I got involved in ROLE project. It is a project that research about Responsive Open Learning Environments. Specifically, it focuses on Personal Learning Environments (PLE). PLEs enable users to personalize the services required for the different assignments in a learning process, in a technical way, we can define it such as a mashup of services.
Don't hesitate to read our paper about ROLE that we presented at ECTEL'11!!!!!!!!!. The main authors of this paper were my colleagues Sten Govaerts and Katrien Verbert.
Personalization is the key. If users can personalize their own learning environment, we add another possible factor that can influence on the success or fail of the user activities... which resources and services can be the key to understand learners (from a teacher perspective but also from their own perspective).
The understanding of the learner is the key of my current work, the development of tools to reflect on the user activity and visualizations can be one of the possibilities.
The first attempt to do something in this field was this application and we submitted a paper to EFEPLE workshop. You can see a screenshot of the application below.
During the development, we did some evaluations with teacher assitants, and finally had a discussion in the context of the EFEPLE'11 workshop.
The results pointed out some interesting details:
1. Users have different visualization background and they use the visualizations for different purpose. For instance, some of the evaluated users highlighted the fact that bar charts are really easy to understand and they really like it. However, others user with higher skills in visualization tools asked for more relevant information. They were interested for more detailed information.
2. The viewer needs information about the context to understand the visualizations. If you know the purpose/goal of the learners, the activity, the course, the specific student... the visualization makes more sense... now it is a dashboard that visualizes information... but the question that came up is:
How can we provide more meaningful visualizations in a learning environment?
My colleague Joris Klerkx recommended me a paper about narrative visualzation that I really liked it. This paper explains in a few words that visualization can be a good support to explain a story and shows some examples.
Sometimes I heard the discussion about what is better visualizations or recommendations? Simplifying the differences (both are huge fields), one rely on the user the cognitive efforts to achieve conclusions (Visualizations) and the other minimize the user cognitive efforts providing some possible conclusions (Recommendations). Maybe it is not a matter on which approach is the best... depending of the user and depending the quantity and quality of data that we have, one can be better than the other...
So that paper showed me a middle term approach, in a narrative way, the writer was driving the conclusions of the reader and the visualizations were the support of our conclusions (It sounds really similar to me when we use visualizations writing a paper to support our conclusions with quantity data, isn't it?).
Again, my question that was coming up to my mind was:
How can we help users to drive conclusions in a generic way?
Generic way is the key of the question. The systems that I'm working with are very different, different services, different trackers, different quality of data, different formats, so... it makes a bit more complex driving conclusions if you don't know which data and context you will have... again... context is the key... and sometimes we don't have access to this context... for instance, PLEs, LMSs, learning environments in general don't enable external access to such information easily...
How can we provide information about the context?
I finish here my post... but don't worry... I haven't still solved these questions... maybe someday we can read my thesis with useful conclusions about this point... :-) but I think that this question is really interesting to research on: How can we help users to understand visualizations?
Another post comes soon... waiting to know whether my last paper is accepted or not... crossed fingers...
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