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Using student-generated learning materials in higher education is promoted as a way to enhance active learning, but the effectiveness of this pedagogical approach depends on student acceptance and perceived value. This study investigates how Master’s-level students in a human–computer interaction course view creating and using such student-generated materials. Data from pre- and post-course surveys (n = 26 and 25) and interviews (n = 5) show initial reservations about the pedagogical approach. However, by the end of the course, attitudes had shifted positively across all measures, with students emphasising increased trust, motivation, and recognition of the learning benefits of creating learning materials. Follow-up interviews highlighted the importance of classroom discussion for strengthening knowledge and easing doubts. The findings suggest that student-generated materials can enhance engagement and learning when integrated into a scaffolded, discussion-rich course environment that provides opportunities to address potential quality concerns.

Handovers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have so far been treated as a matter of giving control of technology from one to another actor, for example in the handovers of car control in semi-autonomous driving, digital object handoffs in VR, use of smart technology for information sharing, or simply the handovers of app control from mobile phones to laptops. However, handovers are a huge area of HCI research, since it is an essential component of everyday work practices in numerous work domains, with examples such as handovers of information between work shifts, across departments, or even across organizations. In this conceptual paper, we present prior research on handovers in general, analyze specifically handovers’ socio-technical characteristics, and discuss handovers in various work domains and their cross-domain characteristics. Based on the purpose of handovers, we propose a novel HCI research agenda of Generative AI supported handovers across various work domains. 

Digitalization and emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, and drones, are predicted to reshape airport operations worldwide, with the potential to enhance efficiency, safety, and the overall experience for passengers and staff. This study investigates the perspectives of key airport stakeholders, including ground staff, airport managers, technical managers, and labor unions, on adopting these technologies. By employing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the research examines how stakeholders perceive these innovations’ usefulness and ease of use. Based on 27 semi-structured interviews across 14 Swedish airports, the findings highlight opportunities for automation to streamline processes like luggage handling, enhance operational efficiency, and improve safety through AI and autonomous systems. However, challenges such as high implementation costs, infrastructure compatibility issues, and the risk of job displacement remain critical. This paper underscores the importance of addressing technological and human factors to ensure the sustainable integration of these technologies in airport operations.

This paper contributes to the long-ongoing research on control room work by exploring the work practices of traffic controllers and information officers in the domain of train traffic. This study examines how distributed, socially, spatially, and temporally dynamic work activities are enacted within train traffic control rooms. By exploring the situated knowledge of traffic controllers and information officers, we identify the challenge of maintaining remote engagement with, and attachment to, places beyond the control room. By employing a workplace study approach, the paper illustrates how the workers manage the demands of being distributed and dependent on artefacts, as well as their acquired ability to ‘see’ the rail, while physically present elsewhere. We introduce the concept of ‘sense of place’ to better understand the remote aspects of work and how workers develop and maintain their engagement with railway operations in locations far from their own. To conceptualise this phenomenon, we introduce a new term—remote situatedness. This concept integrates cognitive and technological aspects of enhanced seeing with the sense of place, capturing professionals’ ability to engage with distant locations. Our findings highlight three key examples: Mutually enacted situated seeing, Mediated sense of place, and Failed sense of place. These illustrate how remote situatedness is enacted, technologically mediated, and challenged. In conclusion, the paper highlights the need to put the workers’ engagement with their material and social environment at the core of control room research and suggests future research directions for studying work practices from a holistic perspective.

The railway sector has recently seen an increased interest in automation, and advances in onboard monitoring technologies, driver-assisting systems, and automatic train operations (ATO) promise improvements in safety, punctuality, and operational efficiency (Jansson et al., 2023; Singh et al., 2021). Given this interest in automated systems, it is essential to better understand the role of the train driver to determine which train driving tasks can be safely replaced by technology, and which cannot (Jansson et al., 2023).

Train driving is often described as a predominantly visual task, structured by compliance with signalling systems and formal operating protocols (Luke et al., 2006). While these are important components of the train driver's role, this paper aims to explore the role of situated and embodied knowledge in the practice of train driving.

