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Contents : Prepublication draft -- do not cite Manuscript submission for 2005 Proceedings of AECT Volume #1 Understanding and Representing Learning Activity to Support Design: A Contextual Design Example Mark Notess Digital Library Program Indiana University Music Library 1201 E. Third Street Bloomington Indiana USA 47405-7006 +1.812.856.0494 mnotess@indiana.edu Understanding and Representing Learning Activity to Support Design: A Contextual Design Example Mark Notess Abstract Contextual Design is a well-defined method for gathering and representing user understanding within a coherent design process. This paper illustrates the value of Contextual Design to educational system design by describing a case study involving 14 contextual inquiry sessions that were carried out in and around the Indiana University music library in support of designing technology for student learning. Findings are presented as diagrammatic work models an affinity diagram and a list of insights and design ideas. The utility of Contextual Design work modeling is assessed and some limitations in its ability to represent learning are considered. Introduction Designing useful educational technologies requires us to understand the potential users of those technologies the tasks the users bring with them and the contexts of use. As we have developed our next-generation digital music library Variations2 (Variations2 2005) we have taken a valuable opportunity to gain this understanding by studying usage of its predecessor the Variations system (Dunn & Mayer 1999 Variations 2005). This paper reports on the second in a sequence of contextual inquiry studies of digital music library use. Results from the first study have been partially reported (Notess 2004a). A small subset of results from the present study were reported elsewhere (Notess 2004b). Contextual inquiry (Holtzblatt & Jones 1993) is a naturalistic inquiry research method wherein researchers observe actual work in normal work contexts. The method is intrusive in that the observer sits with the participant and asks clarifying questions during and/or following the session. An advantage of contextual inquiry over an interview or questionnaire protocol is that it gets beyond the participants beliefs about their activity and records actual practice which often differs from how participants believe they behave. Data from contextual inquiry has proven very useful in information systems design. Recently it has been applied to the design of educational technologies as well. Contextual Design (Beyer & Holtzblatt 1998) extends contextual inquiry by situating contextual data within a coherent design process. Central to the design process are five types of diagrammatic work models which serve to represent consolidate and communicate the findings of contextual inquiry in a manner useful to technology design. This paper illustrates the application of Contextual Design (CD) to educational technology using a case study of digital music library use at Indiana University. Motivating the study were the following research questions. What is the role of the Variations digital music library in the studies of music students Into what larger patterns of student work does a digital music library fit How do students decide between using online and physical resources For online resources what use do students make of the non-library web Beyond these primary questions we were also interested in characterizing the suitability of contextual inquiry and the CD work models for examining and representing student library work. The CD models were developed primarily for describing business-oriented work activity. Whether the models adapt well to representing learning activity is an open question. After describing the digital music library technologies and the method for conducting the observations this paper provides examples of the five CD work models describes the useful outcomes of the study for Variations2 design and offers a preliminary assessment of the CD models utility in studying learning. Study Description Variations and Variations2 Variations is a large digital music library implementation at Indiana University (IU) in use since 1996 to provide streaming audio and digitized score images to music students at computers in the music library. The approximately 1500 School of Music students make frequent use of Variations for course reserves and personal study although anyone with an IU network login may go to the Cook Music Library and use Variations. The collection includes over 10 000 digitized recordings. A Variations recording comprises a CD CD set LP LP set tape etc. hence an item in the library catalog maps to a single Variations item. The Variations collection has grown through successive semesters of course listening reserves being requested by faculty. For copyright reasons access to Variations is limited to PCs in the music library on the IU campu

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