What was shared? As the samples show, on the surface (from an aerial view) these materials are very
similar to those used with the school students. Again, small diagrams, photographs and line drawings are mixed with pieces of text which varied in length from single words to paragraphs. The main difference between the two learning situations was that the students in the English classes often used book texts - for instance the novel or play they were studying - in addition to shared printed materials.
What did participants do with the shared material? Surprisingly, although the teaching and learning
context was different, the majority of the activities could be classified under the same headings as those of the school students. Of almost 80 activities, those, such as homework assignments, which involved purely individual work, were discarded. Table 5.1 shows how the remaining 56 activities fitted into the categories derived from the study of school students.
Category Number o f occurrences
Comments
Order 3 Includes one graphical activity - completing a timeline Match 10 Includes matching items from lists, matching pictures to text.
Label 3 Includes labelling items in room, parts o f body. Often labels selected from a given list. Caption 6 Most frequently writing text to fit small cartoon stories.
Fill-in-gap 12 Frequently used for grammar exercises, for example, inserting correct form o f verb. Fill-in-table 7 Includes marking items true and 61se, for example, to test comprehension.
Mark 6 Mainly marking words in a certain category (past tense verbs, for instance) or underlining difficult vocabulary.
Other activities 9 Includes 2 that involved walking around the room. 3 pair activities where only one partner knew the answer and concealed material from the other. 5 where the item that was the focus was simply viewed and all the interaction was oral. (1 overlap - total = 9, not 10)
Table 5.1: Spanish language learning tasks
How was the work organised? As stated, students usually worked in pairs. They did not always work
with the same person and the teacher organised the activities to ensure that partners changed. Pairs sat together, usually facing the same way. Usually individual students had their own copies of materials used. Sometimes the two members of the pair had a different sheet of paper. In this case, the sharing only took place at the end of the activity, by showing or swapping papers.
The teacher alternated between keeping an eye on all the pairs, visiting pairs in turn to join in or answer questions and writing additional information or vocabulary on the whiteboard in the room. This was also, of course, shared material.
What is the motivation for these activities? During the follow-up interview, the teacher explained why
such activities should be group endeavours. The strongest reason, in this language class, was to promote communication and to provide varied contexts for this. She also explained that where one partner has information others need, this creates a real need to communicate in the language - haice the activities which involved hiding information. The teachCT would try to vary both tasks and group composition.
Finally, the teacher was asked how the material was created. Some items were photocopied from text books. Others were from El Pais^ (using the World Wide Web) or from magazines. Some she had drawn herself. Some activities she had devised and some were taken ready-made from books.
5.4 Discussion
Only three objects were used in these classes to hold textual or graphical material that was shared by everyone. These were worksheets, the classroom whiteboard and textbooks. It should be remembered that sharing also took place by means o f talking and that in the language classes, audio- and videotapes also held material that was shared by everyone; this material was not included in the analysis above (Table 5.1). In addition, there was some informal sharing between individuals, or between the teacher and a single student. Most often, it was the student's notebook that held this part-shared material.
\c o n d itio n s
Object
Created by Created when Created using Visible during lesson to Acted on during lesson by For reference during lesson by Kept after lesson by
Worksheet 1 or Other Itefore lesson Pen, paper, computer, photocopier
S and T S S
Whiteboard T During lesson Pen, eraser S and { T S Not kept
Textbook Other Ikfore lesson N/A S and T S S S
T = Teacher S = Students
Table 5.2: Classroom objects holding shared lesson material
Bearing in mind what has been said in Chapter Four (section 4.2.1 ) about the need for group support tools to be integrated with tools used for individual work, each o f the three objects used here was considered in relation to: who constructs it, how it is constructed, who sees it and who acts on it during lessons, and who keeps it after the lesson. In a sense, it sums up the relationship of these lesson participants with the material they used.
For example, the whiteboard in a classroom usually (not always) holds material constructed during the lesson, by the teacher, for reference and visible to all. Other tools are involved in creating materials: computer, pen, paper, photocopier, for example. The photocopier should be distinguished from the others, since it acts as a means o f distribution, rather than creation o f materials.
