A multimedia-enhanced collaborative learning environment

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2000) 16, 2-13

2000 Blackwell Science Ltd 2

A multimedia-enhanced collaborativelearning environment

C-K. Looi & D. AngKent Ridge Digital Labs and School of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract The proliferation of the Internet has brought about the notionof online virtual communities. One enabling technology for onlinecommunities is multiuser environments such as Multi-User Dimensions(MUDs) and Object-Oriented MUDS (MOOs). These text-basedcollaborative learning environments have recently have been integratedwith the World Wide Web, thus harnessing the graphics andmultimedia-rich environments available therein. Learners can directlyexperience, manipulate, and create objects in their rich multimedia form.MUDs and MOOs are augmented with synchronous collaborationtechnology that provided simultaneous control and viewing of shareddocuments and applications. In this paper, we describe a multimedia-enhanced MOO system called SpaceALIVE! and our experiences from apilot project involving Singapore students who use SpaceALIVE! as acollaborative learning environment are reported.

Keywords: Action research; Collaboration; Communication; MUDs;Secondary; Science

Introduction

The advent and proliferation of the Internet has brought about a powerful set ofideas emerging around the notion of an online community — a group of peoplewith common interests and goals, connecting regularly online, communicating,sharing, constructing, learning, playing, working or building. If this community isviewed as a place where people come together to construct knowledge and negotiatemeanings together, then this is consistent with recent notions of learning. Learningis seen from the perspective of participating in a ‘knowledge-building community’(Scardamalia et al., 1994), a ‘community of practice’ (Lave et al., 1991) or‘community of learners’ (Brown et al., 1992) . In such communities, learning is an‘intermental process’ (Edwards et al., 1989; Morrison et al., 1995: Vygotsky et al.,1978) that takes place in the context of real-time discourse. Knowledgeinternalisation occurs when this interpersonal process which happens at the sociallevel is transformed into an intrapersonal process happening at the individual level.

Many researchers have worked on designing technology environments andstudying ways of using these environments for supporting these contructivistapproaches to learning. This paper looks at a specific kind of technology

Accepted 12 March 1999

Correspondence: Chee-Kit Looi, Kent Ridge Digital Labs, 21 Heng Mui TerraceSingapore 119613 Email: [email protected]

3 C-K. Looi & D. Ang

2000 Blackwell Science Ltd, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 16, 2-13

environment: Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs) and MUDs Object-Oriented(MOOs). Recent advancements in World Wide Web technology have enabledMUDs and MOOs to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of the web.These technology innovations open up new possibilities in broadening the use oftraditionally text-based MUDs and MOOs.

Looi (1999) describes a framework for thinking about the roles of multimedia-enhanced MOOs (called WOOs) in supporting different approaches to learning.The spatial metaphor in WOOs, object construction, manipulation and persistence,and support for real-time collaboration make it possible to provide virtualenvironments for instruction, construction, communication, and situated learning.Learners can directly experience, manipulate, and create objects in a richmultimedia form. WOOs are augmented with synchronous collaboration technologythat provides simultaneous control and viewing of shared documents andapplications.

This paper describes the design of a WOO called SpaceALIVE! Varioussynchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools provided in the WOO arediscussed. Finally, there is a discussion of some of the online interactions and useof SpaceALIVE! tools arising from a pilot project involving Singapore students whoused this WOO as a collaborative learning environment.

Text-based communicative and constructive environments

A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, Dimension or Domain) is a software program thataccepts ‘connections’ from multiple users across the Internet and provides to eachuser access to an imaginary on-line environment. This environment is usuallyorganised as a city, campus or building with a collection of rooms, exits, andobjects in the rooms. As learners move about in a MUD, they read what is beingsaid in the room and can join in the conversation, talk in private with otherlearners, manipulate objects in the room (pat a cat, play a video tape, use tools, etc.)or move to other rooms. Learners can also create new objects and give thembehaviours.

A MUD is thus a kind of virtual reality that learners can visit developed fromearly computer games where users could walk from room to room, gettingdescriptions of things seen and interacting with these things. MUDs include combatand role-playing games as well as social spaces. The object of an educational MUDis however, not to kill the monsters and find the treasure, but to interact sociallyand create personal places, rooms or objects. A MOO is a MUD built using object-oriented technology that makes it easier for learners to create new objects.

