Proof of Concept activity shows, that not only ASD-pupils are unique – so are ASD-teachers!

Better late than never!

In the middle of a busy June(to be exact: June 8th) I planned, arranged and carried through a Paper prototype test with three teachers from Egebakken as a HANDS Proof of Concept activity. Unfortunately have I not had time to analyse the data from the experiment, but I have a strong personal need to tell about the immediate results from the experiment.

I believe, that my working hours will be dedicated to writing the HANDS proposal.

The main conclusions of the test are in the bottom of this post.

The motivation for this Proof of Concept activities was a need to prove – theoretically – the benefit of the HANDS concept.

The experiment setup was:

• Nice and for the testteachers familiar surroundings – in a classroom at Egebakken
• Three teachers who each was given 3 real world pedagogical problems, which they had to consider thinking aloud one after the other. All teachers were from Egebakken: Susan Gulstad, Kristian Wolling and Søren Madsen.
• They could solve the problem by taking or sketching solutions.
• I was testleader asking them positive yes questions and possibly suggesting to them computertools to be a part of the solution.
• Each realworld problem case was elaborated in approximately 15 minutes.
• The datacollection methods were videorecording of the whole test and written a report.
  Special thanks to Anne-Katrine Kjaer Christensen and Julie Leth Jespersen, students at Aalborg University, Institute of Communication.

The immediate impression of the test was overwhelming. Very. While the test took place, Anne-Katrine, Julie and I was overwhelmed by knowledge, considerations, interesting perspectives and much, much more. This made it nice to end the session so that I did not get any more new information, even though that I knew, I had to continue and get as many data out of the experiment as possible.

The test in other words was well functioning. The real world problems were relevant and the teachers were more than willing to think-aloud. They did not by themselves suggest solutions the problem by using Pdas.

Main test conclusion are

• Teachers are different. The three teachers did not have the same methodology to solve the same problems.
• They were open towards solution with pdas, but they did not suggest it themselves.

• Internal motivation of the pupil was always considered.

• They referred to a common set of methods, which they wanted to apply in different situations.

• One method – Simple Safe Success – seems very valuable to put into a pda.

The fact that the three teachers seemed to have differentways of elaborating a real world problem seems troublesome. Unique teachers’ hers personalities. Uak! But they had several things in common the most valuable, they had methods in common. Most profound was the use of SSS, Simple Safe Success’. A method which can easily be formalized and turned into a computerprogram.

In general methods are formalizations of everyday pedagogical work and these methods should be integrated into the pda.

If I had time to analyze the video and testreport several other very interesting testresults will appear.

The HANDS project aims to integrate the teachers' professional intuition and this experiment was the first study in the field.

An interestering and valuable experiment.

HANDS-whole-day-seminar in July - valuable and chearfull day

July 31th was selected to be a HANDS-whole-day-seminar at Aalborg University.

The invited partners was the core group in Aalborg: Aalborg University(Persuasive Design group), Egebakken – school for children with ASD and Wirtek(Romania)

9 persons participated in a valuable, interesting and cheerful day together.

In the seminar the first real version of the proposal(version 1) was published and critized.

The mainresult of the seminar was

Establishment of the writing group: Henrik Sand, Lars Moltsen(Wirtek), Susan Gulstad(Egebakken), Miklos Gyori(Budapest), Tia Hansen(AAU) and Morten Aagaard(AAU)

Establishment of The marketanalysisgroup: Morten Aagaard(AAU), Søren Madsen(Egebakken)

Establishment of The usecasescenario group: Morten Aagaard(AAU) and Kristian Wolling(Egebakken)

Agrement, that a HANDS meeting for all partners of HANDS is a good idea. Should be placed primo September.

Several participants had each an item on the agenda, which they had to resume. The resumes differ a lot.

The agenda was

HANDS soft roles

1. Presentation of the participants and the agenda
2. A personal introduction /Morten Aagaard – the slides, the resume.
   I gave a talk about core projectvalues of HANDS. In headlines it is: HANDS have some valuable European perspectives for the partners in Aalborg, user participartory design, an interdisciplinary design project demands openness towards other peoples ideas and the acronym HANDS is an oppurtunity to have fun together and create an open projectatmosphere.
   
   
3. Some perspectives on Persuasive Design/ Professor Per Hasle, AAU The resume
   Unfortunately had Per Hasle become ill and the Anne-Katrine Kjaer Christensen(Elite-student at Aalborg University) managed to be plan B. She had participated(May 2007) in the conference “Persuasive Technology 2007” at Stanford and told us, what state of the art in Persuasive Technology. A clear trend is mobile persuasion. Much work within the area is dedicated to experiments using the terms identified in B.J. Foggs book,”Persuasive Technology”. But to call research.. Anne-Katrine Kjaer Christensen was not sure. She was sure, that HANDS would be valuable to present at the next Persuasive Technology conference in Oulu 2008.
   
