Deixis in synchronous CSCL systems. A collection of socio-technical patterns.

International audienceThere is a growing interest in synchronous CSCL systems that combine a communication space with a task space for supporting knowledge building by distributed or co-located small groups of learners. In that context, in which collaborative learning processes are scattered above two distinct spaces, deictic references to the objects in both spaces, the time of learners' actions, and the identity of participants are very important. This paper describes a structured collection of high-level patterns whose purpose is to catalog and document design knowledge about the mechanisms, resources and practices for deictic referencing

How online small groups co-construct mathematical artifacts to do collaborative problem solving

Developing pedagogies and instructional tools to support learning math with understanding is a major goal in math education. A common theme among various characterizations of mathematical understanding involves constructing relations among mathematical facts, procedures, and ideas encapsulated in graphical and symbolic artifacts. Discourse is key for enabling students to realize such connections among seemingly unrelated mathematical artifacts. Analysis of mathematical discourse on a moment-to-moment basis is needed to understand the potential of small-group collaboration and online communication tools to support learning math with understanding.This dissertation investigates interactional practices enacted by virtual teams of secondary students as they co-construct mathematical artifacts in an online environment with multiple interaction spaces including text-chat, whiteboard, and wiki components. The findings of the dissertation arrived at through ethnomethodologically-informed case studies of online sessions are organized along three dimensions: (a) Mathematical Affordances: Whiteboard and chat spaces allow teams to co-construct multiple realizations of relevant mathematical artifacts. Contributions remain persistentlyavailable for subsequent manipulation and reference in the shared visual field. The persistence of contributions facilitates the management of multiple threads of activities across dual media. The sequence of actions that lead to the construction and modification of shared inscriptions makes the visual reasoning process visible.(b) Coordination Methods: Team members achieve a sense of sequential organization across dual media through temporal coordination of their chat postings and drawings. Groups enact referential uses of available features to allocate their attention to specific objects in the shared visual field and to associate them with locally defined terminology. Drawings and text-messages are used together as semiotic resources in mutually elaborating ways.(c) Group Understanding: Teams develop shared mathematical understanding through joint recognition of connections among narrative, graphical and symbolic realizations of the mathematical artifacts that they have co-constructed to address their shared task. The interactional organization of the co-construction work establishes an indexical ground as support for the creation and maintenance of a shared problem space for the group. Each new contribution is made sense of in relation to this persistently available and shared indexical ground, which evolves sequentially as new contributions modify the sense of previous contributions.Ph.D., Information Science and Technology -- Drexel University, 200

Promoting Andean children's learning of science through cultural and digital tools

Conference Theme: To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time, and scaleIn Peru, there is a large achievement gap in rural schools. In order to overcome this problem, the study aims to design environments that enhance science learning through the integration of ICT with cultural artifacts, respecting the Andean culture and empower rural children to pursue lifelong learning. This investigation employs the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework, and the Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology using an iterative process of design, implementation and evaluation of the innovative practice.published_or_final_versio

Annotations of maps in collaborative work at a distance

This thesis inquires how map annotations can be used to sustain remote collaboration. Maps condense the interplay of space and communication, solving linguistic references by linking conversational content to the actual places to which it refers. This is a mechanism people are accustomed to. When we are face-to-face, we can point to things around us. However, at a distance, we need to recreate a context that can help disambiguate what we mean. A map can help recreate this context. However other technological solutions are required to allow deictic gestures over a shared map when collaborators are not co-located. This mechanism is here termed Explicit Referencing. Several systems that allow sharing maps annotations are reviewed critically. A taxonomy is then proposed to compare their features. Two filed experiments were conducted to investigate the production of collaborative annotations of maps with mobile devices, looking for the reasons why people might want to produce these notes and how they might do so. Both studies led to very disappointing results. The reasons for this failure are attributed to the lack of a critical mass of users (social network), the lack of useful content, and limited social awareness. More importantly, the study identified a compelling effect of the way messages were organized in the tested application, which caused participants to refrain from engaging in content-driven explorations and synchronous discussions. This last qualitative observation was refined in a controlled experiment where remote participants had to solve a problem collaboratively, using chat tools that differed in the way a user could relate an utterance to a shared map. Results indicated that team performance is improved by the Explicit Referencing mechanisms. However, when this is implemented in a way that is detrimental to the linearity of the conversation, resulting in the visual dispersion or scattering of messages, its use has negative consequences for collaborative work at a distance. Additionally, an analysis of the eye movements of the participants over the map helped to ascertain the interplay of deixis and gaze in collaboration. A primary relation was found between the pair's recurrence of eye movements and their task performance. Finally, this thesis presents an algorithm that detects misunderstandings in collaborative work at a distance. It analyses the movements of collaborators' eyes over the shared map, their utterances containing references to this workspace, and the availability of "remote" deictic gestures. The algorithm associates the distance between the gazes of the emitter and gazes of the receiver of a message with the probability that the recipient did not understand the message

Collaborative mind mapping to support online discussion in teacher education

Mind maps that combine text, images, colour and layout elements, have been widely used in classroom teaching to improve retention, knowledge organization and conceptual understanding. Furthermore, studies have shown the advantages of using mind-maps to facilitate collaborative learning. However, there are gaps in the literature regarding the use and study of collaborative mind-mapping in online learning settings. This integrated-article dissertation explores the implementation of online collaborative mind mapping activities in a mathematics teacher education program at a Canadian university. The studies were developed with participants enrolled in three different courses where at least two of the online activities used collaborative mind mapping for knowledge construction. Rather than prove the efficacy of a visual tool, as other studies have, this research provides an understanding of how the learning and knowledge construction process occurs when student interact with one another using a mind mapping tool. The set of articles contained in this dissertation answers to the questions: (1) What are the roles that collaborative mind mapping plays in the participants’ education as mathematics teachers? (2) What are the differences between student interaction in threaded forums and mind-maps? (3) How does online collaborative mind mapping enhance the aspects of engagement, representation, and expression in teacher education? (4) How can grounded theory methods be developed with sources of online multimodal data such as online mind mapping? (5) How do students interact and construct knowledge when they engage in online collaborative mind mapping? The research view is qualitative and uses a variety of descriptive case study, content analysis, and constructivist grounded theory methods. This dissertation provides insights into online collaborative knowledge construction when using collaborative mind-mapping and adds to the existing literature on online learning, especially concerning the use of visual, collaborative tools. It contains guidelines and suggestions to implement this type of learning experiences in other courses and/or other education levels

