Recent research on the impact of new communication and
information technologies (e.g., the Pew Internet & American Life project
reports) stress the transformation that new forms of mediated interactions are
having on the ways that teenagers, especially, participate and make sense of
different aspects of their lives, including education. The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) project is an
NSF-funded research program that investigates the innovative use of online
collaborative environments to support effective K-12 mathematics learning. The
ethnographic case study presented here explores the sustained interactions of
five virtual teams of teenagers distributed across the
The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) project investigates the innovative use of online collaborative environments to support effective K-12 mathematics learning. VMT brings together an interdisciplinary team representing diverse approaches to research and development. The ethnographic case study discussed here was designed to explore how virtual teams of teenagers engaged in a series of mathematical problem solving sessions online. Our ethnomethodological analysis is aimed at uncovering the “member methods” displayed and developed by these teams in their collective sense-making. It specifically investigates the deictic referencing by the participants as they collaboratively construct mathematical objects and reason about them.
Our analysis is conducted within a theoretical framework that focuses attention on the small-group unit of analysis as the site of problem-solving agency. The analysis results in the identification of interactive methods of “doing mathematics” as a group. This, in turn, suggests mechanisms that sustain individual engagement and drive community evolution. The approach of conversation analysis that we build upon and adapt is based on ethnomethodology, which involves the study of the member methods that co-participants use to accomplish what they are doing. We are interested in working out a systematics of the methods that are used by students in online math chats, including the methods used for making sense of mathematical objects and referencing them in computer-supported interactions. Particular attention is given to the way in which mathematical objects are co-constructed and used within problem-solving interactions and how graphical and referencing tools in the software environment facilitate working with these conceptual objects.
The analyses in this study are based on electronic recordings (chat transcripts and recordings of the evolution of the shared whiteboard) of 5 teams of secondary students physically distributed across the U.S, engaged in 18 online problem-solving events spread across 4 different consecutive sessions. Students were selected by their teachers based on an open invitation offered online. The sessions took place during a time span of two weeks and lasted for an average of approximately 60 minutes each. The teams started from a basic mathematical situation, and were given the freedom to engage in problem invention and negotiation of the problems they were interested in exploring. Adult facilitators provided general guidance on the task and assisted the participants with the use of the online collaboration environment, but provided no actual group moderation for the problem-solving task.
The collaboration environment used in this study, ConcertChat, contains a text-based chat and shared whiteboard tools. The system also allows the creation of graphical links from a message to another message or to objects on the shared whiteboard. Chat interactions tend to give rise to a number of sense-making challenges, including those related to the disambiguation of references caused largely by the unpredictable order of postings. Participants deal with such interactional challenges in ways that display their situated understanding of the context and dynamism of their interactions. Exploratory quantitative analysis of the data collected for this study indicate that the participating students made extensive use of the referencing supports provided by ConcertChat throughout all sessions. However, the amount of use of the referencing tools showed great variability across teams and sessions due to various factors such as changes in group composition (new team members joining), the nature/complexity of the task, and the effort involved in learning how to use this novel system function. Although facilitators modeled the use of the referencing tools for students, the total number of message-to-message references made by the facilitator did not appear to be correlated with the total number of references made by the students. On the other hand, the total number of message-to-message references made by the group as a whole was found to be related to the size of the group which might indicate that the participants perceived a greater need to utilize this system function when the complexity of the interactions increased. We also observed that participants used the message-to-message referencing tool to link nearby messages most of the time.
We have begun to analyze the recorded interactions captured through ConcertChat. Our findings indicate how participants developed and used different methods to reference diverse elements of their interactions. Our initial ethnomethodological analysis has identified four important and distinguishable referencing methods that participants developed and used:
· Referencing aimed at selecting intended recipients of chat postings,
· Referencing indicating a graphical object in the whiteboard,
· Referencing a prior posting for purposes of elaboration, and
· Referencing distant conversation material in order to re-contextualize it.
These “member methods” represent part of the situated culture of online collaborative problem-solving and allow us to better understand the dynamics of such environments. Further analysis will elaborate on these and other relevant member methods and explore their role in the collaborative sense-making.
This research contributes to the understanding of how small groups of students construct their interactions in online environments. Understanding how learners construct their shared meanings and develop new mechanisms of participation to turn technological possibilities into practical means will allow researchers and designers to better support effective collaborative learning experiences that take advantage of innovative forms of interaction.