Enriching spaces in practice-based education to support collaboration while mobile: the case of teacher education

Practice-based education is gaining a growing popularity in fields as diverse as, for example, software engineering, pedagogy and medical studies. In practice-based education learning takes place across different learning arenas and requires cooperation among all the actors involved in the learning process. However, mobility of students across these arenas impact deeply on cooperation patterns, and therefore on the learning process. In this paper we investigate the usage of shared display systems to promote cooperation among students in practice-based education. Our focus is on teacher education and the paper is based on our experiences with the teacher education programme at our university. Based on our observations of students out in practice, we discuss the importance of common spaces and the role of bulletin boards of different types. We then define high-level requirements for a shared display system to support practice-based education and we illustrate the main concepts with a demonstrator. Strengths and weaknesses of our approach are pointed out through an evaluation of the demonstrator.

[1]  Ole Smørdal,et al.  PDAs in medical education and practice , 2002, Proceedings. IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education.

[2]  Giorgio De Michelis,et al.  Design and deployment of community systems: reflections on the Campiello experience , 2002, Interact. Comput..

[3]  Jan Noyes,et al.  HCI International 2005 , 2005, HCI International 2005.

[4]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  The notification collage: posting information to public and personal displays , 2001, CHI.

[5]  Monica Divitini,et al.  Shared displays for promoting informal cooperation: an exploratory study , 2004, COOP.

[6]  Wendy E. Mackay,et al.  Media Spaces: Environments for Informal Multimedia Interaction , 1999 .

[7]  Bonnie A. Nardi,et al.  Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? , 2004, CSCW.

[8]  Pamela J. Hinds,et al.  The (Currently) Unique Advantages of Collocated Work , 2002 .

[9]  Kenton P. O'Hara,et al.  Public and Situated Displays , 2003, The Kluwer International series on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

[10]  Monica Divitini,et al.  Blog to support learning in the field: lessons learned from a fiasco , 2005, Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'05).

[11]  John C. Ferrara.  Building positive team relationships for better usability , 2005, INTR.

[12]  Phil Turner,et al.  Spaces, Spatiality and Technology . , 2005 .

[13]  T. Rodden,et al.  The Social Construction of Displays , 2003 .

[14]  Thomas H. Davenport,et al.  Book review:Working knowledge: How organizations manage what they know. Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. $29.95US. ISBN 0‐87584‐655‐6 , 1998 .

[15]  Kaj Grønbæk,et al.  eBag: a ubiquitous Web infrastructure for nomadic learning , 2005, WWW '05.

[16]  Kenton O'Hara,et al.  Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies , 2004 .

[17]  Christian Heath,et al.  Mobility in collaboration , 1998, CSCW '98.

[18]  Munindar P. Singh,et al.  Service-Oriented Computing: Semantics, Processes, Agents , 2010 .

[19]  Karen Holtzblatt.  Designing for the Mobile Device: Experiences, Challenges, and Methods , 2005 .

[20]  Heinz Ulrich Hoppe,et al.  Integrating heterogeneous personal devices with public display-based information services , 2005, IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE'05).