Abstract
This paper describes a study of the design of computer-based communication and media space
environments that support highly interactive school-based learning communities. The two basic questions
posed in this research are: (1) How are media space tools used by students in these classrooms, both in
terms of the structure of communications activity and the surrounding physical and temporal constraints of
the environment?; and (2) What are possible explanations for student behaviors and attitudes with regard to
media space tools? The answers to these questions will provide insight for the design of next-generation
media spaces for educational settings.
Keywords:
Media Spaces, Education, Communication, Design
Introduction
Classrooms are like islands, isolated from each other and the world beyond their boundaries. Students
enter an enclosed space and for the next forty to ninety minutes, all interaction is confined to the
individuals contained within the classroom walls. More often than not, the instructional strategies
employed in classrooms also isolate students from one another. Communication is comprised of back-and-
forth exchanges between teacher and student, and only rarely from student to student. This dissertation
studies the deployment of highly-interactive computer-based communication tools designed to break the
boundaries that exist in classrooms, with the goal of elaborating principles for the effective design and
implementation of these environments in school settings.
The high school classrooms involved in this study have been augmented with a suite of highly interactive
communication tools, including electronic mail, Usenet newsgroups, asynchronous multimedia notebooks,
remote screen-sharing, and desktop video teleconferencing. In the CHI community, this combination of
tools has come to be known as a media space [3, 1]. Media spaces enable individuals or
groups to work together, even when they cannot be temporally or spatially co-located. This makes it
possible for students to collaborate both with their distant peers and with experts outside the classroom. It
is argued that classrooms equipped with media space technologies will become the norm over the next
decade, thus making it important to understand student behaviors and attitudes with respect to the use of
these communication technologies.
Two basic questions are asked in this research: (1) How are media space tools used by students in these
classrooms, both in terms of the structure of communications activity and the surrounding physical and
temporal constraints of the environment; and (2) What are possible explanations for student behaviors and
attitudes with regard to media space tools? The answers to these questions are intended to provide
guidance for the design of next-generation implementations of classrooms where highly interactive
communication tools are used to link students as peer collaborators to professional communities, teachers,
and other students both within and beyond the walls of the school.
BACKGROUND TO THIS WORK
At CHI '94 in Boston, a panel entitled "Media Spaces and Their Application in K-12 and College Learning
Communities" [5] presented three different educational projects that employed varying configurations of
media space technology to enhance learning environments. An important result of this panel was the
recognition that the needs of school environments are significantly different than the white collar settings
in which most media space research is conducted. Each of the three projects represented on the panel
employed a different solution (both technological and pedagogical) to the problem of cross-classroom and
beyond-school communication, but there was little empirical evidence to support any of the approaches
presented.
In a search for past research to inform the question of media space application in classrooms, two distinct,
but related, literatures were identified. The first body of research is comprised of studies describing the use
of various communication tools in educational and work settings, primarily in terms of message flow over
time [6]; studies of the classroom as a work environment enabled by communication tools [9]; and studies
of "communicative economies" of workplace activity [8]. The second literature is from communication
research, and it provides several theory-based explanations for why students behave as they do with respect
to mediated communications. The theories that are predicted to provide explanatory power in this project
are: Information richness theory [2]; and social influence theory [4]. Information richness refers to the
extent to which a communication tool allows you to give and receive timely feedback, transmit a variety of
different cues beyond the spoken message (i.e., non-verbal cues), and to tailor messages to your own or
other personal circumstances. Social influence theory refers to the extent to which your use of and
attitudes toward various communication tools are affected by the behaviors and attitudes of those people
who are close to you. A number of other factors related to characteristics of the student population will
also be evaluated for their influence on communication tool use and attitudes towards communication tool
use.
METHODOLOGY
The setting for this research is fourteen science classes at two Chicago-area high schools, composed of six
teachers and approximately 300 students. These students and teachers are all participants in the Learning
Through Collaborative Visualization Project (CoVis) [7]. Each CoVis classroom is equipped with six
workstations connected to the Internet via a broadband ISDN network, and each classroom has three
Cruiser desktop videoconferencing stations [see 3].
This research will be conducted over the course of the 1994-95 school year using a combination of
qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Descriptive information about student communication tool use
will be gathered using an observational technique called shadowing [8, 9]. Computer logging of media
space tool use will provide automated measures of use for those tools, and self-report data will be used to
gauge use of non-computer-mediated tools in the classroom (i.e., handwritten or printed notes, telephone,
and face-to-face communication). Longitudinal surveys will be used to measure independent and
dependent variables for use in testing the theoretical explanations. The dependent variables are: amount of
communication tool use and attitudes towards communication tool usefulness. The independent variables
are: information richness; communication tool expertise; social influence; and a variety of student
characteristics including written and oral communication apprehension, gender, academic self-concept,
experience with computers, and academic level in school.
The data from this research will be analyzed using multiple regression techniques, which will produce a list
of factors that have an impact on how students adopt and come to think about the various components of
the CoVis media space suite. Furthermore, this list should be ordered according to the strength of each
factor's effect on communication tool appropriation, providing a rough guide to potential trouble spots for
implementers. The observational component of this research will provide insight into the everyday
activities of the CoVis classrooms, to aid in interpreting the survey data.
CONCLUSION
This research project proposes to study the communication practices of high school students in an
environment enhanced with media space tools. How do students in such a setting appropriate and utilize
media space technologies that range from electronic mail to desktop videoconferencing? Using a
combination of "bottom-up" observational and "top-down" theoretical approaches, the nature and structure
of communication activity in CoVis classrooms will be analyzed in order to better understand how media-
space tools can be used to support inquiry-based classrooms where the use of highly-interactive
communication tools is key to work and learning. The principal product of this work will be a set of
heuristics to guide future design of media spaces for learning environments.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the support and insight of his doctoral committee in the preparation
of this work: Louis Gomez, Allan Collins, Roy Pea, and Joseph Walther.
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