Primary students' group metacognitive processes in a computer supported collaborative learning environment

The current understanding of students’ group metacognition is limited. The research on metacognition has focused mainly on the individual student. The aim of this study was to address the void by developing a conceptual model to inform the use of scaffolds to facilitate group metacognition during mathematical problem solving in computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments. An initial conceptual framework based on the literature from metacognition, cooperative learning, cooperative group metacognition, and computer supported collaborative learning was used to inform the study. In order to achieve the study aim, a design research methodology incorporating two cycles was used. The first cycle focused on the within-group metacognition for sixteen groups of primary school students working together around the computer; the second cycle included between-group metacognition for six groups of primary school students working together on the Knowledge Forum® CSCL environment. The study found that providing groups with group metacognitive scaffolds resulted in groups planning, monitoring, and evaluating the task and team aspects of their group work. The metacognitive scaffolds allowed students to focus on how their group was completing the problem-solving task and working together as a team. From these findings, a revised conceptual model to inform the use of scaffolds to facilitate group metacognition during mathematical problem solving in computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments was generated.

The use of embodiments in distributed collaborative business process modelling

Remote networked collaboration with business model documentation has many communication problems. The aim of this project is to solve some of these communication problems by using digital 3D representations of human visual cues. Results from this project increased our understanding of the role and effects of visual cues in remote collaboration, specifically for validating business process models. Technology designs to support such cues across a distance have been proposed in this thesis with qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis being combined to analyse the impact of these cues on the communication, coordination and performance of a team collaborating remotely.

Thinking like Disney: Supporting the Disney method using ambient feedback based on group performance

The Disney method is a collaborative creativity technique that uses three roles - dreamer, realist and critic - to facilitate the consideration of different perspectives on a topic. Especially for novices it is important to obtain guidance in applying this method. One way is providing groups with a trained moderator. However, feedback about the group’s behavior might interrupt the flow of the idea finding process. We built and evaluated a system that provides ambient feedback to a group about the distribution of their statements among the three roles. Our preliminary field study indicates that groups supported by the system contribute more and roles are used in a more balanced way while the visualization does not disrupt the group work.

Collaborative practices that support creativity in design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and; 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study.

Active awareness : supporting the intentional disclosure of awareness information in collaborative systems

This thesis opens up the design space for awareness research in CSCW and HCI. By challenging the prevalent understanding of roles in awareness processes and exploring different mechanisms for actively engaging users in the awareness process, this thesis provides a better understanding of the complexity of these processes and suggests practical solutions for designing and implementing systems that support active awareness. Mutual awareness, a prominent research topic in the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) refers to a fundamental aspect of a person’s work: their ability to gain a better understanding of a situation by perceiving and interpreting their co-workers actions. Technologically-mediated awareness, used to support co-workers across distributed settings, distinguishes between the roles of the actor, whose actions are often limited to being the target of an automated data gathering processes, and the receiver, who wants to be made aware of the actors’ actions. This receiver-centric view of awareness, focusing on helping receivers to deal with complex sets of awareness information, stands in stark contrast to our understanding of awareness as social process involving complex interactions between both actors and receivers. It fails to take into account an actors’ intimate understanding of their own activities and the contribution that this subjective understanding could make in providing richer awareness information. In this thesis I challenge the prevalent receiver-centric notion of awareness, and explore the conceptual foundations, design, implementation and evaluation of an alternative active awareness approach by making the following five contributions. Firstly, I identify the limitations of existing awareness research and solicit further evidence to support the notion of active awareness. I analyse ethnographic workplace studies that demonstrate how actors engage in an intricate interplay involving the monitoring of their co-workers progress and displaying aspects of their activities that may be of relevance to others. The examination of a large body of awareness research reveals that while disclosing information is a common practice in face-to-face collaborative settings it has been neglected in implementations of technically mediated awareness. Based on these considerations, I introduce the notion of intentional disclosure to describe the action of users actively and deliberately contributing awareness information. I consider challenges and potential solutions for the design of active awareness. I compare a range of systems, each allowing users to share information about their activities at various levels of detail. I discuss one of the main challenges to active awareness: that disclosing information about activities requires some degree of effort. I discuss various representations of effort in collaborative work. These considerations reveal that there is a trade-off between the richness of awareness information and the effort required to provide this information. I propose a framework for active awareness, aimed to help designers to understand the scope and limitations of different types of intentional disclosure. I draw on the identified richness/effort trade-off to develop two types of intentional disclosure, both of which aim to facilitate the disclosure of information while reducing the effort required to do so. For both of these approaches, direct and indirect disclosure, I delineate how they differ from related approaches and define a set of design criteria that is intended to guide their implementation. I demonstrate how the framework of active awareness can be practically applied by building two proof-of-concept prototypes that implement direct and indirect disclosure respectively. AnyBiff, implementing direct disclosure, allows users to create, share and use shared representations of activities in order to express their current actions and intentions. SphereX, implementing indirect disclosure, represents shared areas of interests or working context, and links sets of activities to these representations. Lastly, I present the results of the qualitative evaluation of the two prototypes and analyse the results with regard to the extent to which they implemented their respective disclosure mechanisms and supported active awareness. Both systems were deployed and tested in real world environments. The results for AnyBiff showed that users developed a wide range of activity representations, some unanticipated, and actively used the system to disclose information. The results further highlighted a number of design considerations relating to the relationship between awareness and communication, and the role of ambiguity. The evaluation of SphereX validated the feasibility of the indirect disclosure approach. However, the study highlighted the challenges of implementing cross-application awareness support and translating the concept to users. The study resulted in design recommendations aimed to improve the implementation of future systems.