   
4. Why does progress in the teaching and caretaking of individuals with ASD have wider perspectives and how domight it interest professionals in other pedagogical areas? / Michael Sørensen, Manager of Egebakken, Vodskov – the slides the resume
   Michael presented the problem of being an individual with an autismdiagnosis. Lack of communication skills, social abilities and lack theory of mind. And he told about Egebakkens value of using pdas: to structure a chaotic everyday for the children with autism diagnosis.
   
   
5. How is the HANDS userexperience?/Morten Aagaard – the slide
   The seminar did not manage the time to hear this item. But the slides are available..
   
   
6. Preevaluation of the HANDS proposal/ Tommi Nielsen og Lone Grøndahl Kristensen, AAU fundraising office - the resume
   Tommy and Lone gave a razor sharp and very critical walkthrough of the proposal. They pointed out several very important problems in the proposal. Simple technical errors but also very many big mistakes was evident. The most important one was, that the objectives were not understandable. Furthermore, we asked Lone and Tommi, who they would recommend as the Head of HANDS. They did not doubt a second and pted at Peter Øhrstrøm.
7. Management structure, Ressource control and Risk management is needed too!/ Henrik Sand, Fundrasing & project manager, Institut for Kommunikation, AAU - the resume
   Henrik Sand talked about the importance of writing a good proposal and the core of a good proposal is to have objectives, which respond to the challenge.
   Furthermore Henrik stressed the importance of partners, who are familiar with each know the objectives well. He suggested(strongly supported by Lars Moltsen from Wirtek) that we should arranged an meeting in September for all partners. The participants agreed.
   
   

The meeting decided to make decisions instead of receiving new input.

The decisions were
Establishment of the writing group: Henrik Sand, Lars Moltsen(Wirtek), Susan Gulstad(Egebakken), Miklos Gyori(Budapest), Tia Hansen(AAU) and Morten Aagaard(AAU)

Establishment of The marketanalysisgroup: Morten Aagaard(AAU), Søren Madsen(Egebakken)

Establishment of The usecasescenario group: Morten Aagaard(AAU) and Kristian Wolling(Egebakken)

Agrement, that a HANDS meeting for all partners of HANDS is a good idea. Should be set for September.

8. Ethical concerns and WorkPackages. How to share Workpackage responsibility? / Morten Aagaard
   The seminar did not manage the time to hear this item.
9. Gift to particpants and establishment of the HANDS proposal in the EU’ EEPS proposal database.
   The seminar did not manage the time to hear this item.
10. Eventually
    The seminar did not manage the time to hear this item.

All in all a good seminar which pushed the HANDS proposal further.

Proof of Concept activity – Talk and debate on Institute of Communication/AAU

I made a personal walkthrough of the HANDS project objective and organzational challenges. It was positively but critically debated by an audience primarily from Aalborg University. But there where a couple of participators from HANDS partners.
The debate about HANDS was orientated towards
a) how to incorporate ethics in the design process
b) What type of testing and how to use the empirical data and
c) The main objective should be measurable.
Many valuable comments where given. Thank you to all participants of the meeting. The summary was written by Julie Leth. Thank you. My slides is here.

My motivation for this Proof of Concept meeting was the expectation, that the HANDS proposal will not be evaluated by qualified proposal-evaluators. Either will the evaluator have a Computer Science background, a cognitive psychology background or they will have an Human Computer Interaction background. Persuasive Technology is far new too the proposal evaluators.

In other words is this Proof of Concept activity my own desire to make a critical and Persuasive Technology competent review of the HANDS project.

In reality there where two obstacles to make succeed: first I had change from being in “Selling-mode” to an academic critical mode. Localize and explain the weak issues in HANDS and tell it to an audience which could be very critical. Second I had to explain the actual status of the design of HANDS within one hour.

The first obstacle was managed during the preparation of the talk. But it was initially difficult. To be open and to hope for critical comments. Unfortunately was the audience very positive and eager to make the project “come true” and wanted to contribute very constructively. It was a nice feeling but somehow too easy.

The second obstacle, introducing HANDS within one hour, was difficult. Even though the audience was knowledgeable about Persuasive Technology it wasn’t enough. Introducing HANDS software components demands that you describe the persuasive aims, you describe how you can achieve credibility and then you can explain the use of the functional triad. And when you talk about social actors things really become “scientific” or spectacular. Even a knowledgeable audience isnot familiar with the design choices. It takes a while to explain and it takes even more to digest.

