The Design of History Mechanisms and their Use in Collaborative Educational Simulations
The Design of History Mechanisms and their Use in Collaborative Educational Simulations
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Date
1999-08-25
Authors
Plaisant, Catherine
Rose, Anne
Rubloff, Gary
Salter, Richard
Shneiderman, Ben
Advisor
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Abstract
Reviewing past events has been useful in many domains. Videotapes and flight
data recorders provide nvaluable technological help to sports coaches or
aviation engineers. Similarly, providing learners with a readable recording of
their actions may help them monitor their behavior, reflect on their progress,
and experiment with revisions of their experiences. It may also facilitate
active collaboration among dispersed learning communities. Learning histories
can help students and professionals make more effective use of digital library
searching, word processing tasks, computer-assisted design tools, electronic
performance support systems, and web navigation.
This paper describes the design space and discusses the challenges of
implementing learning histories. It presents guidelines for creating
effective implementations, and the design tradeoffs between sparse and dense
history records. The paper also presents a first implementation of learning
histories for a simulation-based engineering learning environment called
SimPLE (Simulated Processes in a Learning Environment) for the case of a
semiconductor fabrication module, and reports on early user evaluation of
learning histories implemented within SimPLE.
Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-34