Users of a MUD or MOO interact only in text with each other. When users ‘say’something, it is heard by others in the same room. If Serena types:

say hishe will see:You say, ‘hi’,while everyone else in the room sees:Serena says, ‘hi’She can also ‘emote’ to express emotions or act. If she types:emote smileseveryone in the room including her will see:Serena smiles.She expresses her thoughts explicitly using ‘think’. If she types:

A collaborative learning environment �


think This conversation is not going anywhere!everyone in the room including her will see:Serena. o O (This conversation is not going anywhere!)

A MOO, as a text-based collaborative world on the Internet where graphics live inthe mind’s eye, offers teachers and students an unusual way to combine classroomcontent with imagination (Dyrli et al. 1996). MOOs provide authentic reading andwriting environments. Students will encounter just about every grammar lesson,reading lesson, spelling lesson and writing lesson that would be presented in atraditional manner. MOOs emphasise important educational skills such as learning,building, communicating, cooperating, experimenting, interacting socially and areuseful for learning foreign languages.

WOOs: multimedia-enhanced MOOs

In recent years, MOO technology has been advanced through integration with theWorld Wide Web (see for example, ChibaMOO, CardiffMOO, Hypertext Hotel,WaxWeb (Epstein et al., 1995). WW-based MOOs (known as WOOs) combine thegraphic capabilities of the WWW with the synchronous capabilities and flexibilityof the text-based MOOs.

http server

MOO server

Collaborationtools

Java applet

Fig. 1. Sychronised web-based MOO environment

A WOO called SpaceALIVE! has been built; this integrates the text-based MOOwith the World-Wide Web. It communicates through HTTP and HTML protocols,thereby supporting multimedia on the web page. SpaceALIVE! can be accessedfrom a Java-enabled browser. The SpaceALIVE! client is a normal web browserwith a special Java applet running at the bottom as a telnet session and connectingback to the MOO server for all MOO activities (Fig. 1). SpaceALIVE! exploits thecombined power and ubiquity of the WWW, Netscape, and Java.

A learner can navigate in this environment either by typing commands in theMOO part, or by clicking hyperlinks in the web page. SpaceALIVE! willautomatically synchronise the web page with the MOO part. Thus, if a users types‘science’ to go to the Science room, they will not only see the text description of theScience room and the objects and users in it, but a web page associated with andrepresenting the Science room.

These web pages can also embed a Virtual Reality Modelling Language(VRML) view as well as include audio and video files. Web pages containing



pictures, sounds and videos can be created as a WOO object by a user and viewedconcurrently by other users. The basic idea is to link MOO objects or actions onobjects with their web-page ‘equivalents’. There is also a rich set of user tools thatallow beginners to create MOO objects and associate HTML links with themwithout having to write code in MOO.

Collaboration tools in SpaceALIVE!

This section introduces the suite of collaboration objects and tools available in theSpaceALIVE! environment for supporting collaboration. These tools were designedbased on the following principles:• Fully integrated environment: SpaceALIVE! provides an simple environment

for collaboration. Students do not need to go outside the environment to dodifferent tasks.

• Easy access to facilitate adoption in schools: Any user need only have anInternet connection and a Java-enabled browser to access SpaceALIVE! There isno need to download and install any other client software.

• Transparent technology: The environment is organised spatially and the toolsare meant to be intuitive to use as they are modelled on tools used in humancollaboration.

• Facilitating knowledge construction: Tools are provided to enable easyconstruction of artefacts like web pages.

• Supporting different collaboration modes: SpaceALIVE! provides affordancesfor supporting different modes of collaboration and engagement: asynchronousand synchronous collaboration, supporting one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communication, peripheral or full participation, informal and formaldiscussions, and adhoc or scheduled interactions.

Tools for Sharing: Conversation propsSpaceALIVE! has a number of educational objects or tools that can be used forgroup discussion purposes, such as white board and web projectors. These objectsallow the sharing of pictures, diagrams, text and web pages by a group of studentsin the same room. The web projector is analogous to an overhead projector. Itallows a student or teacher to create slides as web pages and display them to otherstudents gathered in the room. A group or discussion leader controls the running ofthe web projector to deliver multimedia slides onto the web part of the interface,and uses the text-based MOO part to promote a group discussion (Fig. 1). In thisway, the group leader can manage the sharing of common artefacts as a basis forreference and discussion. As MOOs are active spaces, students should beencouraged to be spontaneous and respond to the group leader as the presentationor discussion proceeds. Students can also use the internal MOO mail system to sendemails to each other.

