As technology becomes an increasingly ubiquitous component of everyday life, educators will be left with little choice but to find a way to incorporate technology into the classroom. Computer and technology use and behavior is dynamic and evolving with the changing demands of the users and disciplines in which they occur. Ethnicity, gender, experience, and personality are all variables that factor into technology use.
This project is not an attempt to prescribe blanket statements or predictions about how technology can be used in the classroom. Rather, it is an effort to offer a set of hypotheses which educators, academics, industry leaders, and researchers can use to guide their own future research. A thorough understanding of the characteristics and implications of how this chatroom fits into the classroom structure will enable educators to design a better framework for learning.
- Implementations of the backchannel will and should vary across different contexts and domains, such as undergraduate, graduate, and K-12 environments
- Teaching styles will need to be adjusted to take advantage of the social and educational affordances offered by the backchannel
- Chatrooms should enable teacher self-assessment
- Peer to peer learning should take advantage of the affordances offered by the backchannel
- The backchannel can facilitate different types of learning
- Educators will need to discuss how student's access to technology in their personal lives affects their use of technology in the classroom
- A backchannel should encourage some social interactions and community building in addition to academic discussions
- A backchannel etiquette will need to be developed
- A teacher-endorsed chatroom will increase the academic quality of the discussion
- Educators will need to experiment with ways in which technology can best be incorporated into the classroom
- The backchannel should take advantage of the benefits of learner's multi-tasking while reducing the disadvantages of multi-tasking
- In higher education environments with access to teaching assistants, the assistant should monitor the backchannel, providing real-time question and answer sessions and acting as a mediator between the professor and the students
- Backchannel discussions should be monitored to stay on-topic
- A culture will develop around the virtual community and it is important that the culture be one of learning, respect, engagement, and participation
- Educators need to better understand why users choose to participate in the backchannel and take advantage of these properties
The eroding distinction between the cultures surrounding education, work, play, and technology poses new methodological challenges within the learning environment. What are learners' rights with regards to wireless use in the classroom? Designing for new educational environments using these technologies requires the use of iterative and reflective design methods to explore what works, what is important, and how it enhances learning. This is the subject that we hope our project will help to grow and explore.
Read more under our research page