Product Discovery Report for a Visual Data Management System
WCER Working Paper No. 2018-15
Caktus Group
December 2018, 78 pp.
ABSTRACT: This report is a companion piece to WCER working paper 2018-14, “A Cyberinfrastructure for Design-Based Research: A Collaborative Design Project Proposal.” That paper stressed that the educational research community would be well served by a mutually created cyberinfrastructure that encourages and supports engagement by multiple design-based researchers in working toward answers to important theory-driven research questions, moving the field toward a “bigger science” approach. This current report, prepared by the Caktus Group for the University of North Carolina School of Education, outlines a process by which a single digital tool specific to design-based research (DBR) methodologies could be built. The goal in commissioning this report was to discover the most effective and suitable system to recording and visually representing learning environment workflows, building searchable collections of well-catalogued assets, and securely sharing data and analysis with the community of peers. With that goal in mind, the Caktus Group, in collaboration with Dr. Sharon Derry, built and administered a survey to better understand the needs of the DBR community. Following the survey, and informed by its results, the Caktus Group facilitated a discovery workshop to identify design and technical requirements for the system, outline its desired architecture, and gather information for an estimate of the cost of building such a system. This report proposes a full-scale design for a workflow visualization system to support design-based research in the learning sciences. It builds on participant experiences with prototypes and incorporates outcomes of survey research and a two-day intensive design workshop led by Caktus Group that took place on July 31–August 1, 2017, in Durham, NC. The work was conducted under direction of Sharon Derry. Invited participants in the workshop were Janice Anderson, Kelly Barber-Lester, Lana Minshew (all from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Vanessa Svihla (University of New Mexico).
keywords: design-based research, cyberinfrastructure, educational research
