Roy Pargas

Making Every Voice Count: Enhancing Learning Through Social Computing

Biography
Roy P. Pargas (Ph.D. Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Clemson University. One of his interests is in developing tools to support the instructor teaching courses in technology-enhanced classrooms, i.e., in which all students arrive with laptop computers with access to the Internet. Two of his current projects are MessageGrid (described in this position paper) and developing Tablet PC software that demonstrate and animate concepts in courses like CS4 (Algorithms and Data Structures) and CS3 (Computer Organization).

Position Paper
Social computing activities are not usually welcome in the classroom. Instructors prefer that student attention be focused on the instructor, on the PowerPoint presentation, on the whiteboard, or on a passage in a book, and certainly not on writing email, instant-messaging, or participating in chatroom discussion. Most instructors have concluded, of course, that such activity inevitably leads to unproductive socializing, distraction, and a general waste of class time.

We submit that this need not be the case and that, with the right software tools, learning in and out of the classroom can be achieved, indeed enhanced, through carefully structured social computing activities.

A growing number of colleges and universities today require entering first-year students to have laptop computers with wireless access to the Internet. Instructors at such schools who require their students to bring their laptops to class can, with the right software tools, design creative and structured classroom exercises. The exercises can supplement course content provided by the instructor through lecture. Students learn by doing, i.e., by solving problems designed to bring out subtle aspects of the theory.

An example of such a tool is a web-based software package called MessageGrid, currently being developed at Clemson University. MessageGrid enables instructors of laptop-enhanced courses to conduct recitation or elicit student participation in structured class activities. The tool enables an instructor to provide a grid-like interface which students can access through their browsers and to which students can post responses to an assignment given by the instructor.

The tool goes far beyond a discussion board or a chatroom, both of which impose a linear ordering to responses from students. In MessageGrid, the instructor creates a grid, labels rows and columns, and instructs students to provide specific submissions to grid cells. A single cell may contain one or more submissions. Submissions may be documents, images, audio, URLs, text files, PowerPoint presentations, video, really anything that can be displayed by a browser. As students submit their work, a mosaic of responses is created. By refreshing their browsers, students can see the collective answer gradually forming and, at the end, the entire class has a global view of all answers submitted. MessageGrid may also be used for out-of-class assignments and team projects. The instructor enjoys great flexibility in designing creative activities in and out of class.

MessageGrid has multidisciplinary appeal; instructors from widely different disciplines (nursing, chemistry, psychology, performing arts, English, Spanish, sociology, as well as computer science) have been using the tool in their classes during the fall 2004 and spring 2005 semesters. During monthly meetings, instructors share their new MessageGrid experiences with the rest, explaining what they tried, what works and what doesn’t.

The conclusion that this group of instructors draws almost daily is that new technology (e.g., laptops) coupled with supporting software (such as MessageGrid) can transform the traditional classroom experience into one that is simultaneously socially interactive and pedagogically effective. We will be happy to share some of these experiences with you through a presentation at the 2005 Microsoft Social Computing Symposium.

MessageGrid is being developed with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, is written in C# and ASP.NET, and uses SQL Server as the backend database and is currently being extended to provide a “clicker” function allowing the instructor to take instant surveys among the students in the middle of lecture.

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