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This article explores the concerns and potential benefits of using a backchannel discussion platform in classrooms. Interviews with professors, graphs of usage distributions, and prototype feedback are discussed to assess the usefulness and potential distractions of ClassChat. The article also highlights features and dislikes of the prototype, including the use of AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies. The article concludes with vignettes showcasing the constructive uses and potential distractions of disruptive technologies in the classroom.
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ClassChat Steve Chan Sarita Yardi Sarai Mitnick
Needs Assessment I have needs! • Interviews with 3 SIMS professors • Professors concerned about what is happening on a backchannel – is it productive? Is it sniping? • Should the channel be anonymous? • Can it encourage more classroom discussion and promote legitimate discussion? How can we measure it? • Usefulness depends on class size • Bottom Line: Will it promote or distract from teaching? What about my needs?
Needs Assessment: Graphs of Usage Distributions That’s Zipf’s Law in math gibberish. What does that mean? Help!!!
Second round of interviews with prototype Likes: Zoom into a time period to see chat Clickable calendar Highlight on mouseover Realtime sliding scale Natural language processing Possible use for grading class participation total & average participation lines Dislikes: Drop down menus Overlapping pastel lines, Need to clarify what high and low participation rates mean, Hard to see what any particular user is doing, How can we tell if a student actually understands the material? Prototype feedback Aha a prototype! Feature-fantasy!
ClassChat Screenshot It uses AJAX and Web 2.0 tech! Its 1 million percent Buzzword compliant!
ClassChat Features Martin Wattenberg loads Everything into the client For his visualizations! Martin Wattenberg is my hero! There’s a 4500+ word frequency table on the client side!
“Some database analysts are completely compulsive. They have obsessive compulsive disorder. They’ll normalize to the Nth degree… They have these very complicated tables that require a huge amount of performance…”
Meanwhile, on ClassChat… 3:16:35OCD = normalizing to the nth degree 3:16:55 where n goes to infiniti 3:17:03I'd like to catch a ride with n as it goes to infinity, never been there 3:17:30hitch a ride on the infiniti train? 3:18:32staple myself to an n 3:19:04I've never been to N, only N-1. Everytime I iterate, just as I'm about to get to n, the loop ends
Vignette 1: Essence of Tablehood “What is tablehood? What is the essence of tables?”
ClassChat threads • 14:30:21 Student4 "the essence of tablehood" • 14:30:39 Student23 La Mesa • 14:31:05 Student23 My consulting business will be mesa-hood Joke Connection to other material • 14:30:41 Student4 Any InfoVizzers here? Reminds me of the Steve Few Designing for Tables book! • 14:38:09 Student31 the Bible sez Jesus turned over the tables... Even Jesus didn't like tables!!!!! • 14:39:26 Student4 except the fat table at the Last Supper • 14:40:10 Student23 Well, some tables are good. The Last Supper table had real content and structure. Joke
When is a joke more than a joke? “I think it reinforces the class participation in an odd sort of way. There’s a place to talk, exchange ideas. […] [The professor’s] up there crafting this thought, people have thoughts about that, they’re making jokes. You hear an idea, make a joke of it, you’ve just used something you just got. […] Being able to form a joke means you’ve got it.” “It also ties the group together outside and between classrooms.”
Vignette 2: The crowd goes wild! “I have my examples backwards in the slides!” “See why this is great, I argue against my own slide here. But I think you get the idea that you can see both kinds of arguments. I have captions but maybe there is a different kind of caption and it depends on what kind of caption… And they’re going wild in the chatroom.”
Vignette 3: Pondering the Tortilla Document Engineering Lecture April 10, 2006 8 flour tortillas
Meanwhile, on ClassChat… 15:05:31 recipes... I always get hungry when we talk food... 15:06:34 yeah, seems like a cool thing to model, that is, modeling the cost model of constraints 15:09:46 This just makes me want to go get food. 15:09:51 wondering about 'academic nutritional' value of a given class... 25% of RDA of concepts related to topic on task list... 15:10:24 ...perpetually off topic 15:10:36 very interesting way to appraoch a course - don't you think though that's the grading breakdown or the syllabus? 15:11:09 this is making me hungary 15:11:25 "Is a tortilla a standard unit of measurement?"
Interviews “Some professors think, ‘if you don’t have anything else to do, then you’ll pay attention.’ I feel like it’s almost insecurity, that professors are worried that people aren’t paying attention, they get a little pissy about it.” “I do occasionally feel kind of guilty about it, I should be paying attention to the class. Especially when things ‘get out of hand’ and people start laughing, I think, ‘we shouldn’t be doing this…’” “If profs are afraid of people chatting, they should suggest things to chat about. People would conform, you’d see the numbers change radically in the word-topic ratio.”
Recommendations • The backchannel will vary across different contexts and domains • Teaching styles should take advantage of the social and educational affordances • Chatrooms should enable teacher self-assessment • A backchannel should encourage social interactions and community building
Thank You! Peter Lyman, our advisor. Bob Glushko and the Document Engineering students, our guinea pigs. The entire iSchool community, and especially the backchannel participants.
