Encouraging Students through Reflective Dialogues: A Teaching Concept Based on DialogueMaps and Its Evaluation

In computing and engineering courses, the students´ personal experience in using technology can be embraced in order to encourage students and to enrich course contents. The own experience can be contrasted with theories, models and concepts from the course literature. In this paper, we describe the teaching concept of reflective dialogues. Reflective dialogues aim at fostering the students´ involvement by using an interactive visualization and presentation tool called Dialogue Maps. The concept has been applied in a master´s program CSCW course. Steps for future development are derived from the results of the first multi-perspective and multimethod evaluations.