This paper presents a concept for in-app reflection guidance and its evaluation in four work-related field trials. By synthesizing across four field trials, we can show that computer-based reflection guidance can function in the workplace, in the sense of being accepted as technology, being perceived as useful and leading to reflective learning. This is encouraging for all endeavours aiming to transfer existing knowledge on reflection supportive technology from educational settings to the workplace. However, reflective learning in our studies was mostly visible to limited depth in textual entries made in the applications themselves; and proactive reflection guidance technology like prompts were often found to be disruptive. We offer these two issues as highly relevant questions for future research.
This paper presents cooperative design as method to address the needs of SMEs to gain sufficient knowledge about new technologies in order for them to decide about adoption for knowledge management. We developed and refined a cooperative design method iteratively over nine use cases. In each use case, the goal was to match the SME's knowledge management needs with offerings of new (to the SMEs) technologies. Where traditionally, innovation adoption and diffusion literature assume new knowledge to be transferred from knowledgeable stakeholders to less knowledgeable stakeholders, our method is built on cooperative design. In this, the relevant knowledge is constructed by the SMEs who wish to decide upon the adoption of novel technologies through the cooperative design process. The presented method is constituted of an analysis stage based on activity theory and a design stage based on paper prototyping and design workshops. In all nine cases, our method led to a good understanding a) of the domain by researchers - validated by the creation of meaningful first-version paper prototypes and b) of new technologies - validated by meaningful input to design and plausible assessment of technologies' benefit for the respective SME. Practitioners and researchers alike are invited to use the here documented tools to cooperatively match the domain needs of practitioners with the offerings of new technologies. The value of our work lies in providing a concrete implementation of the cooperative design paradigm that is based on an established theory (activity theory) for work analysis and established tools of cooperative design (paper prototypes and design workshops as media of communication); and a discussion based on nine heterogeneous use cases.
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