ClassChat

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ClassChat

• Steve Chan
• Sarita Yardi
• Sarai Mitnick

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Needs Assessment
I have needs!

• Interviews with 3 SIMS professors
• Professors concerned about what is happening on
  a backchannel is it productive? Is it sniping?
• Should the channel be anonymous?
• Can it encourage more classroom discussion and
  promote legitimate discussion? How can we measure
  it?
• Usefulness depends on class size
• Bottom Line Will it promote or distract from
  teaching?

What about my needs?
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Needs Assessment Graphs of Usage Distributions
Thats Zipfs Law in math gibberish.
What does that mean? Help!!!
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Prototype feedback

• Second round of interviews with prototype
• Likes
• Zoom into a time period to see chat
• Clickable calendar
• Highlight on mouseover
• Realtime sliding scale
• Natural language processing
• Possible use for grading class participation
  total average participation lines
• Dislikes
• Drop down menus
• Overlapping pastel lines,
• Need to clarify what high and low participation
  rates mean,
• Hard to see what any particular user is doing,
• How can we tell if a student actually understands
  the material?

Aha a prototype! Feature-fantasy!
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ClassChat Screenshot
It uses AJAX and Web 2.0 tech!
Its 1 million percent Buzzword compliant!
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ClassChat Features
Martin Wattenberg loads Everything into the
client For his visualizations!
Martin Wattenberg is my hero!
Theres a 4500 word frequency table on the
client side!
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Social Network Analysis
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Testing ClassChat
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Testing ClassChat
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Some database analysts are completely
compulsive. They have obsessive compulsive
disorder. Theyll normalize to the Nth degree
They have these very complicated tables that
require a huge amount of performance
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Meanwhile, on ClassChat
31635 OCD normalizing to the nth degree
31655 where n goes to infiniti
31703 I'd like to catch a ride with n as it
goes to infinity, never been there
31730 hitch a ride on the infiniti train?
31832 staple myself to an n
31904 I've never been to N, only N-1.
Everytime I iterate, just as I'm about to
get to n, the loop ends
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_at_grouphug
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(No Transcript)
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Distraction and Multi-Tasking
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Panacea?
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constructive uses of disruptive technologies
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Vignette 1 Essence of Tablehood
What is tablehood? What is the essence of
tables?
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ClassChat threads

• 143021 Student4 "the essence of tablehood"
• 143039 Student23 La Mesa
• 143105 Student23 My consulting business will be
  mesa-hood

Joke
Connection to other material

• 143041 Student4 Any InfoVizzers here? Reminds
  me of the Steve Few Designing for Tables book!

• 143809 Student31 the Bible sez Jesus turned
  over the tables... Even Jesus didn't like
  tables!!!!!
• 143926 Student4 except the fat table at the
  Last Supper
• 144010 Student23 Well, some tables are good.
  The Last Supper table had real content and
  structure.

Joke
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When is a joke more than a joke?
I think it reinforces the class participation in
an odd sort of way. Theres a place to talk,
exchange ideas. The professors up there
crafting this thought, people have thoughts about
that, theyre making jokes. You hear an idea,
make a joke of it, youve just used something you
just got. Being able to form a joke means
youve got it. It also ties the group together
outside and between classrooms.
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Vignette 2 The crowd goes wild!
I have my examples backwards in the
slides! See why this is great, I argue against
my own slide here. But I think you get the idea
that you can see both kinds of arguments. I have
captions but maybe there is a different kind of
caption and it depends on what kind of caption
And theyre going wild in the chatroom.
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Meanwhile, on ClassChat
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Vignette 3 Pondering the Tortilla
Document Engineering Lecture April 10, 2006

8 flour tortillas
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Vignette 3 Pondering the Tortilla
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Meanwhile, on ClassChat
150531 recipes... I always get hungry when we
talk food... 150634 yeah, seems like a cool
thing to model, that is, modeling the cost model
of constraints 150946 This just makes me want
to go get food. 150951 wondering about
'academic nutritional' value of a given class...
25 of RDA of concepts related to topic on task
list... 151024 ...perpetually off
topic 151036 very interesting way to appraoch
a course - don't you think though that's the
grading breakdown or the syllabus? 151109 this
is making me hungary 151125 "Is a tortilla a
standard unit of measurement?"

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Interviews

• Some professors think, if you dont have
  anything else to do, then youll pay attention.
  I feel like its almost insecurity, that
  professors are worried that people arent paying
  attention, they get a little pissy about it.
• I do occasionally feel kind of guilty about it,
  I should be paying attention to the class.
  Especially when things get out of hand and
  people start laughing, I think, we shouldnt be
  doing this
• If profs are afraid of people chatting, they
  should suggest things to chat about. People
  would conform, youd see the numbers change
  radically in the word-topic ratio.

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Some Findings
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Recommendations

• The backchannel will vary across different
  contexts and domains
• Teaching styles should take advantage of the
  social and educational affordances
• Chatrooms should enable teacher self-assessment
• A backchannel should encourage social
  interactions and community building

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Thank You!

• Peter Lyman, our advisor.
• Bob Glushko and the Document Engineering
  students, our guinea pigs.
• The entire iSchool community, and especially the
  backchannel participants.