Providing guidance on Backstage, a novel digital backchannel for large class teaching

Many articles in the last couple of years argued that it is necessary to promote the active participation of students in lectures with large audiences. One approach to make students actively participate in a lecture is to use a digital backchannel, i.e. a computer-mediated communication platform that allows students to exchange ideas and opinions, without disrupting the lecturer’s discourse. Though, a digital backchannel, in order to be most helpful for learning, have to address the need for guidance of the users interacting. The article presents Backstage, a digital backchannel for large class lectures, and shows how it provides guidance for its users, i.e. the students but also the lecturer. Structural guidance is provided by aligning the usually incoherent backchannel discourse with the presentation slides that are integrated in the backchannel’s user interface. The alignment is thereby asserted by carefully designed backchannel workflows. The article also discusses the guidance of a student’s substantial involvement in both the frontchannel and the backchannel by means of scripts. Through the interactions of guided individuals a social guidance may emerge, leading to a collectively regulated backchannel

Enhancing the Digital Backchannel Backstage on the Basis of a Formative User Study

Contemporary higher education with its large audiences suffers from passivity of students. Enhancing the classroom with a digital backchannel can contribute to establishing and fostering active participation of and collaboration among students in the lecture. Therefore, we conceived the digital backchannel Backstage specifically tailored for the use in large classes. At an early phase of development we tested its core functionalities in a small-scale user study. The aim of the study was to gain first impressions of its adoption, and also to form a basis for further steps in the conception of Backstage. Regarding adoption we particularly focused on how Backstage influences the participants' questioning behavior, a salient aspect in learning. We observed that during the study much more questions were uttered on Backstage than being asked without backchannel support. Regarding the further development of Backstage we capitalized on the participants' usability feedback. The key of the refinement is the integration of presentation slides in Backstage, which leads to an interesting reconsideration of the user interactions of Backstage

Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science

Academic disciplines which practice in the context of rapid external change face particular problems when seeking to maintain timely, current and relevant teaching programs. In different institutions faculty will tune and update individual component courses while more radical revisions are typically departmental-wide strategic responses to perceived needs. Internationally, the ACM has sought to define curriculum recommendations since the 1960s and recognizes the diversity of the computing disciplines with its 2005 overview volume. The consequent rolling program of revisions is demanding in terms of time and effort, but an inevitable response to the change inherent is our family of specialisms. Preparation for the Computer Curricula 2013 is underway, so it seems appropriate to ask what place Web Science will have in the curriculum landscape. Web Science has been variously described; the most concise definition being the ‘science of decentralized information systems’. Web science is fundamentally interdisciplinary encompassing the study of the technologies and engineering which constitute the Web, alongside emerging associated human, social and organizational practices. Furthermore, to date little teaching of Web Science is at undergraduate level. Some questions emerge - is Web Science a transient artifact? Can Web Science claim a place in the ACM family, Is Web Science an exotic relative with a home elsewhere? This paper discusses the role and place of Web Science in the context of the computing disciplines. It provides an account of work which has been established towards defining an initial curriculum for Web Science with plans for future developments utilizing novel methods to support and elaborate curriculum definition and review. The findings of a desk survey of existing related curriculum recommendations are presented. The paper concludes with recommendations for future activities which may help us determine whether we should expand the notion of computer science

The Faculty Notebook, December 2003

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Augmenting entry: the possibilities for utilizing geo-referenced information to improve mobile calendar applications

Today's mobile communication devices often offer extensive calendar facilities. However the use of these is often very limited through cumbersome interfaces and inappropriate designs for small devices. Prompted by previous work in mobile calendar usability, this paper discusses how augmentation of calendar entries with mobile spatial information could provide potential advantages and improve the usability of an electronic calendar

Developing a MovieBrowser for supporting analysis and browsing of movie content

There is a growing awareness of the importance of system evaluation directly with end-users in realistic environments, and as a result some novel applications have been deployed to the real world and evaluated in trial contexts. While this is certainly a desirable trend to relate a technical system to a real user-oriented perspective, most of these efforts do not involve end-user participation right from the start of the development, but only after deploying it. In this paper we describe our research in designing, deploying and assessing the impact of a web-based tool that incorporates multimedia techniques to support movie analysis and browsing for students of film studies. From the very start and throughout the development we utilize methodologies from usability engineering in order to feed in end-user needs and thus tailoring the underlying technical system to those needs. Starting by capturing real users’ current practices and matching them to the available technical elements of the system, we deployed an initial version of our system to University classes for a semester during which we obtained an extensive amount of rich usage data. We describe the process and some of the findings from this trial

Phenomenography and elearning in art and design

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on how phenomenography was used as part of an extensive study in the under-researched area of elearning in art and design in Higher Education (HE). The purpose of the original study was to identify the perceptions and practices of lecturers in undergraduate art and design disciplines, as well as the unique characteristics and challenges of the sector vis-à-vis elearning. In this paper, references are made to some of the limited studies of elearning and ICT implementation in art and design. This highlights the need for further research and supports the position adopted by this paper that phenomenography is ideally suited for under-researched areas of investigation. The paper refers to some of the research outcomes in the context of reflecting upon and elaborating on the research methodology per se and the challenges and benefits of using phenomenography to investigate elearning in art and design. Consistently with the phenomenographic approach to research, the original study pursued a second-order perspective, i.e. through a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews the research dealt with people’s experiences of aspects of the world. Subsequently, the paper addresses the main tenets and critiques of the research methodology and the overall process it entails. It addresses how phenomenography facilitates the identification, description and categorization of perceptions and practices for the creation of a final outcome space that is manifested as a topology of inter-related categories or groupings of the perceptions and practices identified through semi-structured interviews. The paper elaborates on the main qualitative and quantitative critiques of phenomenography, as well as issues of validity and objectivity. The latter entails dealing with the concept of bracketing and the relationship between the researcher and the process of acquiring and interpreting the data through phenomenographic methods. Finally, this paper concludes that the contribution of phenomenography was invaluable in revealing the spectrum of challenges vis-à-vis elearning in art and design, and in opening up this specific area of study to further research