During the proposal I worked on the usability aspects of the tool and during the development of the tool, I used AR to create part of the story. Originally I thought we could use one of the lesson plans about Residential Schools that have been shared online to gather data about our user, but then I learnt about Indigneous ways and rights around story sharing. To avoid appropriation, Leo referred to the Truth and Reconciliation document to create a script for Charlie’s story to use for the tool. From here I was able to create an AR scene depicting a part of the script. Every week we met through Zoom to discuss and share/demo our progress and discuss how our tool was usable and how it was configuring our users and ourselves. I found these discussions useful and when I went back to reread the readings, I was able to make more connections to my own teaching practices and beliefs. For example, at Professional Development sessions on technology, the presenter often says, “Of course the students know how to use technology. Even if they don’t, they can learn quickly and still be able to teach the teacher.” Reading Issa and Isaias’ (2015) observation that “[i]n order for computer-based systems to be widely accepted and used effectively, they need to be well designed via a ‘user-centered’ approach” (p. 20) plus Woolgar’s (1990) paper on configuration makes me realize that instead of using my own observations to create student profiles and determine their technology capabilities, I had relied on others, assuming that their reality is the same as mine.
*Please note that this is the same video shown during the presentation.
Although I had a better understanding of configuration and usability, I still had problems identifying and describing the intended user, which made it hard to agree on what customizations were needed to make the tool usable. If I were to do this project again, I would work backwards by looking at the different lesson plans and curriculum overviews from BC (because it’s the Canadian curriculum I am most familiar with) and Saskatchewan (from an online search there appeared to be a good number of lesson plans available) to find a lesson or unit where Charlie’s story could be used. From here, I would identify the grade and subject of the user. Then I would find at least one person who falls in that age group and region. I think it would have been possible since both I and Leo are from BC and if we had used a lesson from Saskatchewan, Liz is from there. Then we could have profiled our user(s) and their school’s socio-economic, cultural, linguistic and technology policies/usage/ratio. Even if we could not find a person to test and feedback our tool, we could have chosen a school to offer a demo to and configured the tool to the school’s situation. Having a user in mind is necessary because HCI is an interdisciplinary subject, involving computer science, psychology, industrial design, sociology and anthropology (Issa & Isaias, 2015). The latter two involve interactions between technology, work and organization, which we were unable to fully consider without a more detailed user profile.
I enjoyed working on this tool. Feras, Liz, Leo and Safa were communicative, thoughtful and encouraging. I learnt a lot from them.
References
Issa T. & Isaias P. (2015) Usability and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Sustainable Design. London: Springer. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1007/978-1-4471-6753-2_2
Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: the case of usability trials. The Sociological Review, 38 (1_suppl), 58-99.