An analysis of social interaction between novice older adults when learning gesture-based skills through simple digital games

Universal Access in the Information Society - This paper reports three exploratory empirical studies with older adults that had little or no prior experience with interactive technologies. The...     

Evaluation of collaborative modeling processes for knowledge articulation and alignment

The evaluation of modeling processes for years has focused on assessing the outcome of modeling, while the process of modeling itself hardly has been subject of examination. Only in recent years, with rising interest in collaborative conceptual modeling approaches, the process of modeling has gained more attention. Different streams of research have focused on examining the sequence of model manipulations or have considered the collaborative modeling to be a negotiation process and shaped evaluation criteria accordingly. This article proposes to add the perspective of articulation and alignment of the topic of modeling to the potential foci of evaluation. Its contribution is to show, how existing research originating in theories of co-construction of knowledge can be adapted for this purpose and how the adopted perspective is complementary to those already available in related work. A comparative field study applying different evaluation methods on a single real world showcase is presented to show the practical applicability of the approach and allows to identify potential for the combination of previously unrelated analytical dimensions.

     

Facilitating shared understanding of work situations using a tangible tabletop interface

As work is an inherently cooperative phenomenon, it requires a common understanding of the nature of collaboration for all involved parties. In this way, explicit articulation work becomes an integral and essential part of collaboration. Implicit aspects of collaboration have impact on the quality of work results, mainly through social norms and observations of working together. Eliciting those aspects interactively helps in avoiding (mutual) misrepresentations and lack of understanding. Tangible articulation support systems allow aligning mental models of how work should be carried out. Stakeholders can develop a common understanding of collaboration in a semantically open and non-intrusive way. They are not burdened by explication features and diagrammatic notations. We have utilised experiences with model-centred learning theory to support explicit articulation work. According to our field studies, the resulting models can be fed back to current work practices and help in preventing problematic work situations.