Dual Eye-Tracking Methods for the Study of Remote Collaborative Problem Solving

Applied eye-tracking has been extensively used for the study of psychological processes. More recently, some researchers have used this technique to study the interaction between people by tracking and analyzing eye-movements of two persons synchronously. However, this is generally accomplished by observing people in simple controlled settings. In this thesis, we use a similar methodology, dual eye-tracking, to study people in more natural, semantically richer, tasks with the aim of identifying dual eye-movement patterns which reflect collaborative processes. Eye-tracking, and more globally eye-movements analyses, is a complex domain involving several methodological issues, which have not yet been satisfactorily solved. This work is also an attempt to offer solutions to several of these issues. The first part of this thesis is dedicated to the improvement of the methodology of eye-tracking data analysis. We present several developments pertaining to the general methodology of eye-tracking. More specifically, we identify problems and offer solutions to the following aspects: fixation identification, systematic position errors correction and hit detection. We also tackle more specific questions concerning the method dual eye-tracking. We present issues that arise in dual eye-tracking data collection and analysis and propose some solutions. On the technical side, we deal with the question of the synchronous recording of two streams of eye-movements and on the analytical side, we extend gaze cross-recurrence, a measure of eye-movements coupling, to complex realistic collaborative tasks. The second part is devoted to experimental studies of collaboration through the use of dual eye-tracking methods. We first present four exploratory studies which allowed us to set up the stage by identifying interesting phenomena and experimental difficulties. The main results of these experiments revolve around the relationship between gaze and speech. In these respects, we extended some results found in the literature to more natural settings and we developed a computational model to make actual predictions about dialogue and visual references. Finally, the main study of this thesis is about computer program understanding. This study is composed of two experiments: a solo programming experiment, from which we identified gaze patterns of a single programmer and a pair-programming task in which we explored how gaze patterns during program comprehension are affected by collaboration

Supporting Participation Through Live Media

Throughout the past century, live media has grown to play a significant role in how we experience the world. Live media connects people in real-time with events happening around the world and helps people establish shared social realities. Recent live forms enabled by the internet are shifting the paradigm away from just passively watching to actively participating. This has significant implications for how we engage in critical aspects of society, including education, politics, work, play, and everyday life. In this work, we focus on understanding emerging live media phenomena and designing new forms to support participation. We do this through two core approaches: qualitative investigations and live media probes. To build an understanding of practice and communities, we conduct qualitative investigations of two situated live media contexts: the video game live streaming site Twitch and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Using Marshall McLuhan’s concept of hot and cool media, we explore how live streaming as a medium affords building these online communities through participation in shared experiences. Building on these findings, we design, deploy, and evaluate live media probes. These probes implement new forms of live media, with the goal of eliciting new forms of live experience and participation. We first design Rivulet, a live media probe supporting new participatory modalities and multiple simultaneous live streams. Through our investigation of Rivulet, we discover how, by incorporating new modalities, we can support higher-impact forms of participation in live experiences. Next, we design Collaborative Live Media Curation (CLMC), a new live media form enabling the collaborative real-time assemblage of web media including text, images, sketch, and live video and audio. We deploy LiveMâché, a CLMC probe, in four situated online learning contexts to support participatory learning activities. We find that CLMC supports new forms of real-time conversational grounding and participation. In conclusion, we summarize and discuss our findings and discuss future directions for live media research

Towards a framework for the analysis of CSCL (computer supported co-operative learning) discourse

The thesis aims to develop a possible description of electronic discourse in CSCL\ud through a data-driven description of the linguistic behaviour and discourse strategies of 4\ud groups of postgraduate students engaged in an asynchronous CSCL task during-February\ud 2000 and February 2001.\ud The study develops an analytic framework for the coding of the messages. The\ud framework consists of three levels, with a default inheritance relationship between these\ud levels. The top level concerns the aim of the messages, identified within the broad\ud context of Levinson's Activity Type. The mid-level consists of the traditional\ud conversational analysis categories, with some minor adaptations to the CMC medium.\ud The third level is based on a neo-Gricean approach to utterance interpretation, with\ud special attention to Levinson's (2000) theory of generalised conversational implicature.\ud The analysis was conducted through intensive reading of the coded data to identify\ud categories of speaker behaviour. The categories were then collated to address the research\ud question. 19 categories were identified, covering 4 aspects of discourse behaviour.\ud As an additional test of the discourse analysis framework, the coded output was used as\ud data for a separate theory-driven question. The question was to seek evidence of\ud behaviour typical of the iterative dialogue that characterises Laurillard's (2002) model of\ud learning through conversational dialogue.\ud The research study found that the majority of the discourse categories identified by the\ud framework are valid, although some need to be refined. In particular, 4 basic message\ud structure types, and distinctive patterns in the use of indirect and direct forms of\ud expression are clearly identified in this data. There are also clear indicators of strategies\ud used to maintain cohesion and coherence. In the test case, the coded data was used to\ud identify six types of critical learning behaviour that are broadly consistent with\ud Laurillard's model of learning