Using Design Research to Explore the Use of Mobile Devices and Social Media to Mediate ‘Informal Learning’ John Cook Learning Technology Research Institute London Metropolitan University Email: [email protected]

Introduction The Learning Design Grid Theme Team vision (http://www.ld-grid.org/home) makes it clear that “Social and mobile technologies offer learners unprecedented opportunities ... yet these are constantly shifting with escalating complexity”. If we add to this the increasing overlap between formal, „informal‟ and work-based learning then we truly have a world in flux. Consequently, this paper describes two small to medium sized projects that have taken a participatory, educational design research approach to investigate how mobile devices and social media can mediate “informal learning” in a variety of contexts. The aim is to uncover design principles based on the complex case studies and raise issues about possible approaches to scaling up these techno-pedagogical designs. The paper is structured as follows. Firstly, I briefly delineate what I mean by “informal learning”, opting for the term „task-conscious learning‟, and outline the characteristics of educational design research. This is followed by a succinct distillation of some key participatory perspectives and design based oriented outcomes from two European projects that I have worked on as a partner: CONTSENS (using devices for context sensitive and location-based vocational education and training) and MATURE (social learning in work-based knowledge networks). The descriptions are by no means exhaustive and instead aim to provide the workshop with a resource for design discourse. I will conclude by exploring the design implications for sustainable approaches to developing technology enhanced approaches for mediating informal task-conscious learning. Informal learning and design research We are always learning from different contexts in the world. It is for this reason that Cook et al. (2008) see formal and “informal learning” as being part of a continuum of a multi-dimensional clustering of informal and formal learning activities, rather than positioned in an either-or relationship. Indeed, “informal learning” has been used of late as an en vogue term by various governments who have specific agendas. Rogers (2006, p. 7) makes the helpful distinction between „task-conscious learning‟, “where learning is not conscious but takes place while engaged in some activity and when achievements are measured not in terms of learning but of task completion”, and „learning-conscious learning‟, “where learning is intended and conscious and achievements are measured in terms of learning”. The two cases below are generally in the area of „task-conscious learning‟, but inevitably there exists overlaps with „learning-conscious learning‟. Educational design research tends to have interventionist characteristics, is process oriented and contributes to theory building (Plomp, 2009, p. 17). Indeed, design research (as I will henceforth call it) is context bound in nature, which means generalizations from this type of work tend not to be context-free. However, design researchers do strive for generalisable design principles whilst generalising to a broader theory (Plomp, 2009, p. 33). My own approach to design research, described below, spans the last 20 years; it is user centered and aims to provide a lens through which to systematically inquire into approaches that orchestrate and empower educators, trainers, technology and social media designers/developers, users and learners as they participate in design discourse and practices surrounding Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Case 1 CONTSENS: Augmented Mobile Learning In the CONTSENS project (www.ericsson.com/contsens) LTRI successfully explored how the use of physical space could be augmented using mobile devices so as to mediate task conscious activities in areas as diverse as landscape architecture, urban planning, marketing and second-language learning (for detail see Cook, 2010; Smith et al, 2011). We aimed to augment a variety of contexts for learning in such a way that would, we predicted, allow collaborating learners to interact: with each other, with the mobile phones and with the physical environment in order to generate their own context for development within a Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978 / 1930). Design research was introduced in CONTSENS with the expectation that participants would systematically adjust various aspects of the designed context so that each adjustment could be tested and fed back into the next iteration of the intervention. Mixed reality scenarios were used on Smartphones to allow for adaptations in the contextual designs. Of particular interest (for the workshop) is the successful reuse of the

