Our Papers
A selection of papers on the role of chat in the classroom:
Final Project Submitted to UC Berkeley's School of Information for the Requirements for the Masters in Information Management and Systems, May 2006
Noise or Knowledge: The Role of an IRC Backchannel Chat in an Academic Community
Related Work
A discussion of related work and visualizations.
Visualizations of iSchool Chat Logs
iSchool students engaged in online discussion on their own IRC channel beginning in the Fall of 2004. Interactions occurred both inside and outside of class, when users were co-present or in separate physical environments. Conversations sometimes augmented class discussion, allowing for different types of in-class participation, as well as the sharing of relevant material, resoureces, and URLs.
The images below highlight a few of the iSchool IRC channel statistics. They were produced with IRC log data and Tableau and Spotfire analysis software tools.
Total Chat Entries By User Between Oct 2004 and Oct 2005
Any member of the iSchool community has access to the backchannel.
Most students have entered the backchannel at least once, although not all of them have and some only enter it sporadically.
A visualization of users indicates that usage follows a Power Law curve.
Usage follows an exponential drop off with a gradual decline at the tail end of the curve.
Trends in Chat Log Use over 24 Hours
Participants in the iSchool chatroom are driven by a desire for a sense of community.
People are "searching for a feeling of community that's been lost as many "third places"
(not work, not home, but a third place where people congregate and interact) have closed down."
There are many indicators of the iSchool backchannel as a third place.
Participant usage increased during class time but also in the evenings, as this graph shows.
This suggests that an in-class chat tool could be enhanced by out of class uses, such as study sessions.
Peaks in Usage During Class Hours in Fall 2004
Chat use peaks during class hours, indicating that students voluntarily choose to participate in the chatroom while in class.
Student motivations will have to be further analyzed to determine how to facilitate similar motivations when the backchannel is
an academically drive environment, rather than a combination of academic and social.
Number of Chat Entries Over First Six Weeks of Spring 2005 Academic Semester
User count is plotted versus the first six weeks of the Spring 2005 academic semester.
Visualizations of user entries versus time periods highlights adoption curves over time.
The visualization suggests that community participation increases as the academic semester progresses.