Multi-touch versus single touch: which is best for supporting collaborative learning?
Event details
| Date | 24.06.2009 |
| Hour | 14:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Yvonne Rogers, The Open University, UK |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Recently, there has been much interest in how tabletops can support collaborative learning. Smart Table has now reached the classroom. Several claims have been made about the benefits of providing multi-touch horizontal interfaces including encouraging more equitable participation than vertical surfaces and reduced social awkwardness compared to PCs. The shared interactive surface - that allows more than one person to interact with digital content simultaneously - is assumed to provide new opportunities for groups of children to learn together. As part of our research on the ShareIT project we have been conducting studies that have been investigating these claims. In one of our studies, we compared groups of children working around a multi-touch surface - where all children could interact with the digital content - versus a multi-touch tabletop which was constrained so that only one child could interact with it at a given time. The task involved planning and designing a classroom layout. Our findings showed that children talked more about their designs in the multiple-touch condition than they did in the single-touch condition. However, in the single-touch condition, talk about turn taking was more frequent and appeared to replace discussion about design. Hence, it seems, that while multi-touch can facilitate collaboration, forcing children to take turns rather than allowing for a free-for-all can result in more awareness of the other children's interactions. In my talk, I will discuss reasons for this. I will finish by describing our design framework that considers the effects of constraining a collaborative learning activity either by encouraging, enabling or enforcing, in terms of the physical space, the technology, the software and the learning task.
Prof. Roger's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free