The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

422 B.R. Krogstie
information about technology; in most cases, simple web search or FAQ lists provide
answers, but occasionally project members participate in discussion forums [16].
These patterns of use, combined with the functionality of tools, imply that data resulting
from various types of project work is generally logged. Wiki revisions are
automatically stored and the email clients store all mail unless otherwise specified by
the user. It is tacitly expected that an email user keeps an archive of work-related
email. With instant messaging, team members frequently choose to enable logging.
On an internet forum, postings remain as long as the community hosting the forum
wants to keep them. Looking into the historical data stored in these tools, they can be
seen as a trace of the work undertaken with the aid of the tools. The studies investigating
reflection aided by historical data [9, 11] showed that data in tools used for project
management and coordination reminded participants of events related to those aspects
of project work and thus helped them reflect on that type of issues.
To examine the potential for historical data to shed light on other types of issues,
we started out by issues that, according to the teams’ own reflection. had been of great
importance in their projects (e.g. misunderstandings in team-customer collaboration,
problems of getting timely information from a service provider). Examining historical
data in collaborative tools used by those teams, including email archives, instant messaging
logs, and discussion forums, we looked for historical data that could shed light
on those issues The data found were, as seen by the researcher, rich enough to have
such a potential, partially because the data shed light on the use of the collaborative
tool itself, which was often at the core of the project challenge.
We end this section by outlining some more characteristics of the SD projects relevant
to our agenda of understanding and supporting retrospective reflection in the
teams. Work in the projects is typically diversified, project participants having different
roles, dividing work and using different tools to address different tasks. Team
members’ roles affect their day-to-day use of collaborative tools. Consequently, historical
data in a tool typically reflects work in which some team members have been
more involved than others. Project artifacts (e.g. requirements specifications and project
plans) frequently play a role in collaboration with project stakeholders (e.g.
customer [17] and course staff) having different goals for their project involvement.
Project artifacts in various states can be seen as more or less well defined versions.
These may be deliberately saved by the user (as when a text document is renamed and
saved) or automatically stored in a tool. A file versioning system stores the contents
of and differences between every file version ‘checked in’ by the users. In our studies
of retrospective reflection aided by historical data in collaborative tools, going into
detail often meant exploring specific artifact versions.
3 Theoretical Background
Taking the view of constructivism, seeing learning as integral to activity that is basically
social and situated, and focusing on the role of tools, several theories [18, 19]
may shed light on project based learning. They include activity theory (AT), actor
network theory (ANT), symbolic interactionism, situated learning, and distributed
cognition [20, 21]. In [11] it was shown that distributed cognition is an adequate
framework for understanding retrospective reflection in SD student projects. It has
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