Promoting reflection and interpretation in education: curating rich bookmarks as information composition

Abstract

Reflection, interpretation, and curation play key roles in learning, creativity, and problem solving. Reflection means looking back and forward among building blocks constituting a space of ideas, contextualizing with processes including tasks, activities, and one's internal thinking and meditating, and deriving new understandings, known as interpretations. Curation, in the digital age, means searching, gathering, collecting, organizing, designing, reflecting on, and interpreting information. We introduce rich bookmarks, representations of key ideas from documents as navigable links that integrate visual clippings and rich semantic metadata. We support curating rich bookmarks as information composition. In this holistic visual form, curators express relationships among curated elements through implicit visual features, such as spatial position, color, and translucence. We investigated the situated context of a university course, engaging educators in iterative co-design. Rich bookmarks emerged in the process, motivating changes in pedagogy and software. Changes provoked students to collect more novel and varied ideas. They reported that curating rich bookmarks as information composition helped them reflect, transforming prior ideas into new ones. The visual component of rich bookmarks was found to support multiple interpretations; the semantic to support associational exploration of related ideas.