Final Project Report
Submitted to UC Berkeley's School of Information
for the Requirements for the Masters in Information Management and Systems, May 2006
Since the Fall of 2004, students at the University of California's School of Information (iSchool) have engaged in online discussion on their own IRC channel. Interactions occur both inside and outside of class, when users are co-present or in separate physical locations. Conversations sometimes augment class discussion, allowing for different types of in-class participation, as well as the sharing of relevant material, URLs, etc.
By creating a visualization of IRC data, we hope to explore the benefits of such a tool for educators wishing to understand the relation of chat activity to the classes they teach. Some teachers have now looked into incorporating chat into the classroom, by creating sanctioned IRC channels for students to engage with one another. A visual analysis of log data from such discussions may prove interesting or useful for professors. Our goal is to create a visualization tool to enable this analysis and assess its usefulness in education.
Classchat began as a visualization of iSchool IRC log data, with the identities of individual users masked to maintain privacy. The chat log contains a date and time stamp, user name, user entries, and robot commands. We began by exploring this data with existing visualization tools, such as Spotfire and Tableau. We examined a range of possibilities in creating a visualization of the data, including extracting information about times (which can be overlaid with class times, important dates, etc), users, and lines of contribution within a discussion.
We are currently in the process of developing a tool for use within the classroom setting. In designing this tool, our questions include:
- What can chat data say about classroom interactions?
- How are classroom interactions expressed through online chat?
- How can this information be used by educators?
- In what ways does chat augment class discussion?
- Which dimensions of chat are most useful for education?
This project integrates many components of our iSchool education. It requires technical programming skills, use of user-centered design processes, information visualization techniques, social network theory, and usability testing. Courses that have been taken by one or more of the group members that will directly inform our methods include:
- Information Organization and Retrieval
- Foundations of Software Design
- Social and Organizational Issues of Information
- User Interface Design and Development
- Needs and Usability Assessment
- Information Visualization and Presentation
- Information in Society
- Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure
Read more about the design of Classchat as we progress, or view the prototype.