Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemOnline conferencing for collaborative work in an on-campus setting( 2004)There is as yet very little research into effective uses of online communication tools in on-campus settings. This thesis details a qualitative, interview-based study into the how participants in an on-campus, postgraduate course ‘blended’ online conferencing and face-to-face discussions for a collaborative task. The general objective of the study is to describe benefits of and barriers to using computer mediated communication for a collaborative task in an on-campus setting. Seven of the fourteen active participants in the collaborative task were interviewed about how they used the communication modes available to them. Email was found to be a less satisfactory tool than WebCT for use on the task, because of the lack of threading and the additional cognitive load of sorting through messages to find the relevant text. Participants reported that working asynchronously had two main benefits: organisationally, from the ability to time- and location-shift their work, and cognitively from using written communication to facilitate reflection. Participants tended to restrict their face-to-face meetings to organisational and social aspects of their work on the task. Although these on-campus participants had ample opportunity to get to know each other, they needed time and activities to become adequately socialised to working online. They would have benefited from advice about how to structure their online and face-to-face activities and on developing their team-working skills.