Messages Passed Through

As technology pervades our lives in an increasingly rich ecosystem of digital devices, they can capture huge amounts of long-term personal data. A core theme of my research has been to create systems and interfaces that enable people to harness and control that data and its use. This talk will share key insights from a series of case studies from that work and plans to build upon these. The first case studies explored how to harness data from wearables, such as smart watches, for personal informatics interfaces that help us gain insights about ourselves over the long term, for analysis of a large dataset (over 140,000 people) and for Virtual Reality games for exercise. The second set of case studies are from formal education settings where personal data interfaces, called Open Learner Models (OLMs), can harness learning data. I will share key insights that have emerged for a research agenda: OLMs for life-wide learning; the nature of the different interfaces needed for fast, versus slow and considered, thinking; communicating uncertainty; scaffolding people to really learn about themselves from their multimodal data; and how these link to urgent challenges of education in an age of AI, fake news and truth decay.