Despite these reservations the meeting was valuable. It was not a complete walkthrough of the objectives of HANDS and all the challenges. But several vital HANDS issues were debated.

I will mention three issues here

1. Ethical issues.
The design of the social actor may introduce ethical problems. If the user gets too dependent of the social actor and too involved - how do you handle that? Ethical issues should (in a Scandinavian Persuasive tradition) be involved in the design process, not afterwards or at milestones, but a part of the systemdevelopment process.

b) What type of testing and how to use the empirical data.

Due to the fact that many research fields and traditions are included in the HANDS project it is not known how the empirical experiment should be designed. Very very true. Furthermore 1) the dataset size will be small(100<) 2) single individual with ASD have similarities with other individuals with ASD. And differs too. 3) The testsites will have to adapt the experiment to the single individuals which requireso not one experiment but many experiments.

c) The main objective should be measurable.

The meeting had a debate on the main objective of the proposal. The experienced EU-participators stressed explicitly, that it is very important to make the objective measureable. The same with all WorkPackages. EU needs projects which are not a risky business. The research design of HANDS makes it worthwhile to consider this very much. Quantitative research is far more easy to measure and HANDS will be a research
project primarily based on qualitative data.

There where other valuable comments. All valuable comments that will be integrated in the proposal. Thank you to the contributors.

Visit to London South Bank University - success!

I met Joseph Mintz from London SouthBank University at the Meeting of Minds conference back in February. Joseph teaches at a PostGraduate Program for Teachers specializing in children with ASD. At the moment he is presenting his paper tothe Emotions 2007 conference in the Autum. Issues in his work are children with ASD or Asperges syndrome that have a life in mainstreamschools, where they act differently than the other pupils and have to manage that somehow. It is a central issue in caretaking of children and teenagers with ASD.

But before Joseph Mintz started teaching and researching at LSBU, he had a carrier in the IT-industri, which in this project can be of great value.

Before going to London we had several negotiations.
Firstly I had asked Egebakken, if one member from the management could participate. I did so, because I emphazise teachers experience very much. Their knowledge, experiences, and competences should have a central and large role in the HANDS project. If we had the opportunity to visit a school in GB it would be nice. Informationofficer Susan Guldstad was asked to participate and it was a good choice. She is eager to push the project forward, openminded and critical. And as an surplus value she is taking an NLP-education and is always in a good mood.

Secondly while I started negotiation with Joseph, it happened that his father had a very larger operation and Joseph's time and attention was neded there. I must admit, I was pushy and Joseph managed to handle both his father and planning a very large and interesting program for Susan and me.

We had one day together at LSBU together with interesting and qualified staffmembers. We meet

• Peter Winbourne, reader in Mathematics Education
• Caty March, Senior Lecturer in Professional Studies,and a teacher with considerable experience in working with children with ASD
• Xristine Faulkner, Reader in Human Computer Interaction(I have used her books in my own teaching!!)
• Julia Power, European Programmes Manager at LSBU
• and finally Sally Inman, Head of Department

The invited people represented very different views on ICT and ASD which made it valuable and interesting. Through the talks we had to explain and argue for the HANDS project in a new manner.

Especially was it interesting to consider

• Research methodology
• The term "Social inclusion"

According to Research Methodology we tried to elaborate a methodology based on a combination of qualitativeve dataand quantitative data. We tried, but - I believe - we agreed, that the terms in Persuasive Technology and the intention of the project had to be proved first and it limited our debate to a vague conclusion that HANDS should rather be considered to be several qualitative experiments. This was the first argument. The second argument was - that our empirical data will not form a massive amount of quantitative data, (rather the opposite due to the fact, that the phenomena we will observe is behaviors of teenagers with ASD) which makes it possible to make clear and simple verification of HANDS software.

From the applications point of view it is fully acceptable. FP7-challenge 7 objective 2 states, applications should be considered to be Proof-of-Concept projects.

Furthermore it was noted by Joseph and I, that the HANDS project allow space for a new (in ASD research) type of methodtriangulation: the classical data is some kind of observation by researcher. In the HANDS project we have a very unique source of data: the uninterpretated logfiles which is a registration of the actual use of the HANDS software.

The term social inclusion played an important role in the design of schooloffers to the children with ASD in GB. The politicians in GB wants more children with ASD to attend mainstreamschools and the term social inclusion of young marginalized people from the EU-FP7 challenge 7 objective is in GB context interpreted to be a support of that intention.

The clear preproject conclusion was, that more testsiteschools should be mainstreamschools integrating children with ASD.

After this long and interesting day we finalized the talks with the head of department, Sallyre Inman. She warned us in believing that good EU-proposals always areaccepted. I believe she is right.

