This study explores how students within higher education perceive different types of peer review feedback and how that feedback affects their learning. The study builds on a previous paper [1] where the Blackboard peer assessment tool was used, and compared three feedback conditions: positive, mixed, and negative. The findings strongly indicated that students preferred negative feedback, corresponding to earlier research showing that experienced students seem to benefit from negative feedback [2].

To explore the students perception on feedback, we designed an academic course to incorporate peer review assessment. The course was held during autumn 2018 and included 75 bachelor students. Students were required to individually complete a set of four review assignments using the school’s learning management system, ITs learning (ITs). Each of the four peer review assignments were designed to represent a different approach to feedback. The first assignment instructed the students to only give positive feedback in the review process; e.g., “choose three things that are positive”. The second assignment had instructions without suggesting valence in the feedback and asked the students to “examine how the argumentation is included in the text”. The third assignment instructed the students to provide negative feedback, by asking them to “point towards at least three areas for improvement”. The fourth assignment instructed the students to validate the feasibility of a written research proposal by their study peer, again without suggesting a valence of positive or negative. By consciously designing the four peer review assignments to produce specific kinds of feedback, we aimed to learn more about how the students experience such different types of peer review.

Based on focus group interviews, we have so far found that the students perceive it harder to give positive compared than negative feedback. They also perceive giving feedback, rather than receiving feedback, as a more important experience in learning. The latter will be especially interesting when compared against earlier research [3] which showed that providing peer feedback had several potential learning benefits for the provider. A preliminary finding of our study is that the transition from earlier levels of design critique during digital development projects to academically founded criticism and review requires careful instructions and pedagogic considerations. In order to further evaluate the students' experience, a questionnaire will be distributed at the end of the course (end of Oct. 2018).

The findings presented in this study aim to work as a backdrop for future discussions about how to design peer-review assignments in higher education to increase students’ academic literacy.

References:

[1] Kidd, J., Hankins, M., “The effects of peer review in students learning: a comparison of positive and negative feedback.”. 10th International Technology, Education and Development Conference, Valencia, Spain, March 7-9, 2016.

[2] Fishbach, A., Eyal, T., & Finkelstein, S. R., “How positive and negative feedback motivate goal pursuit.” in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4(8), 517-530, 2010.

[3] Van Popta, E., Kral, M., Camp, G., Martens, R. L., & Simons, P. R. J., “Exploring the value of peer feedback in online learning for the provider.” in Educational Research Review, 20, 24-34, 2017.

The paper reports on a study of community gardening in Stockholm. We contribute to the body of knowledge about the sustainability of community gardens and this new form of citizen-led initiatives in Stockholm, with the ambition of creating a debate about the best way to sustain and develop these initiatives in Sweden. We argue that although community gardening may provide leverage for means of developing a sustainable city, it is a marginal phenomenon and contributes little to sustainable development its present form. Through interviews we have investigated how the citizens and municipality officers of Stockholm try to adapt to the renewed interest in community gardening by looking at the policy makers’, municipality officers’ and grassroots movements’ incentives to start community gardens. We specifically focus on how the community gardeners articulate their reasons for participating in collaborative initiatives in the city and how these expectations evolve when they are faced with the reality of gardening and the problems relating to producing food in the city. We have found that there are a growing number of citizens and local authorities advocating community gardening, but the sustainability and endurance of gardens are hampered by vague responsibilities, lack of leadership and unclear expectations of the outcome. Community gardening cases in Stockholm contribute to the debate by exemplifying how formal (e.g. policy making) and informal advocacy (e.g. civic engagement in community gardening) groups are collaborating, but also showing that they often have different agendas and initial motivations for setting up new gardens. We argue that uncritical enthusiasm results in an overly instrumental approach to governance of community gardening and that the sustainability and endurance of the community gardening is not an issue that the governing bodies plan for, and hence it is forgotten. We suggest some routes forward, involving employing facilitators from various stakeholders such as the municipality, housing companies and various NGOs.

This paper presents a case study of an interactive performance that was produced and designed to encourage civic engagement and reflection in relation to the social tensions in a low-income suburb, mostly inhabited by people with immigrant backgrounds. The design of the technological setup in the performance encouraged participation by means of text entries that audience members could share with others. The analysis draws on the corpus of interview and observational data collected, as well as the related text messages that were shared during the performance. We illustrate the different levels at which citizens make sense of societal issues they are concerned about, as well as the audience-citizens' perception of participating in such an artistic experience.

Despite increasing interest, Sustainable HCI has been critiqued for doing too little, and perhaps also at times for doing the wrong things. Still, a field like Human-Computer Interaction should aim at being part of transforming our society into a more sustainable one. But how do we do that, and, what are we aiming for? With this workshop, we propose that HCI should start working with the new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that were formally adopted by the UN in September 2015. How can Sustainable HCI be inspired by, and contribute to these goals? What should we in the field of HCI do more of, and what should we perhaps do less of? In what areas should we form partnerships in order to reach the Sustainable Development Goals and with whom should we partner?

In the global North, there has been a considerable renewed interest for urban agriculture (UA) as a means to re-localize food systems by shortening food supply chains. This can be done by local food initiatives, such as community gardens. This paper is iscussing community gardens in Stockholm. We have choose to look at community gardens under the lens of neoliberal governmentality. Material has been gathered through participatory attendants on meetings, interviews and surveys. The results show that in Stockholm one can to some extent see urban gardening practices as agents of counter-neoliberal urban transformation. But also as an expression of the new rurality were the citizens desire to shorten the food chain and re connect with their food and to create new food regimes.

In this paper we focus on interaction design as the practice of designing interactive and digital products, services, systems and/or environments. Of interest in the area of interaction design is people’s use of designed things, which also makes it relevant to relate interaction design to the social norms present in society, such as gendered norms. We present three different cases in which we have analyzed different aspects of interface design and put a specific focus on interaction design as a carrier of social and gendered norms. The first case concerns a qualitative study of how young girls interact with and present themselves in a photo blog website. The second case is a study of the way that young women entrepreneurs use the functionality of social media to mold an attractive online persona (an invented, or adjusted, character that one wants to put forward). The third case is based on a study of the development of the national youth counseling site in Sweden. By using the concepts of interference and social norms as analytic tools, we exemplify various ways in which social norms, such as gender norms, diversity, power relations, equality, marginalization, etc. are part of interaction design and how the interface design reinforces norms and provides a far from neutral arena. In this paper, gender is highlighted in relation to social norms and values in society and social expectations and hierarchies. On the basis of our findings from the three different cases, we argue that there is a need to unpack how digital design embeds gender norms and to demonstrate how the relationship between norms and design can be critically examined.