context of one subject (urban education) in another (language learning) through a rapid reconfiguration of the required scripts/information within the mobile device mediated augmented space for learning. The initial tour was developed with the aim of enabling HE students to visualise urban education through various collective images and representations1. A tutor had developed the original tour in North London and was closely involved in the creation of the mobile tour. The development and production process involved the following elements: • Initial field work and documentation of the site • Learning narratives/scripts for each task episode in a GPS zone • Capture and digitisation of oral histories, Pathé news clips and local historical stories • Capture and digitisation of material elements that detail changes in the urban form, such as photographs depicting the evolution of school buildings and historical maps • MEDIASCAPE (location-based mobile production to support the underlying pedagogy of the tour) Both tours (urban education and each of the language tours) use the same physical space and have been used and evaluated with representative teachers and learners, feedback was very positive (see Smith et al, 2011, for detail). Of particular note is the fact that in several group interviews participants commented that the mobile tour promoted “active learning” and that students were less passive than they would have been on a tutor-led tour (some learners had also taken the „analogue‟ tour). In one group, whilst talking about the difference between the two tours, one student said, “I felt like I was more passive [in tutor led tour], like I was just taking in information, and with this one I felt like I was, it was triggering my own thoughts and I was getting to think for myself about the area and the buildings”. The tutor, who assisted in the design, was interviewed after the evaluations tours had taken place, stated that he believed that there are lots of benefits to the Urban Education mobile tour and that it provided an effective learning experience and opportunities to utilise new and different pedagogies. Points made by the tutor include the observation that students move from being passive to active learners, they can take more control over their learning, and they can be engaged in more productive pedagogical approaches, such as small group work and investigative problem-based learning. The tutor also noted that mobile tour afforded the opportunity to be more focused, but at the same time provides a multi-tasked and multimedia experience that allows students to get below the surface of the tasks. He also felt that the mobile technologies employed excited and intrigued the students, and helped them to become more engaged in the tour. Whilst different issues have emerged from each of the iterations, one aspect that is common to both of the studies is that our design has fostered active learning, which has occurred through a combination of factors. As the content was pushed to the mobile devices it engaged the learners in the task, and encouraged them to interact with the material and learning content on the devices, the physical environment and the other students in their group. The tasks then made them think and reflect on what they were looking at and being asked to do (a finding from Iteration 1). Another common aspect was that the whole learning experience was “more concrete” and “real” because it took place in situ, and was directly related to the learning context. We claim that the mobile tours appear to be acting as part of what Vygotsky calls the „more capable peer‟ and were assisting the learners as they move through stages of development in the Zone of Proximal Development. However, further issues about scaling up were surfaced which we return to in the conclusions. Case 2 MATURE IP: People Tagging in Workplace Learning The MATURE Project (http://mature-ip.eu) conceives individual workplace learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves people, tasks and processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies with users, to give guidelines and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers. MATURE systematically makes use of a design research approach that has included Use Cases that were linked to personas (developed from an ethnographically informed study) and particular knowledge maturing activities. One important continuing aspect of the MATURE work is the „people dimension‟ aspect of the project, which aims at improving the development of knowledge about other‟s expertise and improved informal relationships based on a people tagging approach (e.g. see Braun et al., 2010) developed by the FZI, the scientific coordinating partner of MATURE. This approach has surfaced design implications for „task-conscious learning‟ in work-based social networking settings and is consequently expanded upon below in more detail. A tag is typically defined in online activities as a “non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system” 2. For example, Facebook has 1 2

See http://www.slideshare.net/johnnigelcook/urban-planning-education-in-context-with-mobile-phones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29, accessed 19 Jul. 11

