Behaviour management in social computing learning environments
Abstract
This case study was part of a national project on social computing in schools. It
focuses upon one of the four modes – collaborative document creation. The activity
encouraged the use of the rules based collaborative environment called Phreda.
Teachers and students found that social computing had the potential to support good
learning opportunities. This was especially important when combining groups across
classes timetabled for different days and times. It also helped to continue the learning
of a student who had suffered a severe injury, and was able to participate from home.
Behaviour management in computer supported collaborative work was required.
Teachers need to avail themselves of new management tools. They need to ensure
they are a member of each virtual team. Using this position, they can monitor
interactions for appropriate language or harassment, file-storages for illegal content,
and group dynamics for engagement.
Introduction
The SiMERR national social computing project was conceived by Chris Reading and
the ICT representatives of SiMERR hubs in each state and territory. As a pilot project,
it provided a framework for one or two schools in each region to participate in a
monitored social computing activity, with the potential to link to other schools in the
project. The theorising behind the project identified four distinct pedagogies which
we associated with the various social computing tools then extent:
•
Sharing knowledge: basically, upload a media file for others to admire. Very
little interaction. eg Flickr, Zooomr, Photoblog, YouTube, Podcasts, Digg, Newsvine,
Gabbr, MySpace
•
Creating shared understandings: Blogs and Wikis are exciting and easy to
use tools which offer great opportunities to self-publish. They offer bi-directional
links, foster feedback, critical commentary and give scope for group/peer editing and
creation. Examples include: Educational Bloggers Network, Edu-Tech News,
Wikipedia, Wikinews, WikEd.
•
Collaborative document creation: this is where people work in virtual teams.
Sometimes the people are on the same site (for instance, all in the same school) but
cannot get a time to meet and work together. Includes computer mediated
collaborative learning or work, providing facilities to share and achieve a common
aim. Tools include: Online chat; shared file storage; shared calendar; morale
monitoring; task-scheduler; discussion boards; voting mechanism; shared database &
index of team-members; e-mail list. Writely allows collaborative work on documents.
Other groupware is available such as PHProject, Trac, Plone, Drupal, YahooGroups,
GoogleGroups and Phreda1.
•
Real-time communication: students can practice speaking & listening in other
languages, conduct debates or have informal conversation. Tools are available to
1
http://www.comp.utas.edu.au/vteam/phreda/
facilitate near-instantaneous exchange of text messages, audio (phone-like) and/or
video with one or several participants/sites. E.g. Skype, Person.com, MSN messenger,
CUSeeMe, NetMeeting, XMeeting, Windows Live Messenger and GoogleTalk.
Planning at the national level
Since project planning was to be undertaken using national videoconference links,
ensuring the school could participate in these national meetings was the first priority.
Using an ISDN connection from a shared facility in the neighbouring TAFE College,
the school was able to dial into the bridge at the University of New England without
problems.
Planning at the school level
 The learning sequence used the pedagogical architecture of collaborative
document creation with Year 10 students
Social computing was used to facilitate groupwork when students could not share the
same physical space at the same time. Initially the collaborating students were
timetabled into two different mixed-grade classes, with only a small number in Year
10 in each class. Two of the classes were timetabled on Mondays and Wednesdays,
and the rest of them were on Tuesdays and Fridays “We had five groups. I chose
students for each group because of dynamics, and chose friendship groups, which
motivated them more, because they wanted to chat with the people in the other class.
The groups varied in size from the smallest with three, and the largest had six
students. One [group] was actually entirely within a single class. All of the other four
teams were across both classes, so you might have had two members in one class, and
two in the other.” It was envisaged that learning to use computer-supported
collaborative work processes in this situation would provide good training for crossschool and inter-state collaborations in the future.
The teacher’s basic idea was for students to use the social computing tool Phreda to
communicate, make decisions and collate their final product. Phreda was therefore
used to create inter- and intra-class groupings and allow collaborative working
regardless of co-location or contemporary activity. Phreda is a developmental social
computing tool similar to Google Groups, but including additional functions such as
group member task allocation and interaction rules. These could be used to build trust,
during communication and task engagement (Gould, 2006, p.2).
The first task was for students to work as a team to create an internet search quiz
(scavenger hunt) on a topic of their choice, which they decided in their group but then
sought teacher approval for. “So they had to work together, to decide on the topic
which took a lot longer than I thought it would. And then each person had to come up
with questions on the topic, and they had to vote on which questions should be
included in the final quiz before it was submitted”. Thus a number of interactions
were supported by the collaboration tool, including acting as a shared repository and
facilitating democratic decision-making.
The teacher reported that some of these initial quizzes were based on the students
themselves. They came up with questions they could ask their friends. “I think they
got that idea from Myspace, where you send your questions around and everyone fills
them out. Other quizzes were on specific topics, such as the history of chocolate.
Example of a Quiz
Questions:
Answers
1. What is your favourite type of
chocolate?