Studying work “in the wild”, as it naturally unfolds, has provided many examples of how knowledge and expertise is not internal to the individual’s mind but in fact distributed and embodied in the social and material environment in which the human is engaging with the world (e.g., Clark, 1997; Gallagher, 2005; Hutchins, 1995; Suchman, 1987). In the context of railway work, traffic controllers have been shown to develop a sense of meaning for places beyond their physical reach from the control room, a phenomenon described as “remote situatedness” (Cort & Lindblom, 2025). This ability is fundamental to the traffic controllers’ capacity to make sense of and appropriately handle situations occurring along the railway. In a similar manner, Willems (2018) demonstrates how train dispatchers develop a bodily and sensory engagement with the railway, which is foundational to their work practices and the responsiveness needed for safe and effective coordination of traffic. These are a few instances where the situated and embodied knowledge, often tacit and difficult for workers to articulate, have been demonstrated to be essential for the successful execution of work practices. This type of knowledge suggests that knowing cannot be separated from doing, and that knowledge resides in the situated, embodied, and material practices of work (Gherardi, 2009). Despite its critical role in work practices, situated and embodied knowledge remains surprisingly underexplored in many professional settings—train driving being one of them (c.f., Andreasson et al., 2019).

The findings presented here are based on selected material from a collection of workplace studies within the context of Swedish operational train traffic, conducted over a period of 2,5 years. As workplace studies make use of ethnographic methods as tools of inquiry, they are a prominent method for making aspects of work practices visible (Szymanski & Whalen, 2011). 13 train drivers participated, they all worked for Sweden’s largest railway undertaking for passenger trains, and had 2-30 years of experience. The primary method for data collection was participatory observations of work as it was carried out by train drivers in the locomotive, along with contextual interviews. Accordingly, the main data sources were field notes from the observation sessions and interview transcripts. The analysis was inspired by theories of situated, distributed, and embodied cognition (Gallagher, 2005; Hutchins, 1995; Suchman, 1987), which are well-suited for studying dynamic, time-pressured work (Barsalou et al., 2003; Rogers & Marshall, 2017), and followed the systematic process of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Below, I have selected a few passages to exemplify the role of situated and embodied practices of train driving.

The locomotive is a noisy environment filled with the constant hum of engines, vibrations, and the rhythmic sounds of the wheels against the tracks. The cab is small and enclosed with limited space for movement, placing the driver close to controls, displays, and communication devices. Early on in the study, a driver compared train driving to using a sewing machine: “you only need to step on the gas”. This suggests that operating the train is a simple, almost automatic task; however, it soon became apparent that this suggested simplicity was misleading and that drivers, in fact, are in a constant state of attunement with the train and its surrounding environment. This was evident in a moment during fieldwork when a driver suddenly asked: “Can you hear that? The brakes... On the left side... That’s not right.” To me, as a novice in this setting, the sounds was just indistinct noise, but the experienced driver was sensitised to what needed attention. Next time the train came to a full stop, he provided some type of maintenance to the braking system, then listened carefully again as the journey continued and concluded, “that’s much better.”

Besides being attuned to the train and its equipment, another recurring theme is how drivers display a bodily sense of the railway and subtle changes in track conditions. Several drivers described how they could “feel” that the tracks were slippery (most likely due to fallen leaves). “The grip feels different. I can’t explain it. It is just different”, one driver tried to explain. Clearly, these sensations are difficult to verbalise but they seem to be immediately recognisable to experienced drivers, who instinctively adjust their driving in response. “If something is wrong, you just know it. I can feel it”, another driver explained, insinuating that it is a bodily familiarity that enables them to detect irregularities through sound, feel, and rhythm.

Theoretically, these examples support the idea that thinking and knowing are not confined to the brain but are distributed throughout the sensorimotor system and shaped by ongoing engagement with the physical world (Gallagher, 2005; Hutchins, 1995). For the train driver, the locomotive is not just a machine to be operated but an extension of the driver’s body. The ability to sense when something is “off” reflects this embodied form of knowledge, which enables drivers to anticipate and respond to emerging situations in a proactive manner. This demonstrates situated and embodied practices where the driver’s body and senses are used as instruments for detecting irregularities, often before any technical warnings appear. In contrast, automated systems rely on discrete thresholds, predefined input parameters, and explicit signal logic. While such systems are effective in rule-based environments, they lack the qualitative understanding that characterises human performance (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986), as shown in the empirical examples above. By making this type of cognition visible, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the unique contributions human workers bring to the increasingly automated railway environment.

In this paper, we promote and motivate research on user experience (UX) in the domain of rail, more specifically for the workers engaged in the daily operational parts of executing train traffic. UX aspects have often been overlooked in the design and use of technology within the workplace, particularly in safety-critical work domains. Here, we provide an overview of current UX research at work and outline a roadmap with seven facets for future research within the domain of operational train traffic that is in alignment with the need for further investigation into UX at work. We hope future research will contribute to a deeper understanding of how positive experience at work provides additional means of enhancing engagement and improving safety management in workplaces in general and for the work in operational train traffic specifically.

