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Designing for Activity
Students across disciplines struggle with sensemaking when they are faced with the need to understand and analyze massive amounts of information. This is particularly salient in the disciplines of both history and data science. Our approach to helping students build expertise with complex information leverages activity theory to think about the design of a classroom activity system integrated with the design of a collaborative open-source network-analysis software tool called Net.Create. Through analysis of network log data as well as video data of students’ collaborative interactions with Net.Create, we explore how our activity system helped students reconcile common contradictions that create barriers to dealing with complex datasets in large lecture classrooms. Findings show that as students draw on details in a historical text to collaboratively construct a larger network, they begin to move more readily between small detail and aggregate overview. Students at both high and low initial skill levels were able to increase the complexity of their historical analyses through their engagement with the Net.Create tool and activities. Net.Create transforms the limitation of large class sizes in history classrooms into a resource for students’ collaborative knowledge building, and through collaborative data entry it supports the historiographic practices of citation and revision and helps students embed local historical actors into a larger historical context.
In 1987, I went to a conference on a rather remote farm in a rather remote corner of Finland. Here, most of the Scandinavian information systems and human-computer interaction community was gathered among Finnish lakes and smoke saunas. I had recently finished my Ph.D. thesis, which would later be published internationally (Bødker, 1991). This thesis helped set the scene for what came to be known as second-generation human-computer interaction (HCI). I came to this topic with a background in early Scandinavian participatory design. My sources of theoretical inspiration were, among others, Leont'ev, whose works I had learned about from Danish colleagues in psychology - Henrik Poulsen, Jens Mammen, Klaus Bærentsen, Mariane Hedegaard, and others. Other sources included the recently published books of Winograd and Flores (1986), and Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), which served as vehicles for a joint study circle between psychology and computer science. In two essays (Bannon & Bødker, 1991; Bertelsen & Bødker, 2002a), we summarized the state of our concerns at the time: Many of the early advanced user interfaces assumed that the users were the designers themselves, and accordingly built on an assumption of a generic user, without concern for qualifications, work environment, division of work, and so on In validating findings and designs, there was a heavy focus on novice users, whereas everyday use by experienced users and concerns for the development of expertise were hardly addressed. Detailed task analysis was seen as the starting point for most user interface design, whereas much of the Scandinavian research had pointed out how limited explicit task descriptions were for capturing actual actions and conditions for these in use (Ehn & Kyng, 1984). The idealized models created through task analysis failed to capture the complexity and contingency of real-life action. […]