The MirrorWolf (MW) project aims at developing novel technologies for learning communities, whether companies or more traditional school settings. At a general level, these technologies, or tools, should help their users to comprehend their individual work process and collaboration within the teams they are involved in, and based on their acquired impressions and analyses, develop their work and practices further on. The techniques to be applied include information retrieval, visualization, group technologies, and computational linguistics.

We see the areas of learning, studying, and working approach as overlapping each other. Therefore, the basic motivation to design these kinds of tools stems from the problems occurring in virtually any modern learning or working setting:

1. Students as well as employees (i.e. learners) need to track their learning or working processes in order to improve their skills.

2. Groups, especially those working in distance, need a better understanding on how their contributions and roles fit together.

3. Most of the concrete artefacts constructed in modern learning or working places are some sort of texts. There is an apparent need to compare and interrelate texts together, for example to trace an individual author, compare similar texts, assess texts etc.

In this project, we follow the participatory design method. However, it needs to be enhanced by formative evaluation, or early stage evaluation within their potential future users. In our case, this means that two companies test and analyse the usability of the tools and some up with respective suggestions at regular intervals over the whole research period. In these primarily group processes, we make use of creative problem solving methods.

MW will create tools for educational institutions and business enterprises focusing on multiple objectives and making use of continuous evaluation schemes in learning environments. The elements to be developed in MW and their correlation, seen from a holistic point of view, are organic in their continuous evaluation schemes.

The technologies to be developed will be built on the earlier results of the research team, particularly those designed in the Thinking Tools for the Net (TTN) project during years 2000-2003. These include automatic essay assessment, concept mapping and visualization of collaborative work.

The previous project TTN was funded by the National Technology Agency of Finland, TEKES.

Project Leader Professor Erkki Sutinen and
Project Coordinator Gaetano La Russa, firstname.lastname@cs.joensuu.fi

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These pages were last updated on 25th of April, 2005.