From the experience gained in working with digital tabletop technology and specifically with its support for education, general guidelines for collaborative learning applications and specially those for ill-defined tasks has been developed:
• Structure the task. Dividing a large task into smaller sub-tasks (or stages) has many ad- vantages as it allows for providing scaffolding instructions and feedback in optimal, non- interrupting manner; provides a space forthink backmoments (reflection) at the end of each stage and giving students an opportunity to evaluate their progress and, with the help of feedback, identify mistakes; improves students problem solving strategy by teaching them that large problems can be solved by dividing them into smaller manageable problems; and helps in providing different perspectives (or representations) of the same problem.
• Precede the task as a whole, and each stage individually with a planning stage.Provide students with different strategy options on how to proceed with the task as a whole or with each stage individually. It is also important to precede the task and the stages with clear guiding instructions and requirements of the overall task and of each stage.
• Encourage externalization.Transforming ideas into forms visible to others frequently trig- gers useful discussions leading to effective learning and collaboration. Students should have a variety of cognitive tools that allow them to express every decision. As an example from Digital Mysteries, providing two options for the relation tool (normal and arrow) created more opportunities for discussion on the type of relation to use. Making the students think- ing visible on the table in this way, also helps teachers in evaluating students’ interactions with the application.
• Follow the task as a whole, and each stage individually, with reflective feedback.Focus on feedback that provides reflective prompts to students encouraging them to evaluate the strategy used, to evaluate their progress, to identify mistakes, and in some cases to think of possible alternatives to how the task was carried out and even re-work it. Two clear examples of this in the design of Digital Mysteries are the feedback provided by the se- quence evaluation dialog, which required the students themselves to evaluate their solution with further feedback given accordingly, and the dedicated reflection stage that followed the task. Digital technology can provide structure and logging which should be exploited in the design of such reflective tools.
Support of the four recommendations above combined with repeated use, can lead to great learning benefits for the students and increases their awareness of the concepts of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulatory skills. These recommendations encourage students to make explicit their strategy and their reasoning for solving the problem at hand, prompt them to reflect on their work and progress, and detect problems in the process which would otherwise go unnoticed. Clear evidence was found as to the benefits of following these guidelines with repeated use of the application.
In addition to these four points, which affect how students proceed in solving the task, other recommendations that are not directly related to the task, but to the application behaviour and regulation of collaboration are as follows:
• Support abstract logging of events and identify critical moments.A full real-time play- back of a session takes a lot of time and distracts attention from the important aspects in the process. With Digital Mysteries, only results of actions were logged and not the whole movements, and important points (as when feedback was provided regarding grouping or sequencing) were marked. This allowed the teacher to perform a quick playback of the whole session and to focus on the important points in the process.
• Design for different ability levels.Provide support and scaffolding based on the students’ performance. This means that the application should behave differently for higher achiev- ing groups than for lower achieving groups, and adapt to the improvement in the groups’ performance. This prevents high achieving students from feeling too constrained, or being
frequently interrupted by the application, and also prevents frustration on the part of low achieving students by providing adequate scaffolding.
• Support the appropriate modes of group interaction. Careful reasoning must underpin the choice and use of parallel interaction, single point of entry, and enforced collaboration. There is no reason why applications should either allow full parallel interaction or only support a single point of interaction. A major advantage of digital tabletop technology is in its ability to switch between these two modes of operation in addition to being able to enforce collaboration when needed. The goal is to optimise the application to maximize the effectiveness of collaboration.
A final recommendation is concerned with the choice of the groups to carry out the trials throughout the iterative design process. From my work with students of different ability levels, observation of groups of lower achieving students more readily led to insights that improved the design. This does not mean removing higher achieving groups from the process, but the positive results, that are a common outcome from such groups, should not be used without questioning as evidence of successful design.