Improving Collaboration Experiences and Skills: An Open-ended, User-Driven Self-Tracking Approach for Education

Collaboration is considered an essential skill necessary for work and life in the 21st century. It is hence necessary to support students in developing this skill, whose necessity is amplified by hybrid work and globalization. In this vision, we bring insights and practices from the personal informatics field to the education domain, in order to trigger self-awareness and collective sensemaking. We propose CoSensUs, a physical self-tracking kit for teams of students to track and reflect on their collaboration practices and experiences. We argue for a user-driven, open-ended, playful, and privacy-centered solution, which would track and visualize data on a group level. This original and underexplored focus on group-level tracking also aims to account for the special needs of students, subject to social pressure and potential control in institutional settings. Through this vision, we contribute to the development of essential social and collaboration skills, in an original, playful and inclusive way.