Making sense of bits and pieces: A sensemaking tool for informal workplace learning

Abstract

Sensemaking at the workplace and in educational contexts has been extensively studied for decades. Interestingly, making sense out of the own wealth of learning experiences at the workplace has been widely ignored. To tackle this issue, we have implemented a novel sensemaking interface for healthcare professionals to support learning at the workplace. The proposed prototype supports remembering of informal experiences from episodic memory followed by sensemaking in semantic memory. Results from an initial study conducted as part of an iterative co-design process reveal the prototype is being perceived as useful and supportive for informal sensemaking by study participants from the healthcare domain. Furthermore, we find first evidence that re-evaluation of collected information is a potentially necessary process that needs further exploration to fully understand and support sensemaking of informal learning experiences. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.