SpaceALIVE! enables multiusers to log onto a common and sharedenvironment, communicate, discuss, explore, manipulate and create commonobjects together. One type of collaboration tool is shared and public folders. Astudent can create a document (say a MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint or HTMLdocument) and upload it as a document in a shared folder. Other students in thesame WOO room can access this shared folder. to retrieve and coedit them.Another type of collaboration tool is a shared-URL-list and URL-on-the-fly. All



students can create there own shared-URL-list that can be accessed by otherstudents. The student can also choose to show a URL-on-the-fly and project it to thebrowser windows of other students in the same room.

Construction toolsWOOs provide an excellent environment for students to use ‘mindtools’ toconstruct knowledge on an individual basis and especially on a social basis.Mindtools engage and enhance thinking in students and help them to recognise,judge and organise patterns of information (Jonassen et al., 1996) Mindtools for theconstruction of knowledge include semantic networks, spreadsheets, databases,expert system shells, and computational tools like calculation, graphing, andcharting tools. Typically in a text-based MOO world, a student has to program inthe MOO language in order to create objects and verbs. In SpaceALIVE!, a suite ofstudent-friendly form-based tools are provided that can be used to create simplecontent without the need to write MOO code. For example, Fig. 2 shows ascreenshot of a simple tool that allows a student to create a MOO object by typingin its name various descriptions, and uploading the web-page associated with this

object. In a WOO, users who can express themselves visually using computer toolsfor creating graphics, can add a new perspective to the worlds that were formerlylimited to text.

Discussion forumsCommunicative tools enable students to construct common understandings of ideasjointly. SpaceALIVE! provides message boards which serve as discussion forums tosupport the joint construction of knowledge asynchronously by students. Theseprovide ongoing, permanent, topic-oriented discussions in which anyone canparticipate.

Fig. 2. Form-based tool to create simple objects



Organising content, artefacts and conversational propsA WOO can be used to organise and store the content created for or created by thestudents. Students can design the layout of the interconnections between rooms,create educational or project materials, messages and notes, and organise them inintuitive ways. These educational objects include books, bookshelf, notes,whiteboard and notice board.

Logging discussions for reflectionAn important benefit of a WOO is the ‘logging’ or recording of online sessions ordiscussions. These logs can be made available to students after the class, either byemail or as a web-page which can be accessed by the students. Students can discussa topic online or read a transcript of the discussion and write minutes of it. A WOOprovides an effective tool for students to reflect upon their learning experiences.The students’ own interactions and experience become subject matter to investigate,thereby providing opportunities for practising metacognitive skills. InSpaceALIVE!, the recording feature is provided by the logger tool which can beactivated by a user or programmed to activate automatically when certain eventsoccur.

In summary, the collaboration tools that serve as conversation props includeweb pages, web projectors, whiteboard and MOO transcripts. Collaboration toolsinclude MOO dialogues, shared folders, shared URLs, message board, and emails.

ScienceALIVE! II project with Singapore students

So far, the rationale for the design of the SpaceALIVE! has been discussed andthere is an expectation that students would use it in certain ways for learning andcollaboration. But what would be the actual experience of students using such anenvironment? Two SpaceALIVE! projects were setup with the objective ofproviding a testbed for the collaborative technology as well as finding out howstudents would use such an environment for collaboration and construction.ScienceALIVE! I was a project involving over 60 students from 10 secondaryschools. One of the objectives was to provide an integrated environment through ITfor pupils from different schools to cooperate and collaborate on an educationalproject. ScienceALIVE! I provided the opportunity to sort out several operationalproblems such as providing Internet access to the participating schools, andtechnical problems with the SpaceALIVE! software. It also allowed highlightedchange management challenges such as initiating such an Internet collaborativeproject to teachers and students who are new to such an online experience.

ScienceALIVE! II focused on the collaboration of a smaller group of students. Itinvolved two Singapore secondary schools and one Hong Kong secondary school.In ScienceALIVE! II, students from different schools formed project teams to doresearch on a science topic and publish their findings as a virtual science exhibit.Teachers from the various participating schools and researchers from the NationalInstitute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, provided support for theteams to work together. This community of students, teachers, technical experts,and researchers interacted in face-to-face meetings as well as online usingSpaceALIVE!. The paper goes on to discuss some of the observations arising fromthe ScienceALIVE! II project.



An outline of ScienceALIVE! IIStudents from the three schools decided on a science topic on which to researchwith the help of the teachers. Each project team had an appointed leader and also ateacher in-charge. Students worked on four investigative science topics: futurehome, aroma therapy, acid rain, and natural paint.

During the project, technical experts logged on regularly to provide onlineassistance to the students when they encountered technical problems or difficulties.Teachers logged on regularly to facilitate student’s online discussions viaSpaceALIVE! They also provided offline assistance to the students within their ownschool. The project teams were encouraged to negotiate on some common times tomeet virtually to work on the project.

