors in a
hospital. In [11] a mobile application which offers various services supporting office-type work which
uses context-awareness, mainly information on position of the user and available services nearby. It
seems there are no major contributions in the field context-aware applications for supporting
collaborative learning except for those dealing with participatory simulations, like the one described
in [7]. In this work, we apply the theoretical framework proposed by Dix [3] to develop a model and a
whole-classroom collaborative learning application. We think this model an application can also be
applied to other scenarios beside the described in section 2 where the common element is that the
information about proximity between users can be used for having a context-aware application. Some
of these scenarios may be conference participants using handhelds during the conference to ingress a
list of topics reflecting their research interests, a small group of employees performing teamwork in
an ad-hoc setting (e.g. emergency management), but they do not know in detail the responsibilities
and activities of their colleagues, or any kind of activities with people doing field-work having to
exchange information among each other in a reduced surrounding.
Acknowledgment: This paper was funded by Fondecyt 1050601.
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