2. Who invented the first chocolate
bar?
3. Do you like dark chocolate?
4. Cadbury or Nestle?
5. When was cocoa first made into
chocolate?
6. Does cocoa contain caffeine?
1. White chocolate
7. Does chocolate cause acne?
8. Are chocolates aphrodisiacs?
9. At what temperature does
chocolate melt?
10. Can you melt chocolate in the
microwave?
2. Conrad J. Van Houten
3. No
4. Cadbury
5. 1674
6. Yes some stronger then
others
7. No unless u have an allergy
8. It is in some ways
9. 36˚C
10. Yes
Measure of achievement of student learning outcome(s)
Some of the students didn't like to work in groups or even talk to others, so it was
hoped this learning environment would be less intimidating. One of the ongoing
assessment processes was therefore a monitoring of engagement and interaction using
the social computing tool. Groups swapped quizzes to test them out then and give
feedback to the producers. The teacher assessed progress against the learning
outcomes using the Phreda administrative tools.
Before the students started work, they were made aware of the ‘rules tool’ in Phreda.
They had to learn about interaction and interaction rules – recipes which
acknowledged and sometimes rewarded productive behaviour when working in online
virtual teams. They were told about possible problems in teamwork:
What problems can you have in a team?
 Miscommunication – different understandings of meanings
 Lack of communication
 Misunderstanding team processes – like publishing before checking with the
boss…
 Interpersonal conflicts
 Freeloading
 Domination
 Lack of commitment
 Illness
 Outside influences – like water restrictions on ovals, council rates, public holidays
The main social computing application used was Phreda:
http://www.comp.utas.edu.au/vteam/phreda/
Phreda allows group participants to construct and use rules to govern and inform
behaviour. For instance, whenever a team-member returns to the site, they can be
greeted with details of the amount of work done by others, what their highest priority
task is, and congratulations on a high level of interaction using the inbuilt chat &
messaging tools. Writing and modifying these rules can be a powerful way to create a
positive group dynamic.
Examples of behaviour rules in Phreda
If total posts Memb>=0
And
average posts team >=0
=> Tell individual
Hello “username” you have posted “b” discussions and the average for the team is “c”
If (total uploads Member > ((3 * average uploads for hyMemb) / 2))
=>
Tell team
Congratulations “username” you have uploaded “b” files
[negative equivalent:
If (total uploads Member < ((3 * average uploads for hyMemb) / 2))
=>
Tell individual
Hi “username” you have uploaded “b” files which is quite a bit less than the team
average of “c”. Make sure that you are doing your share of the work.]
This teamwork training and the rules-tool in Phreda were used in concert to promote
Landrum and Paris’ (2000) idea that virtual teams need equity. Page: 5
This equity was counteracted by the presence of teachers to keep team members’
behaviour under control. Our expectation was for teams to strive for balance through
encouraging students to establish their own rules and let the software do the
monitoring; and have the teacher act as ‘guide on the side’ without involvement in
team online communications. Teams also needed to develop a reward system based
upon performance and participation to maintain motivation.
Positive Benefits
The teacher liked the fact that there were two computing classes, and normally there
was no interaction between them. This social computing project enabled interaction
between the two classes, so that they could work together on one task. “I was a bit
worried about setting it up that way, and it did cause some problems; but, because I
have only got about eight grade tens in each class there are too few to do much group
work with them. But with more of them together, then we could actually have some
group work happening”.
A major positive aspect of computer-supported collaboration resulted from one
student driving a motor-bike into a wall. He broke his neck and had a wire put into his
arm. As a result he was unable to come to school for nearly 5 months. He got onto the
Phreda system, and worked from home. Friends would also visit him at home. The
teacher was impressed by the way Phreda gave people the ability to communicate and
work together at different times and in different locations. When the teacher came to
write reports, she got thinking about the injured student’s report. Before the accident
he was really interesting in manipulating digital photos and creating stick man
animations. “After we started these in class he started doing them at home as well. I
decided to call him up and see if he had done any work at home which he could send
in. We had a talk and we decided he could get on to Phreda with me and he could
upload the pictures he has done at home. To my great surprise he actually did it!
Phreda has also given me the opportunity to give him feedback straight away.”
After students completed their quizzes, the teacher asked the groups to create stories
on a collaborative basis. Some groups organised themselves so that members just
wrote a couple of sentences each. Then they uploaded the story into the Phreda space.
And then the next person had a go. Since half of a group might be in a separate
computing class, they would do six or eight pieces of writing in each lesson; and then
the other team members would do a similar number in their lesson on the next day, so
it took about a week or so to complete the story. This would not have been so easily
done face-to-face (perhaps in a lunchtime) or by e-mail: “that would’ve been hectic,
and there would’ve been stuff everywhere. Because of all the attachments.” One
interesting development when talking to the students was that they did not necessarily
know the personal identity of their co-team members: “…each of us has a nickname,
Vera’s was midget-woman; and Rosemary was frog’s bottom, and I am pirate
woman.” “I didn’t know that was you!”
