Alan Zemel

The Joint Organization of Interaction within a Multimodal CSCL Medium

In order to collaborate effectively in group discourse on a topic like mathematical patterns, group participants must organize their activities in ways that share the significance of their utterances, inscriptions, and behaviors. Here, we report the results of a ethnomethodological case study of collaborative math problem-solving activities mediated by a synchronous multimodal online environment. We investigate the moment-by-moment details of the interaction practices through which participants organize their chat utterances and whiteboard actions as a coherent whole. This approach to analysis foregrounds the sequentiality of action and the implicit referencing of meaning making—fundamental features of interaction. In particular, we observe that the sequential construction of shared drawings and the deictic references that link chat messages to features of those drawings and to prior chat content are instrumental in the achievement of intersubjectivity among group members’ understandings. We characterize this precondition of collaboration as the co-construction of an indexical field that functions as a common ground for group cognition. Our analysis reveals methods by which the group co-constructs meaningful inscriptions in the dual-interaction spaces of its CSCL environment. The integration of graphical, narrative, and symbolic semiotic modalities in this manner also facilitates joint problem solving. It allows group members to invoke and operate with multiple realizations of their mathematical artifacts, a characteristic of deep learning of mathematics.

Analyzing the organization of collaborative math problem-solving in online chats using statistics and conversation analysis

In this paper we describe how a statistical test on a hypothesis regarding collaborative math problem solving using online chats showed an unexpected result, whose understanding required the use of qualitative methods. The phenomenon behind the result is identified using Conversation Analysis. This paper demonstrates the importance of using qualitative methods to describe the perspective of participants as a way of interpreting statistical results, revising hypotheses and developing alternative coding schemes and procedures. The combined approach of quantitative and qualitative methods is applied on real data coming from Virtual Math Teams research project (Drexel University) and is identifying issues not addressed so far in the analysis of online collaborative group activity.

What are We Missing? Usability's Indexical Ground

In this paper, we describe how usability provides the indexical ground upon which design work in a surgery is achieved. Indexical and deictic referential practices are used (1) to constitute participation frameworks and work sites in an instructional surgery and (2) to encode and manage participants’ differential access to the relevancies and background knowledge required for the achievement of a successful surgical outcome. As a site for both learning and work, the operating room afforded us the opportunity to examine how usability, which is a critical design consideration, can be used as a resource for learning in interaction. In our detailed analysis of the interaction among participants (both co-present and projected) we sought to describe a particular case of how usability was produced as a relevant consideration for surgical education in the operating room. In doing so, we demonstrate a set of members’ methods by which actors worked to establish and provide for the relevance of the anticipated needs of projected users as part of developing an understanding of their current activity.

Reading’s Work in VMT

This chapter presents a systematics of chat interaction. Online chats are advantageous sites for examining the organization of social interaction as achieved through computer-mediated communication. Chats differ from talk-in-interaction since the composition and visual inspection of text and graphical objects by any given actor is not observable by other participants. These structural constraints on the organization of interaction require that actors deploy alternative procedures for achieving what turn taking achieves in talk-in-interaction.

Texts-in-interaction: collaborative problem-solving in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication

Quasi-synchronous chat consists of the production and posting of text messages in an online environment. It differs from face-to-face talk-in-interaction in a number of important ways that are significant for participants in the chats and methodologically in terms of the way analysis can be conducted and the kinds of analytical claims that can be made. The perspective adopted in this paper is that chat interaction can be considered the computer-mediated production and reading of texts-in-interaction. However, since the production of a posted text is usually not available to anyone but the author of that text, I am not concerned with the production of posted texts. Rather, I am concerned with the way texts, as produced artifacts, are organized to be read by recipients. In particular, I consider ways in which quasi-synchronous chat postings provide instruction in their design for how they are to be read by recipients of these postings.

The organization of collaborative math problem solving activities across dual interaction spaces

In this paper we focus on the organization of activities that produce shared graphical representations on the whiteboard of a CSCL system with dual interaction spaces called VMT Chat, and the ways these representations are used in conjunction with chat postings as semiotic resources by interactants as they jointly make sense of and build upon each others mathematical statements.

Problematizing the Problem

Our interest is in methods used by participants in a Problem-based Learning (PBL) tutorial to recognize and mark a problem in shared understanding. We investigate how this is accomplished in a distributed meeting conducted via a chat interface. Doing so poses an interactional problem for participants and the sorts of solutions that they work out is our object of study here. We observe that a shared understanding becomes problematic through what we term a problematizing move. For an utterance to serve as a problematizing move, however, it must be followed by an uptake move on the part of one or more interlocutors. We argue that the methods members employ for problematizing problems are both important elements of what it means to do PBL and visible aspects of how learning itself is accomplished as a socially-organized practice.

Combining Coding and Conversation Analysis of VMT Chats

This chapter considers the relationship between statistical analysis of coding based on theoretical schemes and conversation analysis of VMT participants’ structuring of their chats. It describes how a statistical test on a hypothesis regarding collaboration in VMT showed an unexpected result, whose understanding required the use of qualitative methods. The phenomenon behind the puzzling result was idenepsied using conversation analysis. The chapter explores an approach to coding based on analysis of how sequences of discussion of different topics are defined interactionally by chat participants as accomplishments of their postings. A form of “mixed methods” is proposed using codes for the different sequences and displaying the ordering of these longer sequences of interaction or compiling statistics of these codes.

The disembodied act: copresence and indexical symmetry in computer-mediated communication

CSCL has recently begun to consider how shared understanding is achieved in computer-mediated interactional environments. In this paper, we explore how actors produce and maintain indexical symmetry and reciprocity of perspectives in online chat by establishing reciprocal fields of copresence. We use ethnomethodologically informed analysis to describe the interactional methods by which actors establish indexical symmetry and reciprocal fields of copresence.

Studying and Supporting Collaborative Care Processes

In patient care today, teams of practitioners from various disciplines must coordinate their efforts in order to deliver care successfully. Frontline nurses and physicians must interact with social workers, therapists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and others to develop and carry out coordinated plans of care. Also, clinical team members must communicate with patients and their families in language that can be understood and acted upon. In support of these goals, JCAHO standards require patient care to be planned and provided in an interdisciplinary, collaborative manner. As hospital units develop processes for collaborative care in complex environments such as post-surgery and critical care units, it is important to understand what constitutes success for these processes and how they can be enabled and supported. This report documents a series of field visits and simulations designed to observe, videotape, and interview collaborative care team members, patients, and family members engaged in varying forms of collaborative practice. This ongoing research is being conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of medical and social scientists with a shared goal of studying and supporting collaborative care processes.