This paper explores the complex and time-critical work practices within operational train traffic in Sweden by reporting on an incident causing an infrastructure breakdown and large traffic disruptions. Based on a workplace study approach, we report on how the control room workers – train traffic controllers and information officers – grasp, make sense of, and handle the consequences of the incident as it unfolds in realtime. We portray how the workers develop and acquire a sense of place in relation to the incident’s severity which is essential for successfully handling the situation. By introducing the ‘sense of place’ concept originally derived from the field of natural resources to the domain of operational train traffic, we provide a deepened understanding of the challenges characterising remote control work from a safety-critical socio-technical systems perspective. Finally, reflections on the application of the ‘sense of place’ concept, safety aspects and directions for future research are provided.

Increased use of robotization, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) highlights the need for theory development of the digital work environment since such technologies are likely to significantly alter or even totally change human work practices. This paper focuses on how these technologies influence people’s digital work engagement. In an ongoing project, we study how support from these technologies changes the socio-technical work dynamics and how work engagement can be facilitated in such digital workplaces. The project aims to develop a digital work engagement framework based on input across multiple work domains. The present paper reports on an initial characterization of digital work engagement and presents a synthesis of findings from the first iteration of the envisioned framework. Finally, a discussion on the opportunities and challenges of enabling technologies for the future of work practices is provided.

Group work is frequently used in higher education to prepare students for their future work roles and to foster the development of interpersonal and social skills. Such skills may be of particular importance when solving complex problems, in study situations as well as in real life. However, students often report on problems in group work and teachers face difficulties in making fair assessments of the individuals’ contribution. This paper emphasizes the development of openness as an essential team skill for enabling successful group work, to counteract free-riding, and to facilitate teachers in making fair assessments. With the use of a questionnaire for peer assessments of team skills, we measured openness in 23 groups from two different courses—one with students who know each other well and one with students who just met. In a comparison of the two student groups, we conclude that students with a history of working together exhibited more openness, thus speaking in favor of group work running over a longer period of time. We consider the operationalization of the concept of openness as the main contribution here, in addition to the empirical result.

Ihärdighet, eller ”grit”, är en egenskap som beskriver individers förmåga att behålla motivation i strävan mot ett långsiktigt mål och trots motgångar (Duckworth mfl., 2007). Personer med grit har ofta också ett ”growth mindset” vilket innebär en tilltro till sig själv och en inställning att lärande är en ständigt pågående process. Motsatsen, ett statiskt mindset, innebär att individen ser motstånd och misslyckanden som bevis på oförmåga (Dweck, 2017). Processen för lärande kommer då i skymundan och motgångar ses som ett definitivt mått på individens kompetens och värde. I klassrummet är det högst troligt att vi möter både studenter med ett growth mindset och de utan. De sistnämnda har sannolikt en tendens att ge upp när de stöter på utmaningar i utbildningen. Ur ett högskolepedagogiskt perspektiv är det relevant att fråga oss vad vi som lärare kan göra för att stötta studenterna i att utveckla ett growth mindset och bidra till ökad ihärdighet. Vinsten med detta skulle ligga i färre avhopp på kurser och utbildningsprogram samt i en större samhällelig utveckling när allt fler studenter lyckas använda sin fulla potential utan att hämmas av ett statiskt mindset.

För att undersöka vad lärare kan göra för att stötta studenternas utveckling av ett growth mindset, och därmed också deras ihärdighet, genomfördes gruppintervjuer med studenter vid Uppsala universitet. Totalt genomfördes fyra stycken, 30 minuter långa, gruppintervjuer med totalt 13 deltagare. Intervjufrågorna kretsade kring utveckling av ihärdighet med fokus på studenternas erfarenheter av undervisning och vad de uppfattar som stöttande respektive begränsande när de kommer till att upprätthålla motivation över tid. Med en tematisk analys identifierades följande tre teman: Positiv attityd, Lärande som en process, och Att skapa kontext. Mer konkret handlar det om att som lärare (1) ha en positiv attityd till sitt ämne samt att visa tilltro till studenternas möjlighet att lära, (2) att se studenternas individuella inlärningskurvor och i viss mån anpassa undervisningen därefter, samt att (3) sätta ämnet och undervisningen i en större kontext för att synliggöra hur den aktuella kursen relaterar till utbildningsämnet samt till studenternas framtida yrkesutövanden. De aspekter som studenterna lyfter kan tyckas grundläggande men de är centrala för att förmedla vikten av att anstränga sig och vinsten av att inte ge upp. Om vi genom att inkludera små medel som dessa i vår undervisning kan öka studenternas tro på sina möjligheter att lära har vi inget att förlora men desto mer att vinna.

Referenser:Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101.

Dweck, C. S. (2017). Mindset: du blir vad du tänker. Natur & kultur.