Some students investigated the rule-tool in Phreda: “that was a bit hard. I didn’t really
understand it. You made one or two rules”. When prompted as to the kind of rule they
would have liked to create, the quick answer was “no spamming!” because sometimes
personal conversations got out of control.
Measurements of page requests taken from the Phreda database indicate that a
significant amount of each team’s online behaviour related to pages concerned with
team member identities and personal details (such as team status and biography). This
suggests that the way each member is seen by others and how others appear, (ie:
identity building), is an area of learning incidental to the pedagogical task and
stimulated by the ability to engage in social computing (Kildare R.A. 2008).
Behaviour Management
The teacher reported that one group had a few problems, because there was one girl
and four very computer-interested boys. The girl felt that she was ‘on the outer’. The
boys wanted to have a quiz looking at the different parts of computers, very hardware
based. It just didn’t interest the female student. She decided to do her own quiz. She
didn’t really meet the group work criteria, but she did use the technology and she got
the task done.
What does the teacher do when a collaborative story takes a problematic direction?
“One of the stories started off being about one of the girls in the other class. There
was love interest, and it was starting to verge onto a bit of harassment, and teasing.
Since she was a member of that group, she could read all this. They didn’t think that
she would mind. But there was a real risk there. I decided to let her see it and gave
her the option, once she had read it, if she felt it wasn’t appropriate it could be
removed. She was happy, she didn’t care and she continued the story onwards, but
altered it around a bit”.
Another problem arose from bad language (swearing). One of the groups was using
completely inappropriate language. At interview, the teacher said: “I was panicking,
and thinking what am I going to do? I had a talk to Rob about it. I went home and had
to think about it. I asked myself, what am I really try to get out of this? Do I want
them to speak appropriately? My real aim was to get them to use the system, and to
communicate with one another. Some of the groups were struggling to even form a
conversation. Whereas this group had pages and pages of conversation, and they were
all getting involved. But I had to speak to them about the language.We said that if
other members of the group were offended by the bad language, we would remove the
postings. And some members of the group said that this was inappropriate, and some
of the posts were removed”.
File sharing was an essential facility supported by the computer collaboration tool.
But what do you do when the files are inappropriate, or even illegal? One of the
ingenious groups decided that they could illegally share games. Since the teacher was
a member of all the groups, she saw it and intervened! “I saw some file called Turkeyvaders amongst all the other WORD files. I checked, and it was pretty obvious that
my students had not created it [using Gamemaker or any similar program]. So I had a
talk to them [the students], and I remembered the talks I had had it in first year
University about those students who get kicked out along the way in computing for
copying files and all that. And the students thought ‘we could get a kicked out of Uni
before we even get there!’ This could be a first!.. So they took the files down.”
Upon reflection, the teacher stated a belief that “it is really important that students be
taught how to use these tools appropriately. Teachers and schools need to start
thinking about how they are going to support this. I was surprised that no other group
had issues like mine.”
Finally, the design of collaborative computing tools needs to suit students. Those
interviewed found text alone did not support their sarcastic wit, “yes, some people can
take it the wrong way”. Emoticons were not an adequate substitute for voices. Some
found that Phreda had too many options and was confusing. “It was very complicated.
Everything is in weird spots. And I always forget the e-mail addressy thing [URL].
It’s about a metre long. For instance MySpace can be found at MySspace.com. It’s
simple!” One solution to this latter problem is to use tinyURL (www.tinyurl.com).
Conclusion
The school was positive about the experience with social computing. It had
experienced students who were “addicted to MySpace”, contrasting with the positive
learning outcomes in this project. Some of the groups had begun to work with
students in a school on the West Coast of Tasmania, showing that inter-school
collaboration was possible. As they progressed, the teacher was keen to compare the
potential of other collaboration environments, such as Google Groups, real-time
videoconferencing, blogs and MySpace.
Despite the small scale of this project, there are important lessons for other teachers
contemplating the use of social computing tools for collaborative work. Firstly, these
emerging tools can facilitate co-learning across times and places, inter-school learning
and probably inter-state learning. They provide continued engagement for students
unable to come to school.
However, teachers need to avail themselves of new management tools. They need to
ensure they are a member of each virtual team. Using this position, they can monitor
interactions for appropriate language or harassment, file-storages for illegal content,
and group dynamics for engagement.
References
Gould, David (2006) Fifth Generation Work - Virtual Organization. Available
20Dec2007 at: http://www.managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/virtual.htm
Kildare, Robert (2008) Interaction Rules and their Role in Collaboration Software.
Submitted PhD. Thesis University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
Landrum, Nancy & Paris, Lori (2000) Virtual teams in the classroom; a case study.
Available 20Dec2007 at:
http://www.mountainplains.org/articles/2000/general/mpa6.htm
Picture gallery
Students at work