International Student Classroom Interaction

I have finished two of my three tests for my capstone. I haven't had time to look at the survey results since my efforts have been concentrated elsewhere the past few weeks. I am staring a test with a medium sized class this week. I'll be finishing up the setup for that class today.

This test is going to run a little different since the CHI conference will fall right in the middle of the study. The group is also a little different than the small and large classes since it is a mix of PhD and Master's students.

I also have a campus wide international student survey open. I'll have a lot of data analysis to do once I get back from Italy.

I have finished the first week of testing. I am waiting on the participants to take the follow up survey so I can gauge their interest in this idea.

Next week is the group messaging test. I am preparing for that this weekend.

I would like to add a medium sized class to my test group and I have an idea of an ideal target. I just have to see if that professor would be open to the idea.

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.

I have completed my interviews. I would love to do more but I am getting to the point where I need to prototype and test. My interviewees gave me a number of things to think about with this project.

I am getting a lot of excitement from professors and a PhD student regarding my in class communication tool. I am working on a human subjects committee application today that I will hopefully file tomorrow so I can start that process.

Right now I have 3 concepts one to help with classroom interaction directly and another to help improve the sense of community in the department.

In class messaging - This would allow students to communicate through an IM type client. Right now I am looking at using twitter or possibly yahoo as the client. The reasoning behind this is that many students fear having to speak in English and prefer writing. Plus they have the opportunity to construct their thoughts. I am looking at having it be both anonymous and named. The two variations on this are a chat room style set up where everyone can see what the others are saying. The other variation is where the student sends a message directly to the instructor.

iFriends - This started out as mentor/mentee but someone pointed out that this seemed to put a hierarchy in place and make it seem more academic. I am still playing with names but iFriends is what it is right now. iFriends is a program where incoming international students are paired with second year American students. I am also looking at pairing incoming American students with second year international students. I picked iFriends since it is cross culture friendships and informatics school friendships. I am open to new names.

Culture sharing - International students would be encouraged to share their culture with other students. This would occur through cultural pages that the students generate to teach people about their culture. These pages would be shared over the summer along with the forum that we already have set up. I am also hoping to encourage more culture sharing in one of the first semester classes.

These are my core concepts. I have also been gathering things that the students mentioned were good practices from the instructors and helped them to feel more comfortable in class. I hope to take this information and put it together in to a presentation of good and back practices when dealing with international students.