We critically engage with CHI communities emerging outside the global North (ArabHCI and AfriCHI) to explore how participation is configured and enacted within socio-cultural and political contexts fundamentally different from Western societies. We contribute to recent discussions about postcolonialism and decolonization of HCI by focusing on non-Western future technology designers. Our lens was a course designed to engage Egyptian students with a local yet culturally-distant community to design applications for documenting intangible heritage. Through an action research, the instructors reflect on selected students' activities. Despite deploying a flexible learning curriculum that encourages greater autonomy, the students perceived themselves with less agency than other institutional stakeholders involved in the project. Further, some of them struggled to empathize with the community as the impact of the cultural differences on configuring participation was profound. We discuss the implications of the findings on HCI education and in international cross-cultural design projects.

Group Spinner is a digital visual tool intended to help teachers observe and reflect on children's collaborative technology-enhanced learning activities in the classroom. We describe the design of Group Spinner, which was informed by activity theory, previous work and teachers' focus group feedback. Based on a radar chart and a set of indicators, Group Spinner allows teachers to record in-class observations as to different aspects of group learning and learning behaviors, beyond the limited knowledge acquisition measures. Our exploratory study involved 6 teachers who used the tool for a total of 23 classes in subjects ranging from Maths and Geography to Sociology and Art. Semi-structured interviews with these teachers revealed a number of different uses of the tool. Depending on their experience and pedagogy, teachers considered Group Spinner to be a valuable tool to support awareness, reflection, communication, and/or planning.

Understanding, promoting, and teaching media literacy is an important societal challenge. STEM educators are increasingly looking to incorporate 21st century skills such as media literacy into core subject education. In this paper we investigate how undergraduate Computer Science (CS) students can learn media literacy as a by-product of collaborative video tutorial production. The paper presents a study of 34 third-year CS undergraduates who, as part of their learning, were each asked to produce three video tutorials on Raspberry Pi programming, using a collaborative video production tool for mobile phones (Bootlegger). We provide results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the production process and resulting video tutorials, and conclude that the student cohort demonstrated a clear development of media literacy skills. The paper's contribution is twofold. First, we add to the understanding of how the use of mobile collaborative video production technology by non-professionals can help them learn to create meaningful media messages with little scaffolding. Second, we present an alternative pedagogical approach that can help CS students acquire 21st century skills such as media literacy.

We present the design, deployment and evaluation of three configurations of an online learning activity for would-be social innovators and activists, with the aim of understanding the factors that are critical to the design of an infrastructure to support such communities of learners. Our research was inspired and motivated by the example of SOLEs (self-organised learning environments) and builds upon the experiences of early connectivist MOOCs (massive open online courses). Our configurations were used to deliver three pilot courses on the topic of Sustainable Development, in partnership with United World Colleges (an organisation of international schools). Our work is distinctive in putting a focus on civic engagement and the autonomy of student learners throughout the course. Our primary design goals were to enable activist empowerment, self-organized learning, and the creation of social bonds to facilitate a lasting and self-sufficient international activist community. We base our analysis on a sample of 114 active learners and 33 mentors; including data from 223 applications, 705 Facebook posts, 48 participant survey responses and a variety of quantitative metrics.

Ubiquitous computing technologies have traditionally striven to augment objects and the environment with sensing capabilities to enable them to respond appropriately to the needs of the individuals in the environment. This paper considers how such technologies might be harnessed to support language learning, and specifically Task-Based Learning (TBL). Task-Based Learning (TBL) involves doing meaningful tasks in a foreign language, emphasising the language's use in practice. TBL is seen as a highly engaging and motivating approach to learning a language, but is difficult to do in the classroom. Here, learners typically engage in activities that only simulate 'real-world' tasks, and as such only rehearse language use, rather than applying the language in practice. In this paper, we explore how an instrumented, context-aware environment whose design is grounded in pedagogical principles can support TBL. We present the French Kitchen, an instrumented kitchen for English speakers who are learning French, and describe a 46-participant evaluation of the kitchen. Based on the evaluation, we provide a set of design recommendations for those building instrumented systems for TBL.