Abstract Personal informatics technologies support the collection of and reflection on personal data, but enabling people to learn from and act on this data is still an on-going challenge. Sharing and discussing data is one way people can learn from it, but as yet, little research explores how peer discourses around data can shape understandings and promote action. We ran 3 workshops with 5-week follow-ups, giving 18 people the opportunity to swap their data and discuss it with another person. We found that these workshops helped them to recontextualise and to better understand their data, identify new strategies for changing their behaviour and motivated people to commit to changes in the future. These findings have implications for how personal informatics tools could help people identify opportunities for change and feel motivated to try out new strategies.

Social presence is an essential factor in preventing learners from feeling isolation in online courses and in keeping them connected. Some studies, however, point to the negative impact of the social elements in distracting learners from concentrating on a course’s content. In this study, we investigated the influence on learners of different personality types (using the big five model) of an optional chat added to an online learning platform. The results show that there is a variation in the response of the learners based on their personality. However, some personality classes spent the majority of time in the chat discussing off-topic subjects, such as fashion or travel. Thus, although they enjoyed the features in the system, it negatively affected their knowledge gain. We discuss the implications of our findings for adaptive online learning platforms in catering to learners with diverse personalities.

Abstract Online consumer reviews are important for people wishing to make purchases online. However, not everyone contributes online reviews. This paper looks at consumer motivations of reviewing and rating behaviour in order to motivate the design of a mobile interface for online reviewing. An interview study found that people tend to contribute reviews and ratings based on their perception of whether they would be helpful or not to others as well as their own personal view of the usefulness of reviews and ratings when buying products. There also seems to be a cost-benefit trade-off that influences people’s decisions to review and rate: people tend to make a decision based on the perceived value of that review or rating to the community against the effort and costs of contributing. A mobile interface was designed that was intended both to reduce the cost of leaving reviews and to increase the perception of the usefulness of the reviews to others. An initial evaluation of this reviewing interface suggests that it could encourage more people to leave reviews.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to give us increased flexibility about when and where we choose to work and the freedom to deal with home tasks whilst at work. However more use of ICT for work during non-work time has been linked with negative outcomes including lower work and life satisfaction and increased stress. Previous work has suggested that in order to reduce some of these negative effects, people should adopt technology use strategies that aid separation of their home and work lives. In this paper we report the results of a questionnaire study investigating work-life balance boundary behaviours and technology use. We find that people use multiple devices as a way of creating boundaries between home and work, and the extent to which they do this relates to their boundary behaviour style. These findings have particular relevance given the increasing trend for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

A large body of mobile phone sharing research focuses on creating new interaction techniques for sharing, and considers the usability of such applications and features whilst ignoring the context of their use, their adoption or appropriation. Therefore it is not known whether these technologies are used in practice or whether they really meet people's sharing needs. The aim of this research was to understand current real-world user sharing practices around mobile smart phones through the use of a diary study with 63 participants. We focused on close proximity sharing and discovered that new technologies to support this kind of sharing, for example bumping handsets together to exchange files, are not being widely used. More than half of all sharing via phones in this sample involved only telling, showing or passing the phone, though this often triggered further sharing. Possible explanations for this and their implications are discussed.

Reflection on personal experience is described as a means to learn from experience, enable self-development and improve professional practice amongst other things. Recently there has been a move in HCI to explore new ways technology may support us in doing this. However, within this community there is little use made of existing literature to evaluate how well such tools support this reflection. In this paper we present a case study of the development of a ‘levels of reflection’ framework for the purposes of evaluating a wearable digital camera (SenseCam) to support teachers’ and tutors’ reflective practice. The framework enabled us to rate and compare reflection achieved by participants in different situations, and to explore the relationship between the ways images were used by participants and the level of reflection this led to, with implications for designing future SenseCam use to better support teachers’ and tutors’ reflection on experience. Beyond our particular case study, we suggest that the framework and associated methodological approach for rating reflection is of value to those within the HCI community interested in designing for reflection on experience. Rating reflection in this way can enable new tools or techniques for supporting reflection to be explored over time, across similar situations or with adaptations, and to build understandings of how reflection is being most effectively supported – ultimately inspiring the design of future technologies by building up an understanding of the most effective ways of supporting reflection on experience.

Interactive tabletops are an exiting new platform for supporting children's collaboration. With design guidelines and standardized interaction principles still immature, there is a considerable need for iterative prototyping to define the task and interface. Lo-fi prototypes---using cardboard, paper, etc.---are easy to develop, flexible to adjust during design sessions, and intuitive for users to manipulate. Using them can be a valuable step in designing tabletop applications.

Applications running on multi-touch tabletops are beginning to be developed to enable children to collaborate on a variety of activities, from photo sharing to playing games. However, little is know as to how children work together on such interactive surfaces. We present a study that investigated groups of children's use of a multitouch tabletop for a shared-space design task, requiring reasoning and compromise. The OurSpace application was designed to allow children to arrange the desks in their classroom and allocate students to seats around those desks. A number of findings are reported, including a comparison of single versus multiple touch, equity of participation, and an analysis of how a child's tabletop position affects where he or she touches. A main finding was that children used all of the tabletop surface, but took more responsibility for the parts of the design closer to their relative position.

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.

Ubiquitous and mobile technologies provide opportunities for designing novel learning experiences that move out of the classroom. Information can be presented and interacted with in a variety of ways while exploring a physical environment. A key issue this raises is when, where, what and how much? Our research is concerned with the design, delivery and interaction of digital information when learning about ecology outdoors. We present a framework of the different forms of digital augmentation and the different processes by which they can be accessed. Using the framework, we designed an outdoors learning experience, aimed at encouraging students to carry out contextualized scientific enquiry and to reflect on their interactions. Pairs of 11-12 year olds explored a woodland and were presented at certain times with different forms of digital augmentation. Our study showed that this kind of exploration promoted interpretation and reflection at a number of levels of abstraction.