Learning and collaboration at a distance

Mark ChildsCoventry University

Field Museum of Natural History

Today

• Two case studies that use collaboration at a distance.

• Look at methodology for conducting evaluation• For each look at some of the issues that

learners have when undertaking these activities.

• Identify strengths and weaknesses of these environments.

Learning to create a better built environment

• Project led by Coventry University• Co-researcher Robby Soetanto• Undergraduate module• Civil construction engineers in Coventry• Architecture students in Ryerson, Canada• Task: to design a building collaboratively• Problem-based learning

Ryerson to Coventry

Distanced-learning scenario

• Four students at each end• Introduced to the idea of – Conveyance– Convergence– CoherenceAs communication elements

• Data captured through questionnaires and interviews

Analysis

• Interview data analysed– Interviews coded, sorted into nodes– Groups designated as successful or unsuccessful– Nodes clustered into three categories

• Distance (from transactional distance, Moore)• Alignment (term coined as oppositional to

distance• Impact (students also reported value to them)

Overall model think this is quite complex but leave it to you to explain

Questions

• What in your experience would be the most influential contributors to:– Distance … what barriers do people face with

distanced communication?– Alignments … what strategies to people develop to

come to overcome these barriers?– Impact … what are the benefits, both perceived

and actual for learners undertaking these activities?

Virtual teamworking factors

Unsuccessful collaborations

Successful collaborations

I Dig Tanzania

• Project led by Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago

• Co-researcher Anna Peachey• Summer programme• School children learning about palaeontology• Talking with students and field researchers in Dar

Es Salaam• Approximately 50 tasks over 3 weeks• Transmission, experiential, social construction

Distanced-learning scenarios

• Four groups of four students split across two rooms for online activities.

• Videoconferencing• Second Life• Physical world activities• Data captured through surveys, interviews,

blogs, chatlogs, googledocs,

1. Adapt to your biome

• Activity 2.3 • Learning about adaptation• Learning to construct and conduct a hypothesis• Preparatory work: 2.2 meet your team-mates in

Second Life, discuss adaptation• Assessed through the blog question: “List a few

ways that animals are adapted to their environments. If the environment changes, what might happen to those animals?”

The biomes

Avatars: before

Avatars: in the rainforest

Avatars: in the coral reef

Avatars: in the tundra

Avatars: in the desert

Avatars: debrief discussion

Findings

• Students performed reasonably well in blog answers but were better in discussions.

• Students felt that having an initial activity on modifying their avatar gave them a stronger sense of identity within the environment.

• Continued to alter them throughout the programme.

Individualisation

Evaluator: Do you think it helped being able to change and become a bit more individual over the weeksKevin: Yeah because our first activity was to change with the environment we were in.Amy: Yeah we had to adapt to the environment. They put us in certain environments and we were in the desert and I gave myself ... I was wearing thin clothes and I was short and agile. I had a strong sense of big ears and a large nose. I was separate from the whole group. My own person.

2. Elephant farming

• Activity 5.4• Goals: Understand negative and positive aspects of local

wildlife, see how interconnected and dependent different species are on one another

• Preparatory work: Day 5, Skype calls 1) with field scientists and 2) learners in Tanzania about wildlife interactions, scavenger hunt around museum for African mammals. Football warm-up.

• Assessed by blog questions: “What are common conflicts between humans and wildlife?” “Why is all life important?”

Experiential learning

• Kaley: I thought it was really funny at first and I was laughing, then I got mad at Charlie, I was like "Charlie stop doing that".

• Rajesh: "Charlie's an elephant ha ha ha" then everyone got really angry (which you could tell) because they had spikes on the walls, all around the wall they had a bunch of spikes.

Seguing

• Combining the factual element from the Skype meetings and the experiential learning from the Second Life activities produced a cumulative effect.

• Kaley: “I think that learning about it in two different places we got to learn a lot by going into the two different places and looking at it in two different ways. Like one day we would have a theme that we would talk about every day and when we would go and talk to the scientists or the Dar Es Salaam students we would talk about them and ask them some questions and learn about it and then we would go into Second Life and do it for ourselves so it really put everything together.”

3. Create Museum Exhibit

• Activity 12.1 (final two days)• Prior activity: creating scavenger hunt in

physical museum• Creating the museum exhibit intended to

bring together the information the learners had acquired over three weeks.

• Assessed through observation of exhibits

Red: Early/Middle Triassic

Blue: Early triassic

Results

• Groups split physically across two rooms for entire programme. This activity presented the only problem.

• Learners had mixed responses to acquiring building skills.

• This activity showed up limitations of working and communicating.

• Online design collaboration is particularly hard, cannot support “messy talk”.

Questions

• What do you think the advantages are of working in an environment like Second Life?

• What do you think are the disadvantages?• How could you use this sort of environment in

your own work?• What would be the barriers to your use of it?

Conclusions

• Learners work effectively with discussion, experiential learning, collaboration at a distance.

• When collaboration starts to fail, distance can make the distrust, miscommunication worse, other factors then become an issue

• Collaborative design is tricky though. Uses many channels of communication simultaneously.