Supporting collaboration on very large-scale interactive wall surfaces

In this paper we describe CubIT, a multi-user presentation and collaboration system installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility. The ‘Cube’ is an interactive visualisation facility made up of five very large-scale interactive multi-panel wall displays, each consisting of up to twelve 55-inch multi-touch screens (48 screens in total) and massive projected display screens situated above the display panels. The paper outlines the unique design challenges, features, implementation and evaluation of CubIT. The system was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. CubIT enables users to easily upload and share their own media content, and allows multiple users to simultaneously interact with the Cube’s wall displays. The features of CubIT were implemented via three user interfaces, a multi-touch interface working on the wall displays, a mobile phone and tablet application and a web-based content management system. Each of these interfaces plays a different role and offers different interaction mechanisms. Together they support a wide range of collaborative features including multi-user shared workspaces, drag and drop upload and sharing between users, session management and dynamic state control between different parts of the system. The results of our evaluation study showed that CubIT was successfully used for a variety of tasks, and highlighted challenges with regards to user expectations regarding functionality as well as issues arising from public use.

Large scale multiuser digital mind mapping tool : a study in usability

Project work can involve multiple people from varying disciplines coming together to solve problems as a group. Large scale interactive displays are presenting new opportunities to support such interactions with interactive and semantically enabled cooperative work tools such as intelligent mind maps. In this paper, we present a novel digital, touch-enabled mind-mapping tool as a first step towards achieving such a vision. This first prototype allows an evaluation of the benefits of a digital environment for a task that would otherwise be performed on paper or flat interactive surfaces. Observations and surveys of 12 participants in 3 groups allowed the formulation of several recommendations for further research into: new methods for capturing text input on touch screens; inclusion of complex structures; multi-user environments and how users make the shift from single- user applications; and how best to navigate large screen real estate in a touch-enabled, co-present multi-user setting.

Complexity of collaborative work in residential aged care facilities: An analysis of information exchange for medication management

Information exchange (IE) is a critical component of the complex collaborative medication process in residential aged care facilities (RACFs). Designing information and communication technology (ICT) to support complex processes requires a profound understanding of the IE that underpins their execution. There is little existing research that investigates the complexity of IE in RACFs and its impact on ICT design. The aim of this study was thus to undertake an in-depth exploration of the IE process involved in medication management to identify its implications for the design of ICT. The study was undertaken at a large metropolitan facility in NSW, Australia. A total of three focus groups, eleven interviews and two observation sessions were conducted between July to August 2010. Process modelling was undertaken by translating the qualitative data via in-depth iterative inductive analysis. The findings highlight the complexity and collaborative nature of IE in RACF medication management. These models emphasize the need to: a) deal with temporal complexity; b) rely on an interdependent set of coordinative artefacts; and c) use synchronous communication channels for coordination. Taken together these are crucial aspects of the IE process in RACF medication management that need to be catered for when designing ICT in this critical area. This study provides important new evidence of the advantages of viewing process as a part of a system rather than as segregated tasks as a means of identifying the latent requirements for ICT design and that is able to support complex collaborative processes like medication management in RACFs. © 2012 IEEE.

