Current research in learning histories considers the hypothesis that providing learners with a readable record of their actions may help them monitor their behavior and reflect on their progress. Learning histories enable analysis of the decision making process as opposed to analysis of results only, and can facilitate active collaboration among dispersed learning communities. They must provide a strong visual representation of the application's activity and support direct manipulation, wherever possible, to implement history functionality. Learning histories must also be first-class objects, capable of being saved, annotated, sent by email to others, posted to websites, edited, extracted, combined, and searched. This talk will review the topic of learning histories, and describe initial efforts to enhance an existing educational simulation environment with a history capability.
Trails provides the conceptual data structure for the recording of history information.
In this model, user actions in a computer application are separated into individual trails based on the likeness of these actions. Each trail consists of a temporal sequence of an atomic action. To arrive at an overall temporal sequence of user actions in a computer application, relationships among these trails need to be created. Demonstrations of trail-based history applications will be included.