The research data was collected in the form of ethnographic notes of projectgroup activities, interviews conducted with students, online conversation logs,constructed web pages, minutes of meetings, student journals, and other datalogged in the system. The students collaboration face-to-face was observed whenthey were being trained and subsequently through online observations.Questionnaires were given to the student participants and online interviews wereconducted with some of them.

Brief description of the investigation on aroma therapyOne of the projects is on the topic of aroma therapy. The latter can be used as aneffective way to relieve stress, headaches, muscular tension and other functions.The students did some experiments to investigate the effectiveness of the aromatherapy which is a form of herbal medicine that uses the essential oils of plants toheal, stimulate, or relax a patient through application (massage) or inhalation.Aroma therapists point out that just as odours can evoke strong psychological andemotional responses, other fragrances can stimulate the immune, circulatory andneurological systems in predictable and useful ways. The observations and analysisof the data, identified several emerging themes:

1. Team cohesivenessStudents did build up team cohesiveness through online interactions. The aromatherapy project involved only the two local schools (School A and B). An initialmeeting for the students of the two schools had the purpose of allowing themintroduce themselves, and they arranged for subsequent online meetings. Thestudents started the meeting with an introduction that was facilitated by theresearcher. However, as the conversation proceeded, students from School Abecame rather impatient and wanted to go ahead to discuss the project. Thetranscript below shows a segment of their online discourse.

(Lavish, Aroma-Brats, Aroma_Gel, Aroma_Maniac are from School A, while Mintand her members are from School B. Daniel is the facilitator.)Lavish says, ‘mint, who are your team members, and where are u from?’Aroma_Gel. o O (start quick.)Aroma_Maniac says, ‘start???’Mint says, ‘my members are rosemary, calamint, oregano’Daniel says, ‘Hi All Aromas: you have work on this project before, please take thelead’Aroma_Tick says, ‘yep. we are getting inpatient!!!!’Rosemary says, ‘hi to everyone’Calamint [to Aroma-Tick]: are you the leader?



Aroma_Brats says, ‘WHY DON’T WE GET THIS INTRO BUSINESS OVERWITH’Aroma_Maniac. o O (it seems that the proj. is advancing very slowly.)Aroma_Gel. o O (lavish is the leader)Lavish says, ‘I am the leader’Aroma_Gel. o O (lavish is the leader)Aroma_Maniac. says, ‘lets start’Daniel [to lavish,]: please take the lead by telling the members what you have done.

School A had a head start in the project because their school had conducted someinvestigation into aroma therapy in a previous science project. So they came wellprepared with plans and procedure for the experiments. This was probably one ofthe reasons for their impatience. However, the group was able to work bettertogether in the subsequent meetings.

2. NegotiationMany of the MOO dialogues were conversations and negotiations on what taskswere to be carried out and how were they to be carried out. In the aroma therapyproject, one major issue they faced was what type of subjects to use for theexperiments. Students from School A wanted to experiment on hamsters whilestudents from School B wanted to experiment on human beings. The transcriptbelow shows a segment of the negotiation process.

(Lavish and Aroma_Maniac are from School A, while Calamint andOregano are from School B. Daniel is the facilitator.)Calamint says, ‘we r not doing the experiment on hamsters’Mint says, ‘we are doing on human’Calamint says, ‘our teacher asks us to concentrate on the one on human only’Aroma_Maniac asks, ‘why cant do hamsters?’Lavish says, ‘but we are supposed to have a fair experiment’Oregano says, ‘we do our way u do your own way’Calamint says, ‘but our teacher say do human only’Lavish asks, ‘are there any problems?’Oregano says, ‘no problems’Aroma_Maniac asks, ‘we may not achieve same results u know?’Lavish says, ‘the project requires two sides to perform the same experiments topresent our answers’Oregano says, ‘of course’Lavish asks, ‘so?’Lavish asks, ‘how are we going to do it if you are not doing it?’Calamint says, ‘but our teacher say that’Oregano says, ‘we should collaborate with each other, we should think of what to dofirst than confirm’Lavish says, ‘please clarify with your teacher’Oregano says, ‘u all r just like forcing us to do something that it is your way uknow’.

School A’s students had been insistent on experimenting on hamsters because theyhad already done some work on it. However, students from School B were ratherreluctant because of the cost of purchasing the hamsters and also the effort neededin looking after them. They did finally resolve the problem and proceeded toconduct the experiments on human beings.