LSBU gave two valuable offers more:

• Julia Power offered to read the proposal through before uploading to ESSP
• Xristine Faulkner offered to make an evaluation of the userinterface of HANDS.
  

The day at LSBU together with Joseph and his colleageus was indeed a valuable day.

Joseph promised to send the "Letter of Intent".

Thrilling complications - new informations appears!

While I was in Budapest, Miklos and I talked about the process of writing an EU proposal. I said I expected that there would appear information one day - while writing - that will change the whole proposal. Miklos replied, that he agreed and the only thing you can do is to talk with as many people as possible.
It happened June 7th: new information appeared and should the whole project be put in the trash? Luckily not!

I joined a EU-application information meeting in Aarhus together with Lars Moltsen from Wirtek. I met Anette Fløcke Lorentzen, from the Danish Research and Innovationsministerium, who initially was the person(together with others) who funded the HANDS preproject. While talking with her, she thought that the HANDS proposal did not match the objective(FP7-challenge 7, 2d)! Eventhough she had been funding the HANDS project and implicitly verified the match between proposal and objective!
A true Catch 22 situation - a bureaucratic problem, which should not have existed!

She was very polite(!) and recommended that I call the Danish EU-employee responsible for that challenge and talk with him("....every word in an FP7-objective is very seriously considered - the proposal has to aim to achieve the objective exactly").

She gave me a telephone, where the danish EU-employee phonenumber(Peter Wintlev-Jensen) was dialed, and I just had to press "Call". I got the feeling like someone was giving me a pistol and asking me to commit suicide!
I had to refuse her offer, and plan the talk with Peter Wintlev-Jensen.
It was four days before I could call him. His answer was a clear "Yes, the users in focus of the HANDS project are for sure a socially marginalized group of young people and very interesting".
And more. It was very interesting to get an interpretation of the FP7-text direct from the source.
The most valuable ....were:

• EU wants Proof of Concepts research projects.


• EU wants projects with high quality research foundation.


• EU wants small projects


• EU wants innovative Proof of Concept projects, which afterwards can be the foundation of a larger project, which include products which hits the market.


• Every proposal must seriously consider the expected impact of the project.


• Peter Wintlev-Jensen expected, that he gaming industry will send in a couple of proposals.
  

All summed up: HANDS fits those demands very well and my expectations to the success of HANDS were raised remarkably after the phone call.

HANDS visit to Stockholm June 5th - success!

I hitted SvedenSkolan in Stockholm a little north to the citycenter in time. And had a joyfull and interesting talk and negotiation with Tobias(Teacher), Niklas Ahlstrom(VCEO), Gun Marie Wicksen (CEO), Agneta(assisting CEO. We ended our meeting by signing the “Letter of Intent”.

Coming to Stockholm and Svedenskolan was like coming home. It was not that frighting and different as visiting Budapest. First we discussed whether we should held the meeting in English or Skandinavian. We decided it should be hold in English.

Some facts
Svedenskolan has 70 pupils, it is based on TEACCH-pedagogical methods, the pupil/teacher ratio is similar to Egebakken in Denmark, the potentially involved teachers are invited to the meeting, and the management are nice and informal. And they used one PDA for one pupil. Equipped with asoftware “HANDI2” - well-known in Denmark.

Michael(Principal of Egebakken) evaluated beforehand, that Svedenskolan and Egebakken share many values and properties and after visiting SS I still have that viewpoint.

SS is going to be “my” testsite in HANDS and I feel very comfortable about that. HANDS is in good hands in Swedan skolan.

After I had made my presentation(view my slides here and more) I was gently asked to leave the room, so that they could make their own decision. Meanwhile I was given a tourdeforce of Svedenskolan by two very kind psychologists.

Critical comments on HANDS ideas

During the discussion afterwards Swedan Skolan raised several important issues or themes. The most valuable was:

• They commented that personal rights to own data is an ethical issue in HANDS which should be seriously considered. The laws might differ from one country to another.
  
  I fully agree. The ethical Advisory Board must work it out.
  
  

• They commented that working within HANDS could be timeconsuming and this should not be done at the expense of caretaking of the children.
  
  I fully agree. But the division between HANDS work and teaching will in many cases be difficult to draw.
  

I commented, that the level of IT-competences seemed week, and it should be considered how it could be raised. I suggested, that the management started(if the HANDS application goes through) out by using the pdas themselves.

Success - signing "The Letter of Intent"

As previously stated SvedenSkolan(management and teacher) signed the Letter of Intent. While Tobias(the teacher) commented, that many of the core ideas in HANDS is what he had been dreaming of.