Diseño experimental del estudio de campo en Puerto Escondido

Based on the prior research in the benefits of workspace awareness (Gutwin & Greenberg, 2000), we hypothesized that providing students with peers’ interaction information would help mitigate the frustration and confusion they experienced while working together. Thus, it would allow students to focus on their tasks at hand rather than being distracted by the ghosting and action conflicts. While another potential approach was to enforce locks on objects and turn taking, teachers preferred to let students learn to respectfully collaborate in a digital environment rather than automatically enforcing a particular behaviour. Thus, we decided to pursue the direction of supporting workspace awareness of collaborators in a shared virtual canvas. Through discussions with teachers and stakeholders within the company, we derived the following requirements to guide our design process.

Balancing Awareness and Distractions

As students’ main objective in the workspace is learning, the awareness cue design should not distract students from their tasks at hand. The free-form canvas could be quite cluttered so the visual design of the awareness cue needs to be noticeable and distinguishable enough while subtle enough to minimize distracting students and cluttering the workspace. Students should also be able to visually associate the cue to the correct object, given that objects may be in various orientations and may only be partially on-screen. The current literature in balancing awareness and distractions advices to

creating a minimalist and abstract awareness cue (Dabbish & Kraut, 2004; Obermayer & Nugent, 2000).

Appropriate for Classrooms

As the target students’ age range spanned across twelve years (from six to seventeen years old), the cue needed to be understandable and appropriate for a wide age range. The design also needed to consider students’ unique work patterns. Our in-class observations revealed that, unlike adults, students were easily distracted and they rapidly and repeatedly switched between working and socializing with other students. The cue should also take teachers’ pedagogy concerns into consideration and not discourage students from contributing to the workspace.

Moreover, the cue needed to be suitable for various study subjects (e.g., language, science, history, and math) as well as activity formats (e.g., individual work, small group, and large group, whole class brainstorming). In one lesson, teachers might transit between different activities and split students into smaller groups and regroup students several times. Students only had a limited amount of time in the workspaces since teachers typically utilized the class time for several activities. Thus, the

awareness design should not require a lot of students’ effort and time. Teachers might also use several software applications and various websites in addition to the shared canvas for one activity.

Applicable to a Wide Variety of Devices

Schools used a wide variety of laptops and tablet devices with different hardware specifications such as processor speeds and display resolutions. The awareness cue design should consider only the basic support and could not assume a certain display resolution, the presence of mouse pointers, or the existence of a hover state. The cue also needed to be efficient enough in terms of data communication and performance to account for the slower low-cost devices.

5.3.1 Conceptual Design

Based on the design requirements, we would like to provide a transient awareness cue to show the current states of objects that were being manipulated. Figure 5-4 illustrates our conceptual design. When John is manipulating an object in the workspace (e.g., text, shape, image, and video), all other students see a visual cue appearing next to the object and showing John’s name, if the object is on their screen (see Figure 5-4C). The visual cue then fades away over time (see Figure 5-4D).

Showing identity information of the student manipulating the object would address the ghosting problem and let students know who is acting on the object. Moreover, as John’s cue appears next to an object, it signals to other students that the object is busy and John is working with it. This

information could help students to decide if they should still interact with it. Students may know that their action does not conflict with what John is doing based on their split of tasks. Alternatively, students may know that they should refrain from interacting with the object to avoid conflicting actions. Thus, we expected that providing the identity information would address the action conflict problem.

Students’ active selection and interaction with an object would trigger the awareness cue, and the cue conveys the students’ identity and location in the workspace. The real-time updates of the object state would give a sense of the current actions done by the student. Since we used students’

selections, rather than hovering, this approach also worked for the devices that did not have mouse pointers. Moreover, if an area already had many awareness cues, students could coordinate their space usage and find a less crowded space to work. This could further prevent student conflicts. The cue could also help to convey students’ attention. It could be used by teachers to know where students were currently paying attention to, and this could inform teachers’ subsequent teaching activities.