TY - JOUR
T1 - Is the unfolding of the group discussion off-pattern? Improving coordination support in educational forums using mobile devices
AU - Gerosa, Marco Aurélio
AU - Filippo, Denise
AU - Pimentel, Mariano
AU - Fuks, Hugo
AU - Lucena, Carlos J.P.
N1 - Funding Information:
The AulaNet project is partially financed by Fundação Padre Leonel Franca and by the Ministry of Science and Technology through its Program Multi-Agent Systems for Software Engineering Project (No. 552068/2002-0). Both Carlos José Pereira de Lucena and Hugo Fuks receive individual grants awarded by the National Research Council and by the Rio de Janeiro State Research Council project entitled “Cientista do Nosso Estado.” This work was also supported by CNPq Project No. 472410/2008-3.
PY - 2010/2
Y1 - 2010/2
N2 - A forum is a valuable tool to foster reflection in an in-depth discussion; however, it forces the course mediator to continually pay close attention in order to coordinate learners' activities. Moreover, monitoring a forum is time consuming given that it is impossible to know in advance when new messages are going to be posted. Additionally, a forum may be inactive for a long period and suddenly receive a burst of messages forcing forum mediators to frequently log on in order to know how the discussion is unfolding to intervene whenever it is necessary. Mediators also need to deal with a large amount of messages to identify off-pattern situations. This work presents a piece of action research that investigates how to improve coordination support in a forum using mobile devices for mitigating mediator's difficulties in following the status of a forum. Based on summarized information extracted from message meta-data, mediators consult visual information summaries on PDAs and receive textual notifications in their mobile phone. This investigation revealed that mediators used the mobile-based coordination support to keep informed on what is taking place within the forum without the need to log on their desktop computer.
AB - A forum is a valuable tool to foster reflection in an in-depth discussion; however, it forces the course mediator to continually pay close attention in order to coordinate learners' activities. Moreover, monitoring a forum is time consuming given that it is impossible to know in advance when new messages are going to be posted. Additionally, a forum may be inactive for a long period and suddenly receive a burst of messages forcing forum mediators to frequently log on in order to know how the discussion is unfolding to intervene whenever it is necessary. Mediators also need to deal with a large amount of messages to identify off-pattern situations. This work presents a piece of action research that investigates how to improve coordination support in a forum using mobile devices for mitigating mediator's difficulties in following the status of a forum. Based on summarized information extracted from message meta-data, mediators consult visual information summaries on PDAs and receive textual notifications in their mobile phone. This investigation revealed that mediators used the mobile-based coordination support to keep informed on what is taking place within the forum without the need to log on their desktop computer.
KW - Computer-mediated communication
KW - Cooperative/collaborative learning
KW - Distance education and telelearning
KW - Interactive learning environments
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U2 - 10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.004
DO - 10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.004
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:71849108490
SN - 0360-1315
VL - 54
SP - 528
EP - 544
JO - Computers and Education
JF - Computers and Education
IS - 2
ER -