www.library.drexel.edu The following item is made available as a courtesy to scholars by the author(s) and Drexel University Library and may contain materials and content, including computer code and tags, artwork, text, graphics, images, and illustrations (Material) which may be protected by copyright law. Unless otherwise noted, the Material is made available for non profit and educational purposes, such as research, teaching and private study. For these limited purposes, you may reproduce (print, download or make copies) the Material without prior permission. All copies must include any copyright notice originally included with the Material. You must seek permission from the authors or copyright owners for all uses that are not allowed by fair use and other provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. The responsibility for making an independent legal assessment and securing any necessary permission rests with persons desiring to reproduce or use the Material.

More than we realize it, knowledge is often constructed through interactions among people in small groups. The Internet, by allowing people to communicate globally in limitless combinations, has opened enormous opportunities for the creation of knowledge and understanding. A major barrier today is the poverty of adequate groupware. To design more powerful software that can facilitate the building of collaborative knowledge, we need to better understand the nature of group cognition — the processes whereby ideas are developed by small groups. We need to analyze interaction at both the individual and the group unit of analysis in order to understand the variety of processes that groupware should be supporting. This paper will look closely at an empirical example of an online group problem-solving experience and suggest implications for groupware design.

www.library.drexel.edu The following item is made available as a courtesy to scholars by the author(s) and Drexel University Library and may contain materials and content, including computer code and tags, artwork, text, graphics, images, and illustrations (Material) which may be protected by copyright law. Unless otherwise noted, the Material is made available for non profit and educational purposes, such as research, teaching and private study. For these limited purposes, you may reproduce (print, download or make copies) the Material without prior permission. All copies must include any copyright notice originally included with the Material. You must seek permission from the authors or copyright owners for all uses that are not allowed by fair use and other provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. The responsibility for making an independent legal assessment and securing any necessary permission rests with persons desiring to reproduce or use the Material.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) currently represent the most widely used type of social 3D virtual worlds with millions of users worldwide. Although MMOGs take face-to-face conversation as their metaphor for user-to-user interaction, avatars currently give off much less information about what users are doing than real human bodies. Consequently, users routinely encounter slippages in coordination when engaging in joint courses of action. In this study, we analyze screen-capture video of user-to-user interaction in the game, City of Heroes, under two conditions: one with the game’s standard awareness cues and the other with enhanced cues. We use conversation analysis to demonstrate interactional slippages caused by the absence of awareness cues, user practices that circumvent such limitations and ways in which enhanced cues can enable tighter coordination. Author Keywords Avatar-mediated interaction, massively multiplayer online games, conversation analysis. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3. [Collaborative Computing]: online games

Abstract. To date the most popular and sophisticated types of virtual worlds can be found in the area of video gaming, especially in the genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). Game developers have made great strides in achieving game worlds that look and feel increasingly realistic. However, despite these achievements in the visual realism of virtual game worlds, they are much less sophisticated when it comes to modeling face-toface interaction. In face-to-face, ordinary social activities are ‘‘accountable,’ ’ that is, people use a variety of kinds of observational information about what others are doing in order to make sense of others ’ actions and to tightly coordinate their own actions with others. Such information includes: (1) the real-time unfolding of turns-at-talk; (2) the observability of embodied activities; and (3) the direction of eye gaze for the purpose of gesturing. But despite the fact that today’s games provide virtual bodies, or ‘‘avatars,’ ’ for players to control, these avatars display much less information about players ’ current state than real bodies do. In this paper, we discuss the impact of the lack of each type of information on players ’ ability to tightly coordinate their activities and offer guidelines for improving coordination and, ultimately, the players ’ social experience. Key words: collaborative virtual environments, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology,

Abstract. We conceptualize referencing as a primary means of establishing intersubjective meaning and, therefore, as an important consideration in supporting collaborative learning. What we call group cognition is a discourse-centered analysis of the interactional basis of collaborative knowledge building, establishing common ground and co-constructing shared meaning. This epistemological perspective has methodological, technological and pedagogical implications. It directs empirical analysis toward the manifold forms of referencing that constitute small-group communication. Studies of how students actually make sense of, adapt and adopt referential affordances in computational media are used to inform the design of educational software environments. In particular, we are developing an online service for groups of people to discuss mathematical themes. This paper looks at how a group of students used methods of referencing to co-construct geometric objects in a chat room with graphical referencing tools. Epistemology of Referencing Referencing is a primary means for humans to establish joint attention and to make shared meaning. Vygotsky, in a particularly rich passage, described the interactional origin of pointing as an example of how gestures

collaborative math problem solving

Abstract. Recent research on the impact of new communication and information technologies stress the transformation that new forms of mediated interactions are having on the ways that teenagers, especially, participate and make sense of different aspects of their lives, including education. The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) project is an NSF-funded research program that investigates the innovative use of online collaborative environments to support effective K-12 mathematics learning. The ethnographic case study presented here explores the sustained interactions of five virtual teams of teenagers distributed across the U.S. as they engaged in mathematical problem solving throughout a series of four successive sessions online. In particular, our ethnomethodological analysis highlights the “member methods ” displayed and developed by these teams in their collective sense-making. More specifically, we concentrate our analysis on the deictic referencing methods used by the participants as they collaboratively construct and evolve a space of mathematical objects, reason about them, and constitute their own sense of collectivity. We explore implications for understanding learning and interaction of virtual teams and online communities, as well as for designing effective activities and supports for them.

Abstract. More than we realize it, knowledge is often constructed through interactions among people in small groups. The Internet, by allowing people to communicate globally in limitless combinations, has opened enormous opportunities for the creation of knowledge and understanding. A major barrier today is the poverty of adequate groupware. To design more powerful software that can facilitate the building of collaborative knowledge, we need to better understand the nature of group cognition—the processes whereby ideas are developed by small groups. We need to analyze interaction at both the individual and the group unit of analysis in order to understand the variety of processes that groupware should be supporting. This paper will look closely at an empirical example of knowledge being constructed by a small group and suggest implications for groupware design. 1. Individual Learning in Groups Groupware is software that is specifically designed to support the work of groups. Most software in the past, in contrast, has been designed to support the work of

Abstract: Synchronous communication using text chat—often combined with a shared whiteboard—is increasingly used in CSCL. This form of interaction and learning in small online groups of students presents novel challenges, both for the participating students and for researchers studying their work. Chats differ from talk-in-interaction since the composition, posting and visual inspection of text and graphical objects by any given actor is not observable by the other participants. These structural constraints on the organization of interaction require that actors deploy alternative procedures for achieving what turn taking achieves in talk-in-interaction. This paper describes how communication is organized in text chat, where postings have to provide instructions on how they are to be read. This organization is contrasted with turn taking in face-to-face communication. The notion of “reading’s work ” provides a guiding thread, which is explicated. Synchronous text chat seems to offer a particularly effective medium for joint learning activity, but it presents challenges for students using it because the group sense-making strategies to which they are accustomed in faceto-face interactions either do not work or work differently in the online setting, for reasons to be discussed. Similarly, sources of evidence normally available to educational researchers are not available from synchronous online interactions. Student groups develop methods of building their postings to convey instructions for how they are to be read. Chat researchers as well as chat participants must learn to pay heed to such instructions. As we will see, such instructions often involve the sequentiality of postings and the references among those postings (Sarmiento & Stahl, 2008). We have explored the use of text chat for discussions of mathematics in small groups of students for the past six years in the Virtual Math Teams Project (VMT) (Stahl, 2009). Although we have reported on the