International Student Classroom Interaction

I ended up having to file a new study for my concept test. I received a few questions from the human subjects committee the other night which hopefully means I will have an approval in hand before spring break, March 10.

My concept test consists of two parts. The first part will ask students in two classes to use Twitter direct messaging to communicate directly with the professors for these classes. The idea in this situation is to allow people who may not want to raise their hand to communicate through another means. The hope is that the professor will acknowledge and encourage their question to build their confidence in asking questions.

The second part of the test will use a group messaging system where the student submits a question to the group in a chat style interface. This allows for others to see the question or comment and respond.

In both cases an anonymous and named account will be available for all participants in the test. They can choose whether they wish to identify themselves or not.

The next few days will be dedicated to setting up a Wordpress instance and the Prologue plugin on this server for the group messaging. I will also be working with the Twitter api for the direct messaging test.