How It Is, How It Is, and How It Could Be: A Reflection on Strategies for Bringing Body Data Technologies Into Designed Learning Environments

• In Event: Division C Invited Session. Jan Hawkins Award Address: Victor Lee and Angela Booker

Abstract

The time is ripe for educators and designers to leverage new portable, wearable, and mobile body data capturing devices as means for students to obtain large amounts of personally meaningful data that they can then subsequently analyze. These data are especially appealing to capture because they draw on the experientially familiar, such as everyday body movements and routine physical activities. However, how to best use such technology to help learners obtain data and engage in meaningful data analysis practices remains an open question. This talk reflects upon a multi-year program of design-based research that not only involved partnerships and iterative design with students, teachers, and classrooms, but also involved looking at body data capture and analysis activities taking place in non-school communities that operate "in the wild." As will be discussed in this presentation, by simultaneously studying "how it is" that body data and mobile technology are made to work in these other spaces and "how it is" working and not working during a given implementation cycle in actual schools, we can generate new ideas for "how it could be" improved in a future iteration and thus develop new understandings of both how and when body data can be made into a powerful and meaningful resource for student learning.

Author

• Victor R. Lee, Utah State University