had, for some time now, the option to tag the people in a photo. This feature both identifies the tagged people to viewers of the picture and lets those that have been tagged know a photo that includes them has been posted on the a web site or social network service. This is a very successful feature of Facebook and often acts as an object around which informal discussion can take place. There have also been various people tagging applications on Facebook like Describe Me or iDescribe (for example that latter asks you to „select a friend to describe in 5 words‟). However, it should be noted that these applications typically aim for entertaining rather than organizing and sharing knowledge about „who knows what?‟ Social networking approaches to workplace learning have tended to focus on describing and augmenting employee profiles from the perspective of those profiles being used for expert finding and community formation. These platforms are mainly based on the self-promotion paradigm whereby people can represent themselves with a profile and indicate their connections to other users. Further, in some of these approaches, the principle of social tagging and bookmarking is transferred to people; for instance Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/), Xing (http://www.xing.com/) and Collabio3 (the latter is no longer active). „Knowing-who‟ is an essential element for efficient knowledge maturing processes, e.g. for finding the right person to talk to solve a task oriented problem. Many approaches like self-descriptions in employee yellow pages, or top-down competence management approaches have largely failed to live up to their promises. This failure is often because information contained in the directories becomes outdated quickly; or is not described in a manner relevant to potential users. In MATURE, FZI are using a lightweight approach based on collaborative tagging as a principle to gather the information about persons inside and outside the company (if and where relevant): individuals tag each other according to the topics they associate with this person. FZI call this „People Tagging tool‟ and claim it can be used to gain a collective review of existing skills and competencies. Knowledge can be shared and awareness strengthened within the organisational context around „who knows what?‟ This tagging information can then potentially be used to search for persons to talk to in a particular task-oriented situation. FZI (in press), have observed that “each target context of a people tagging system will require a different „configuration‟, which depends on cultural aspects as well as the actual goals that are associated with introducing people tagging. An analysis of the state of the art has shown that there has been little research on identifying design options in a systematic way so that we [FZI] have developed a framework for engineering people tagging systems”. FZI‟s conceptual design framework is based on results and experiences with the field experiments, expert focus group together with an analysis of the design of folksonomy-based systems in general in the literature. The framework has five main aspects: (a) involved people, (b) control and semantics of the vocabulary, (c) control of tag assignments, (d) visibility of tag assignments, and (e) search heuristics for flexible search strategies. For example, in terms of who is allowed to tag (a), restrictions can range from: anyone being allowed to tag, or a limited group of persons are allowed to define tags – limited either by organizational structures (e.g., team colleagues) or individual relationships (e.g., friends, or approved contacts in a social networking service) – or allowing only self-annotation. These options may be combined with each other. The People Tagging tool was introduced to and formatively evaluated in two phases with Connexions Northumberland (Careers Guidance service, UK) between October 2009 and July 2010. Results specifically showed that: the simplicity of the system was attractive and important (being perceived as a „Facebook for work‟); although little knowledge maturing could be observed within the limited period of use in phase 2 (i.e. one month) there were insights into related notions of sharing and building expertise, reflective practice. Furthermore, FZI (in press) have reported that participants stated that they “also liked the way it can give them lots more information than they currently have and the basic philosophy of democracy which empowers the individual and where nobody is in charge but has all possibility to contribute (currently they often feel out of control because there is no possibility to easily contribute to a shared knowledge base like e. g. the intranet).” However, various areas of concern were also identified: (i) there should be a „use by date‟ for tags, it is important that a person tag is time-bound, so people who have this tag do not feel they are making a completely open-ended commitment; (ii) „lazy-practice‟ issue, here some practitioners may abuse the system where, for example, 'lazy' colleagues may resist entering details about themselves and may tag others with expertise they may have (to deflect additional queries); and (iii) „sharing could increase workload‟. On the last issue, FZI (in press) note that “there were concerns about sharing whole people tagging information with other services in general because it could also increase the workload”. It can be noted that the organization currently continues to use the system, and FZI are collecting usage logs to study the tagging behaviour more closely; I will pick up on this analytics in design issues for task-conscious learning in the conclusions below. Conclusions The CONTSENS case took a participative design research approach to developing a reusable design for complex, location based, task-conscious mobile learning (a small- to medium-scale of task conscious learning). 3