A collaborative learning environment ��


3. Sharing ideasSharing ideas is a prominent theme in the collaborations. Students shared theirideas through the MOO dialogues, by expressing them in web pages or by postingthem into their personal folders (Fig. 3). To a lesser extent, students used thediscussion forum to post questions or answers questions.

Fig. 3 Students posting and sharing experimental ideas

The sharing of ideas among students is particularly important for collaborativegroups. When ideas are shared among the group, learning occurs (Bielaczyc et al.,1998). In the aroma therapy project, students from School A shared theirexperimental procedures with School B, and subsequently School B adopted thesame procedures. Both sides did similar experiments, posted their results to the webpages and compared their findings (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. Students sharing and comparing experimental results



4. FacilitationFacilitation can be at three levels: technical, project and content. It was observedthat students needed more help initially on the technical aspects of usingSpaceALIVE! and having someone to assist them was crucial in the project. Thenext level was facilitating the progress of the project. The teachers as well as theresearchers served as facilitators. The teachers helped the students with knowledgecontent and resources needed for the project, such as materials for the experimentsand computer resources. The researcher helped to facilitate the online meetingoccasionally to ensure that the students stayed focused.

5. Use of collaboration toolsDuring the training provided to the students in the use of SpaceALIVE! tools, therewas an emphasis on the use of certain tools that students should know about to getgoing. Students used MOO dialogues, emails, personal folders, WOO rooms toorganise and share their ideas and content, and the construction tools to uploadtheir content into the WOO rooms.Each student was provided with a personal folder in SpaceALIVE! where theystored files containing information to be shared with other students. The personalfolder provided a convenient way of sharing information as other students can pickup the files from the folder at any time. Most of the students made use of this toolregularly to exchange information. Initially, to encourage students to use this tool,the ScienceALIVE! questionnaires were put into the researcher’s personal folder forthe students to pick up. Initially some students had problem knowing how to usethe tool but with some coaching they were able to use it for the project.

Students were encouraged to use the discussion forum to post questions and tocoordinated online meetings during the researcher’s visits. However it was usedmuch less than expected. One of the main reasons for this was that when studentsposted into the discussion forums, they were not sure if the others actually readtheir messages. In this regard, emails were used more often as E-mail: messageswere seen as always reaching their recipients and grabbing their attention. Most ofthe online meetings were arranged using the MOO dialogue.

Students used the web uploader quite frequently as this provided a convenientway for the students to upload information that they had published as web pages asa result of the collaboration in the ScienceALIVE! rooms. One of the majorproblems with using this tool was the coordination of the web pages to be uploaded.For example, one school may have certain information that they want to publish,and the other school may have other information to publish as well. The tool doesnot allow the students to specify links to existing web pages. In other words, thestructure of home page must be designed first with the links to other web pagescreated by other students. Thus much coordination is required in the co-construction of web pages.

Students used distance presentation tools and the logger to a much lesser extent.The former were perceived to be more useful for distance teaching than forcollaboration. Students also did not perceive the need to use them in the context ofthe ScienceALIVE! projects. Some students used the logger when they wereresponsible for writing minutes of online meetings.

Overall, the main finding was that facilitation is key to getting students to knowhow to collaborate with each other, and to know how to use the SpaceALIVE! tools

A collaborative learning environment ��


to support their collaboration and project work.

Conclusion

Several researchers have articulated their vision of a social or distributed ornetworked-based learning environment (Chan et al., 1997; Pea et al., 1994).Commercial companies have also offered distributed learning environments(McGreal, 1998).

This paper considered a class of such distributed learning environment inWOOs. A specific distributed learning environment in SpaceALIVE! was described.The design of SpaceALIVE! was based on the belief that the MOO spatialmetaphor, object construction and manipulation, object persistence, and varioussupport tools for collaboration, are consistent with theoretical models of aknowledge building community or a community of learners, as well as next-generation collaborative work technologies (Schlager et al., 1996).

The observations and analysis rising from the ScienceALIVE! II project showsthat students enjoyed the experience and benefited from collaborating on a projectusing the collaboration environment and tools in SpaceALIVE! A rich softwareenvironment with many collaboration tools was provided and it was found thatstudents appropriated and only used tools that they were familiar with and forwhich they saw the purpose. Facilitation of the students in the process ofcollaboration and in knowing how to use the tools for collaboration is key tomaking SpaceALIVE! and WOOs in general useful for students’ learning.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the students, teachers and principals of the Bendemeer SecondarySchool, Bukit Panjang Government School, and King’s College, who were involvedin ScienceALIVE! II.

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A multimedia-enhanced collaborative learning environment