Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 26.8
The Lantern (
left
) and its use during orchestration
on which exercise (each exercise has a different colour), how long they have been
working on that exercise (the height of the colour bar), do they need help (it blinks)
and for how long (it blinks faster).
Design Factors
The Lantern helps tackling the problems of time management (factor 7) and control
(factor 2). The main difficulty for the orchestrator is to manage multiple teams of
different sizes working at different speeds and requiring different types of help at
different times. The experiments (Alavi et al., 2009) showed that students using the
Lantern or the Shelve spend less time chasing the TA: once they push their device to
ask for help, they can concentrate on their exercises. Control (factor 3) is improved
because teams do not simply wait doing nothing.
Overall, this environment illustrates the physicality of orchestration (factor 9).
The only difference between the Lantern and the Shelve is the spatial layout. Besides
the fact that Shelve is centralized and Lantern is geographically distributed, both
devices display the same information in the same way. The Lanterns connect spa-
tially the information displayed (exercise being done, time in exercise, waiting time)
with the team being concerned by this information. Yet, this single difference led to
different interaction patterns in the class. The central display induced more com-
parison between groups, independent of their location, while the distributed version
led to the emergence of clusters, i.e. sets of 2-3 small groups, located close to each
other, and which interact with each other (e.g. a group A helps group B because A
sees that B has been waiting for help at an exercise that A has completed, Alavi et al.
(2009).
Conclusions
Implications for Learning Technologies
We presented three examples of technologies developed in our lab but many other
colleagues have developed environments that are close to the orchestration model
