Interacting with Heterogeneous Information Ecologies: Challenges and Opportunities for Students in Diverse and Distributed Learning Environments

The rise of heterogeneous information leads to questions of how people find, manage, and use information in increasingly fragmented ecologies. The extent to which interactive technologies can be re-designed to help people thrive in these environments should be explored. A two-phase study is proposed to investigate the effects of heterogeneous information on undergraduates' interactions with their information ecologies. Phase one will examine how students interact with the elements of their information ecologies. Phase two will explore how tools can be re-designed to help students more cohesively weave elements of their information ecologies together. An Activity Theoretical approach to these questions will be taken by examining the relationships between people, information, and tools.