A tentative hypothesis about the role o f an electronic shared workspace in such classes might be drawn from this. First, it might be expected, as a minimum, to perform the functions o f these objects (worksheet, whiteboard and textbook page) - that is, to accommodate all o f the materials constructed during the lesson, and/or visible to more than one person. Other kinds o f classes may use other objects, such as overhead projector, or data projector, to hold shared material but neither was used in the classes observed here. Secondly, the shared workspace tool, like the photocopier, can be a means o f distributing material to students. Finally, the use o f audio and video tapes in the language classes highlights the fact that the shared workspace is only one o f several tools likely to be used to support teaching and learning, not a complete solution.
A national daily paper.
As shown in Chapter Three, however, one cannot take for granted a direct translation from face-to-face to computer-mediated domains. A supplementary question, was therefore whether this was all that it would do — or whether an electronic workspace might be used as means of sharing other kinds of information. Another prediction was that some tasks would have to change if the means of sharing material were a shared workspace tool. Face-to-fece language students took part in activities which involved hiding information, for instance when one student held information that others needed to acquire. Since this is the opposite of sharing, it seemed unlikely that a shared workspace would easily support such activities. The studies reported in Chapter Six show that the range of teaching and learning activities was indeed restricted by the feet that objects were always shared with all group members.
However, it was not assumed that all changes from usual, face-to-fece practice would necessarily be negative ones. For instance, the school groups observed in the earlier study did encounter some problems arising from not having individual copies of the material, or not having a good view of it. The language students usually worked in pairs, which made it easier for them to share the same view of a single piece of paper. It is possible to envisage a gain, in the sense that each participant in a desktop conference will have the same view of material and will be able to perform operations on it easily. So, perhaps, paradoxically, sharing could increase the sense of ownership? This question was answered in part by the later studies; it appeared that both teacher and students perceived a change in relationships brought about by the fact that the shared workspace is equally accessible to all, unlike the classroom whiteboard. The effect was variously described, as "a sense of shared endeavour" and "a workshop atmosphere."
5.5 Conclusion
This chapter has reported the use of classroom observation and document analysis to identify a set of activities that a shared workspace tool might need to support. Interactive work around shared material was used in the observed classes both to help understanding and to encourage communication. The same set of activity categories (Table 5.1) could describe group learning activities in both school English classes and adult education Spanish classes, suggesting that a degree of generalisation had been achieved in describing the tasks, sufficient to make the categories useful as an evaluation tool in later studies. The work discussed here also identified classroom objects that held shared material in these lessons, and the items that teachers and students used for lesson preparation and follow-up. This suggests the shared workspace will need to inter-work with individual tools both for creating shared material and for storing and using it after a lesson. This is important because groupware tools will be used for only a part of users' work, so compatibility with individual tools will make them more acceptable (Grudin, 1994b).
These studies raised questions, as intended, rather than providing answers:
1. Can distributed students, using shared workspace tool in a desktop conferencing system, experience a similar range of learning activities to those experienced in a face-to-face class?
2. What impact will using the tool have on the way these activities are conducted? 3. Will a shared workspace replace worksheets, whiteboard, textbook page, photocopier? 4. What other role will it play?
The observation notes and document analysis also throw some light on the kinds of objects to be shared and the actions to be carried out on them, although the study did not address detailed design requirements. The materials used in these classes (see section 5.3.3) suggest that a shared whiteboard would be an appropriate shared workspace tool to investigate. Such tools support graphics as well as text and preserve layout and positioning, which were seen to be important aspects of content in some of the observed activities.
The work reported here has shown that, to describe the task adequately, it is necessary to describe how people communicate and organise themselves to carry it out. It has sketched out a distant view of the interactions that typically take place in fece-to-fece classes, in text-based disciplines. Students may switch between working in pairs, in small groups and as a whole classes, with the teacher interacting at different times with all of these.
The next step in the research was to investigate questions arising from this field work, using a computer system. Distributed groups were used. A distributed group provides a good test of feasibility, of whether an activity can be supported at all, since alternative ways to share material are available. However, a study of distributed groups also brings with it potential distractors — the other communications channels. This has been discussed already (Chapters One and Three).