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/collabio/, accessed 19 July 2011

Furthermore, the MATURE case has deployed design research to developed four successful „demonstrators‟, one of which has shown that the tools and services for „People Tagging‟ can be successful when formatively evaluated with users (a small- to medium-scale of learning). However, for these cases to become sustainable, issues of up-scaling needs to be addressed so that a large-scale view of design for learning can be attained. Indeed, the people tagging tool is currently being developed into a larger scale „instantiation‟ within MATURE and as such it faces certain challenges. Consequently, I will conclude by looking at the ongoing People Tagging case but draw on relevant questions drawn from the CONTSENS case. Although MATURE has systematically considered aspects in the requirements engineering process of informal task-conscious learning support, its essence is arguably one where, at most, medium groups are implicitly seen as the focus of design. Personas are a useful first step, but can they be generalized to a population of thousands of users? Therefore, I suggest that the useful „customising tools to meet cultural factors‟ methodology deployed successfully by FZI needs extending when we attempt to design for the large-scale use of TEL that is embedded in, or that perhaps embeds, sustainable communities and networks of practice. However, rather than proposing solutions, and because this is a complex R&D area, I instead pose questions that could guide future large-scale, sustainable design efforts. The above leads to the problem statement: how can we address issues related to experiences with participatory design and large-scale engineering of tools to mediate social and networked practice? Indeed, based on CONTSENS work Cook (2010) poses these relevant questions in relation to location-based, mobile learners: during their continuing learning activities, what will the learning trail left behind by learners tell us as they move from one learning context to the next? How can we improve our understanding of how elements of context can be maintained over time, so as to scaffold a perceived continuity of learning? Other questions that arise are these. What are the concrete implications of the above for learning settings (be they task- or learningconscious learning) for tool design and services design to address sustainability? Looking at this design challenge from a different perspective, could outputs from learning analytics mediate large-scale, sustainable People Tagging practices by providing personalized advice and scaffolding within task-related leaning trails? In this context, Cook and FZI (Cook et al., 2011) have recently articulated the various design challenges that relate to the possibility for learning analytics mediate people tagging networks of practice. Acknowledgements CONTSENS was funded by the EU Leonardo Lifelong Learning Programme. MATURE is funded by FP7. References Braun, S., Kunzmann, C. and Schmidt, A. (2010). People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management. In: David Randall and Pascal Salembier (eds.): From CSCW to Web2.0: European Developments in Collaborative Design (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), Springer, 2010, pp. 133-154. Cook, J. (2010). Mobile Phones as Mediating Tools Within Augmented Contexts for Development. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 2(3), 1-12. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/johnnigelcook/cook-ijmbl-2010preprint Cook, J., Pachler, N. and Bradley, C. (2008). Bridging the Gap? Mobile Phones at the Interface between Informal and Formal Learning. Journal of the Research Center for Educational Technology, Spring. Available from: http://www.rcetj.org/index.php/rcetj/article/view/34 Cook, J., Schmidt, A., Kunzmann, C. and Braun, S. (2011). The Challenge of Integrating Motivational and Affective Aspects into the Design of Networks of Practice. In 2nd Motivational and Affective Aspects of Technology Enhanced Learning and Web 2.0 (MATEL), European Conference-Technology Enhanced Learning 2011, Palermo, Italy. FZI (in press). Semantic People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: An Enterprise Social Media Approach to Competence Management. (to be confirmed) Plomp, T. (2009). Educational Design Research: An Introduction. In Tjeerd Plomp & Nienke Nieveen (Eds.), An Introduction to Educational Design Research. Enschede: The Netherlands: SLO Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development. Smith, C., Bradley, C., Cook, J. and Pratt-Adams, S. (2011). Designing for Active Learning: Putting Learning into Context with Mobile Devices. In Anders D. Olofsson and J. Ola Lindberg (Eds), Informed Design of Educational Technologies in Higher Education: Enhanced Learning and Teaching. IGI Global. Due 2011. Rogers, A. (2006). Informal learning in lifelong learning. Paper presented at Informal Learning and Digital Media: Constructions, Contexts and Consequences. University of Southern Denmark, Odense. Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials (Dream). Vygotsky, L. (1978 / 1930). Mind in society. The development of higher psychological processes. Edited by M. Cole et al., Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.