Abstract
Due to the vast amount of new technology, the development of educational technology seems to concentrate on relatively complex tools and technologies. At the same time, there is still a need for simple, generalisable collaborative knowledge constructions tools; that is, social mindtools.
Woven Stories is a concept for a social mindtool. It uses a simple formalism to provide its users with an interesting and flexible approach to story, or any document, writing. It allows both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and aims to work as a tool where all provided information is equally important.
Social mindtools are a subset of mindtools. These tools supply a learning community with the possibility to collaboratively construct and present knowledge. The main differences to mindtools are that these tools must also support knowledge presentation to certain degree. Furthermore, in order to support collaboration, these tools must provide users with awareness related information and must have features to support communication. Thus the requirements of social mindtools can be divided to three distinct layers: concept, awareness and communication.
Based on the concept of Woven Stories, a social mindtool called Loom was developed during 2003–2008. The evaluation of Loom is presented in six different case studies. The results show that Loom is best suited to learning tasks where the knowledge to be processed has strong sequential relationships. Furthermore, knowledge that includes time series, such as is contained in stories and narratives, is most valuable for the learning tasks. The findings suggest that the usage of Loom boosts users’ imagination and creativity. It can be used for several different application domains, for example in debating, adventure game scripting and concept mapping.
Based on the results of a retrospective analysis of the design, implementation and evaluation of Loom, the Nucleus Model for designing social mindtools is introduced. This model is founded on a layered model of concept, awareness and communication. The Nucleus Model is a potential approach for designing social mindtools in an efficient way. It makes it possible to integrate research to development fluently, and provides guidelines for development on such detail that it is easy to follow.
Woven Stories is a concept for a social mindtool. It uses a simple formalism to provide its users with an interesting and flexible approach to story, or any document, writing. It allows both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and aims to work as a tool where all provided information is equally important.
Social mindtools are a subset of mindtools. These tools supply a learning community with the possibility to collaboratively construct and present knowledge. The main differences to mindtools are that these tools must also support knowledge presentation to certain degree. Furthermore, in order to support collaboration, these tools must provide users with awareness related information and must have features to support communication. Thus the requirements of social mindtools can be divided to three distinct layers: concept, awareness and communication.
Based on the concept of Woven Stories, a social mindtool called Loom was developed during 2003–2008. The evaluation of Loom is presented in six different case studies. The results show that Loom is best suited to learning tasks where the knowledge to be processed has strong sequential relationships. Furthermore, knowledge that includes time series, such as is contained in stories and narratives, is most valuable for the learning tasks. The findings suggest that the usage of Loom boosts users’ imagination and creativity. It can be used for several different application domains, for example in debating, adventure game scripting and concept mapping.
Based on the results of a retrospective analysis of the design, implementation and evaluation of Loom, the Nucleus Model for designing social mindtools is introduced. This model is founded on a layered model of concept, awareness and communication. The Nucleus Model is a potential approach for designing social mindtools in an efficient way. It makes it possible to integrate research to development fluently, and provides guidelines for development on such detail that it is easy to follow.
| Original language | English |
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| Award date | 18 Sept 2009 |
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| Print ISBNs | 978-952-219-267-7 |
| Publication status | Published - 18 Sept 2009 |
| Externally published | Yes |