It is possible to participate to the afternoon session also without having attended the morning session!

The workshop will start with a brief presentation of the activities and a short introduction of both projects for an overall introductory section of about 15 minutes. Then the main, interactive part of 2,5 hours starts with letting the attendees interact with the dialogue simulation in a multicultural setting. The concept of the learning buddy will be presented together with the interactive simulation. Once attendees are familiar with the tools and the scenario, the participatory design process of how to embed such a simulation in training will be facilitated by creative techniques. At this point attention is on how to support individual reflection. Once the frame for a learning scenario is traced, with the support of social spaces around the simulation, discussion turns into how to broaden the reflection process from individual into group/collaborative reflection.  Finally the last 45 min will be dedicated to comments and feedback from participants as well as drawing conclusions and potential outlooks.

Simulation

The presented simulation will be an online application, where users can play the dialogue and wherever relevant state their moods in a so-called mood map based on the “Circumplex model of affect” (Barrett, L. F., & Russell, J. A., 2009). Also, as they make their choices and the chosen dialogue or behaviour determines the next one, they will be able to input comments or choices they would have liked to find at that stage in the system. The presented simulation will not be adaptive yet, but the plan will be to augment its content with changing reality as well as to adapt it to the user together with the offered learning buddy.

Learning Buddy

The workshop will present an opportunity for the participants to interact with the learning buddy service, gaining an insight into the metacognitive skills as outlined in the metacognitive awareness inventory (MAI) (Schraw, G., & Sperling Dennison, R. 1994). This will be followed by an exercise where participants will work in pairs to perform 2 tasks, in each case one member acting as the performer, one as the coach. Advice given by the coach will then be analysed by the pairs and discussed by the whole group. The outputs from this will feed back into the development of the scaffolding narrative being delivered by the learning buddy.

Creative Techniques

We will use a selection of three established creativity techniques to explore the potential of simulation and training techniques. The first is solution-led problem generation. Each feature of the presented simulations will be explored systematically to discover problems that each feature can solve. The second is rule-based idea combination. A small set of rules will be developed with which to combine simulation problem and solutions to generate previously unforeseen ideas. The third is storyboarding. The emerging ideas will be combined further into frame-based graphics that describe how human actors will interact with the simulations in new ways.

Collaborative Reflection

After ideas for using dialogue simulation for training purposes have been collected in the creative session, each participant is asked to tell a short story which problem or situation in their respective work context such training is supposed to support. Typical situations and problems of the workshop’s target audience will be provided as examples and initial content to work on. After that, groups of participants will mutually introduce and explain their stories to each other in order to discuss similarities to their own situation and stories. To make this discussion sustainable, they will be asked to add links between their stories and those provided to them as well as to provide comments to these stories containing e.g. similar facts about their work. On this material from collaborative reflection, participants will be asked to provide a story that combines their individual issues or situations with the ideas collected during the creativity phase. Thus, each group will produce a solution scenario applying ideas generated earlier with findings from the collaborative reflection of their work, which they will present to all at the end of the workshop.