Case Study 4: Psychology and Information Technologies

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>> Case Study: CMC Use in Psychology and Information Technologies - summary version

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Introduction

This module has been running for the past seven years. It is one of twelve modules which honours students of psychology will take out of an array of about twenty five available from which they must choose. The module is taken by students in the final year of a four year Scottish degree programme. The module runs for five weeks, presently during the Autumn term of the year, with approximately forty students out of a total of around one hundred taking the course each year. The module is based on a series of student-led seminars around general issues in the area of the interrelationship between psychology and information technologies, and the social and psychological impact of computer and communication technologies. Students are presented with a list of eight general topics before the beginning of the module, and are asked to 'vote' on the issues which they would most like to study.

The array of possible topics includes:

Models and Metaphors in Human-Computer Interaction
Virtual Reality and Telepresence
Human Response to Computers & IT
Brain, Mind and Computers
Gender and Technology
Hypertext and Hypermedia
Children and Technology
Computers in the Workplace

These expressed preferences are then used to decide on topics, and to arrange students into groups which will address the chosen themes through presentations during the weekly seminars. At this stage the lecturer frequently engages in some negotiation with students about the topics which they have chosen and the more specific details of their personal interests. The expressed intention is to provide as open a curriculum as possible, with the students own interests defining, as far as possible, the detailed contents of the seminar meetings. At this point therefore, there is frequently a degree of blurring of the boundaries between the various topics. Once the general areas have been agreed, the lecturer meets with the particular topic groups in order to discuss the way in which their seminar will be handled, the issues to be addressed, and to provide them with guidance about reading and other resources.

Characteristics of the Communication Technology

The general resource for the course is provided through a series of Web pages which contain reading suggestions, and links to useful resources on the Web. After the students have conducted their seminars, any presentation slides or notes are placed on the Web in pdf file (portable document format) form. Thus students are encouraged to use the Web as a central resource and focus for the activity of the course.

A web-based discussion forum has been used as a resource for the course over the last three years. The course lecturer had used a HyperNews system on two previous occasions, while the year in which the course participated in this study a locally-built system written by one of the lecturer's colleagues was being used. The lecturer's institution did not, at the time at which we looked, have any policy about the provision and support of text conferencing, so he was in this initiative totally dependent on support from other enthusiasts. Neither did the students on the course have any experience of using text-based conferencing in any other settings, although the use of electronic mail was near universal. Most students appeared to be extremely enthusiastic about the potential and value of electronic mail.

Stated Purpose of the Conferencing

The lecturer presented the text conference to the student group as a resource available for them to use to facilitate discussion about the issues raised in the seminars, and also as an opportunity for the group which was leading any given seminar session to provide some advance guidance to the others attending about what was going to be discussed. Access to the conference also continued after the end of the seminar meetings, with the hope that students would continue to use it for discussion of general issues, or as a means of discussing their preparation for the final examination.

Stated Principles of Use

The interface to the system provided the user with a form into which they typed (or pasted) their message, adding their name and email address. Student participants did not have to log into the system, so it would be perfectly possible for students to choose to withhold their identities, although this very rarely happened. One student routinely used a nickname in his postings, but his actual identity was widely known to the participants (although not to all). The fact that there was no password protection, or other access restriction to the conference, may have proved something of an inhibition to some of the students. It was clear to the users of the system that anyone who knew the web address of the entry page could access and read their posting. In practice however, the only way to find the conference was through the web pages associated with the course, and there was no evidence that unauthorised users were present. The lecturer indicated that he had used password protected systems in the past, but that the need to recall a password constituted something of a barrier to participation with many students forgetting their passwords.

Character of the Communication

Overall, very little use was made of the conference, either during or after the period during which the seminar meetings were taking place. Of the 173 messages posted to the conference, 47 (27%) were from the lecturer. Only ten of the students were recorded to have posted messages to the discussion forum, three of whom only ever posted one message. One student contributor was responsible for 32% of the messages posted. This student was male, and was particularly technically experienced and sophisticated. He was already a user of online chat systems and other communication facilities like ICQ. The message posted by one of the students who only sent one single message was titled 'keeping (lecturer) happy!'. The student was responding to exhortations from the lecturer to contribute to the forum, and was intent to make it clear that responding to this encouragement was the only possible reason she could see for making use of the system. Indeed, there were no specific tasks which students had to complete which made use of the electronic conference necessary for the student group.

The discussion which took place was not perceived by the students to be particularly deep or sophisticated, but rather was valued for the insights it provided into the ideas and interests of one's colleagues.

Self-Perceptions

Although there was no requirement to log into the system, student participants routinely gave their real names and correct electronic mail addresses when prompted to do so by the system when posting messages. They could have masked or misrepresented their identities had they wished, although some appear not to have realised that this was so. Certainly for some students, the interaction on the conference provided a fresh opportunity to get to know people that they had previously had little contact with on the course, and some valued the way in which the postings to the conference revealed insights about the interests and thinking of their colleagues. While valuing this insight, the same student was conscious of his own reluctance to reveal himself through the medium of the conference.

Learning and Teaching Relationships

The students had ready access to one another at formal class meetings, and in their departmental library and common room areas, so it did not seem that the online conferencing opportunity added much to their opportunity to communicate with teachers and peers, not to the nature of that communication.

Getting Things Done

The conferencing opportunity was a collateral feature of the course, not perceived to be necessary for general participation in the course, or otherwise to benefit from it. No course-related tasks were contingent on use of the conference, and some students found its use scarcely relevant. The ways in which they might have made such opportunity relevant could be seen with hindsight.

For those who were regular computer users, and particularly regular users of electronic mail, there was some sense in which the barriers to their use of the conferencing system were reduced by the fact that they were frequently connected to the institutional network.

Continuity with Curricula

The conference was presented to the student group as being a useful opportunity to communicate about the course, and also as a chance directly to observe an important social communicative phenomenon which was brought about by the presence of the technology. Concern with computer-mediated communication and electronic mail formed a substantive part of the course, and the lecture felt that the students should be given the opportunity to experience, and participate in, an electronic conference for themselves. It would seem that this undirected exhortation to become involved did not constitute sufficient motivation for many of the students.

There was little support through the wider context of the students' overall programme of study for the use of text conferencing in the learning and study setting. Only one other course (a course on psycholinguistics) attempted to make use of an online discussion as part of the student activities, and there was also a conference which was intended as a forum for the discussion of 'Big Issues' which might be relevant to the students' preparation for a general essay topic examination paper. These other two conferences were no more successful than the Psychology and Information Technology conference, receiving many fewer postings. There was thus little culture of conference use among the student group, and thus no established practice or routine which would sustain the conference participation. Some students did observe however that their routine of electronic mail use increased the chance that they would be connected to the university's network, and thus find it easy to launch a Web browser and access the conference.

Evaluation

Use of, as judged by contribution to, the conference appeared to be quite patchy, with some making frequent contributions and others contributing not at all. It is impossible to know how many of those students who were not seen to post to the conference were regular readers of the contributions of others. Clearly quite a number were, based on the comments of some of those students interviewed later.

For some who resisted contribution through posting, the conference opportunity was a resource in which they were not interested. Other non-contributors came to be rather more positive about the potential value of the conference, and were disappointed that they had not made more effort.

Text of this section by Hamish Macleod, editor Erica McAteer

Computer-Mediated Conferencing: Grounded Guidelines