Building Bridges - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 249

Design Principle 2: All participants in the webcast
may be of interest to the presenter at any moment,
not just those who are actively participating.

understood or heard properly in the main class-
room. In a sense, text was a way to overcome
some of the anxieties students expressed about
speaking in “public” using the microphone.
Moreover, what is also interesting here is the
comfort students expressed in using text as a
mode of communication. This was not just be-
cause they were confident their questions would
be less likely to be misinterpreted, but because
the mode of communication was similar to IM
and very familiar. This was particularly the case
for the student, quoted above, who indicated that
asking a question was just like using MSN Mes-
senger, a medium students use very frequently in
talking socially with friends and relatives (Shiu
& Lenhart, 2004). This suggests that there may
be utility in reconsidering text as a mode of live
participation, and that other studies of using text
chat while attending to other media (e.g., Weisz,
et al., 2007) may be relevant. Text also has the
advantage of supporting the sort of awareness
discussed by Kimmerle & Cress (2008) - that is,
awareness of who is contributing and what they
have contributed. In this case, the persistence of the
text chat makes this information readily available.
All of this suggests that there is likely sub-
stantial utility in combining multiple media to
facilitate the desired combination of awareness
and interaction. Awareness is visual - it can be
facilitated through video connections that involve
two-way links between multiple sites. Interaction,
however, is separate from video. While there may
be cases (e.g., remote instructors or speakers;
confident students; etc.) where interaction with
satellite and remote students by video conference
may be desirable, our results suggest that text also
has valuable attributes.
This combination of factors raises several key
implications for system design.
First is that the distinction our system draws
between “watching” and being “on air” (part of
the videoconference) is a technical one that is
inadequate to cover the actual modes of participa-

To implement this principle, designers should
consider ways to easily represent large audiences
in ways that instructors can glean useful informa-
tion. Lists of names, as used in prior systems, can
give a sense of scope, but other forms of aggregate
data about students could be useful as well. Build-
ing on work by Chen (2003), data about student
attention and engagement could be displayed.
To get more information about a participant the
instructor could use their PC or possibly a gaze-
based interface that would allow for zooming in
or focusing on particular students.

Interaction and Awareness
Have Different Needs

One clear theme in our results is that both students
and speakers valued the capacity for interaction
between sites and via multiple media (e.g., chat,
audio). This was evident both in our evaluation
data and in the better performance of students
who felt able to easily participate. This raises an
important point about the goals of our system.
Our primary goal was to increase opportunities
for interaction via improved instructor awareness
of satellite and remote students, and via temporary
two-way audio/video links. While these links did
help to improve awareness somewhat (in spite
of the issues identified above), their capacity for
enhancing interaction was mixed.
On the one hand, the system did perform rea-
sonably well from a technical standpoint in that
participants could hear and see each other. It also
allowed satellite and remote students to ask ques-
tions, which all acknowledged was beneficial and
something they appreciated. At the same time, we
were surprised that two of the satellite students
expressed a clear preference for text interaction,
because it allayed their concerns about not being