Urban informatics

The increasing ubiquity of digital technology, internet ser-vices and social media in our everyday lives allows for a seamless transitioning between the visible and the invisible infrastructure of cities: road systems, building complexes, information and communication technology, and people networks create a buzzing environment that is alive and exciting. Driven by curiosity, initiative and interdiscipli-nary exchange, the Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, is an emerging cluster of people interested in research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on cities, locative media and mobile technology. This paper seeks to define, for the first time, what we mean by ‘urban informatics’ and outline its significance as a field of study today. It describes the relevant background and trends in each of the areas of peo-ple, place and technology, and highlights the relevance of urban informatics to the concerns and evolving challenges of CSCW. We then position our work in academia juxta-posed with related research concentrations and labels, fol-lowed by a discussion of disciplinary influences. The paper concludes with an exposé of the three current research themes of the lab around augmented urban spaces, urban narratives, and environmental sustainability in order to illustrate specific cases and methods, and to draw out distinctions that our affiliation with the Creative Industries Faculty affords.

Facilitating growth in prospective teachers’ knowledge : teaching geometry in primary schools

This paper reports on a study that focused on growth of understanding about teaching geometry by a group of prospective teachers engaged in lesson plan study within a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. Participation in the activity was found to facilitate considerable growth in the participants’ pedagogical-content knowledge (PCK). Factors that influenced growth in PCK included the nature of the lesson planning task, the cognitive scaffolds inserted into the CSCL virtual space, the meta-language scaffolds provided to the participants, and the provision of both private and public discourse spaces. The paper concludes with recommendations for enhancing effective knowledge-building discourse about mathematics PCK within prospective teacher education CSCL environments.

Engaging new digital locals with interactive urban screens to collaboratively improve the city

Local governments struggle to engage time poor and seemingly apathetic citizens, as well as the city’s young digital natives, the digital locals. This project aims at providing a lightweight, technological contribution towards removing the hierarchy between those who build the city and those who use it. We aim to narrow this gap by enhancing people’s experience of physical spaces with digital, civic technologies that are directly accessible within that space. This paper presents the findings of a design trial allowing users to interact with a public screen via their mobile phones. The screen facilitated a feedback platform about a concrete urban planning project by promoting specific questions and encouraging direct, in-situ, real-time responses via SMS and twitter. This new mechanism offers additional benefits for civic participation as it gives voice to residents who otherwise would not be heard. It also promotes a positive attitude towards local governments and gathers information different from more traditional public engagement tools.

Designing for Awareness: An Experience-focused HCI Perspective

Within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research, the notion of technologically-mediated awareness is often used for allowing relevant people to maintain a mental model of activities, behaviors and status information about each other so that they can organize and coordinate work or other joint activities. The initial conceptions of awareness focused largely on improving productivity and efficiency within work environments. With new social, cultural and commercial needs and the emergence of novel computing technologies, the focus of technologically-mediated awareness has extended from work environments to people’s everyday interactions. Hence, the scope of awareness has extended from conveying work related activities to people’s emotions, love, social status and other broad range of aspects. This trend of conceptualizing HCI design is termed as experience-focused HCI. In my PhD dissertation, designing for awareness, I have reported on how we, as HCI researchers, can design awareness systems from experience-focused HCI perspective that follow the trend of conveying awareness beyond the task-based, instrumental and productive needs. Within the overall aim to design for awareness, my research advocates ethnomethodologically-informed approaches for conceptualizing and designing for awareness. In this sense, awareness is not a predefined phenomenon but something that is situated and particular to a given environment. I have used this approach in two design cases of developing interactive systems that support awareness beyond task-based aspects in work environments. In both the cases, I have followed a complete design cycle: collecting an in-situ understanding of an environment, developing implications for a new technology, implementing a prototype technology to studying the use of the technology in its natural settings.

A dynamic Web agent for verifying the security and integrity of a Web site's contents

To harness safe operation of Web-based systems in Web environments, we propose an SSPA (Server-based SHA-1 Page-digest Algorithm) to verify the integrity of Web contents before the server issues an HTTP response to a user request. In addition to standard security measures, our Java implementation of the SSPA, which is called the Dynamic Security Surveillance Agent (DSSA), provides further security in terms of content integrity to Web-based systems. Its function is to prevent the display of Web contents that have been altered through the malicious acts of attackers and intruders on client machines. This is to protect the reputation of organisations from cyber-attacks and to ensure the safe operation of Web systems by dynamically monitoring the integrity of a Web site's content on demand. We discuss our findings in terms of the applicability and practicality of the proposed system. We also discuss its time metrics, specifically in relation to its computational overhead at the Web server, as well as the overall latency from the clients' point of view, using different Internet access methods. The SSPA, our DSSA implementation, some experimental results and related work are all discussed