Challenges of Asynchronous Communication in ICT-Supported Learning Groups – a Case Study
Christiane Schmidt
University of Hildesheim, Germany
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Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University College Dublin, 7-10 September 2005
Network 16: ICT in Education and Training
Abstract
In recent years there has been a growing interest in learning and working together in distributed networks via the Internet. Esp. in view of the increasing demand for intercultural team-work in the globalized economy ICT- supported virtual teams have become an important form of co-operation in education and at work. The following presentation takes into focus experiences of students in ICT-supported learning groups with members at different campus universities. The students in the observed seminars communicated partly synchronously, partly asynchronously via mailing list, web-forum or video conference and they too had face-to-face-meetings (“blended learning“). By focusing attention on a case study of one of the learning groups the paper discusses characteristic properties of asynchronous Internet-based communication and their impact on the group communication process. The challenges of asynchronous communication are considered referring to the social information processing perspective and it’s pedagogical implications. This leads to conclusions about new key competencies in virtual teamwork. Finally I discuss the relevance of the findings of the case study about asynchronous communication to intercultural virtual teams.
Introduction: Challenges of asynchronous communication in virtual learning teams
In the science fiction story “the black mirror“ (which was written 1983 by Erik Simon) the inhabitants of two planets have radio contact and can communicate with each other. But since their planets are twelve light years apart they hardly lead a dialog but two parallel monologues because the answer to a question can be received only after at least twenty-four years (Simon 1985, p. 168).
The team members in an internet-based co-operation are not light years apart but they are at different places and communicate asynchronously or partly asynchronously and partly synchronously. Similar to the radio contact in the story of the communication between the two planets they communicate media-supported for instance via mailing list, web-forum or video conference. Simon’s description of the extremely asynchronous interplanetary communication takes into focus a characteristic property of asynchronous computer mediated communication (CMC). Often a rather long time passes between question and answer so that the co-ordination among the team members becomes difficult. They have to create and practice for example special strategies for making sure which answer belongs to which question. Due to the time difference in asynchronous communication and due to the absence of non-verbal cues, as for instance looking into the face of the addressed person, in asynchronous communication these relations are not necessarily obvious. Without special strategies communication in ICT supported teams run the risk of being a number of parallel monologues.
In recent years ICT supported teams have become an important form of collaborative learning and working. ICT supported teams, especially intercultural teams, often use asynchronous computer mediated communication for distributed co-operation. In my presentation I focus on experiences of students in ICT supported learning groups with members at different campus universities.
The purpose of my presentation is to point out that using asynchronous CMC for distributed teamwork implies to adapt the ways of using the media to the requirements of co-operation. Based on an empirical case study I describe this adaptation in detail on the example of e-mail-communication. In the first part of my presentation I shortly describe the underlying project. In the second part I present observations and findings of a case study of a virtual learning team using a mailing list. In the third part I discuss my assumptions referring to the social information processing perspective. Then in conclusion I discuss the pedagogical relevance of my findings. New key competencies are needed for virtual teamwork.
The underlying project: Experiences made teaching and studying in Internet-based seminars
The project "evaluation 'studying via the Internet' – experiences made teaching and studying in internet-based seminars“ focused on seminars covering several university sites, i.e. students from the universities involved took part in a seminar together and co-operated via video conferences and in Internet-based work groups. In the seminars, Internet-based methods were not used to replace traditional forms of teaching and learning such as lectures and discussions, but in the sense of an addition or extension. Special emphasis was placed on team-work among students from several university sites and from different disciplines, including: Education, Philosophy, Applied Linguistics, Computer Science and Information Science.
The project had two parts: an evaluation part, in which we applied an action-oriented approach, and a qualitative study, in which we asked, how the students involved designed, experienced and assessed the new form of co-operation. The main survey methods used in the study were participatory observation as well as oral and written interviews (guided interviews, group discussions, questionnaires) and the survey of documents like e-mails or web-forum discussions. The principal interpretation methods used were qualitative content analysis (cf. Schmidt 2004a) and document analysis (cf. Schmidt 2000, 2004b).
In the following I focus on a case study of the qualitative part of the project. In a seminar of our partner project "Virtueller Campus Niedersachsen Hildesheim-Osnabrück-Hannover" (cf. Hauenschild et al. 2001) the students worked together in three interdisciplinary virtual teams. In the case study on which I concentrate now, I investigated one of these teams by participatory observation, document analysis and semi -structured interviews.
The case-study: Designing asynchronous CMC in a virtual learning team
The observed team started with seven members, four active members collaborated over nine month, three students dropped out. In order to do my participating open observation I participated in the role of a mostly passive team member. The students were studying Applied Linguistics, Computer Science or Information Science at the three universities. The team-mates had little or no experience with collaborative working in project-teams. All of them had already used the Internet, but their familiarity with Internet Services varied extremely, ranging from very first e-mail experiences to experiences in programming of web services.
The team’s task was to describe the structure of a computer-mediated Translation-system (still under construction) and to find out which possibilities and problems lay within such a system. Beyond presentations and text-based materials provided by the teachers – supplemented by own Internet retrieval of the students - they had the opportunity to try out a demo version and to discuss their ideas and questions with the developers of the translation system. The seminar started with a face-to-face workshop in one of the universities, where the students built the three teams. The seminar ended with a face-to-face workshop and during the following three month the students wrote their project team reports. In the meantime the team-mates of the observed virtual team didn’t meet all together face-to-face, only the local sub units of the team consisting of two or three team members studying at the same university sometimes communicated face-to-face.
For their distributed computer mediated teamwork the observed virtual team had chosen a closed mailing list[1]. Additionally several team members telephoned four times. For their distributed communication they didn’t use other media, although chat and a web-forum had been offered to them at the first workshop. During my participating observation I got 135 e-mails via the team mailing list, most of them during the first six month.
To find out how the team members designed their co-operation via mailing list I analysed the e-mail documents. Together with my colleague Christa Hauenschild, a Computer linguist, I developed a special method of document analysis. We call it E-Mail-Sequence-Analysis. By e-mail sequence we mean a succession of utterances consisting of related text passages in two or more consecutive e-mails of at least two communicants. To find out how the students experienced their working together apart, I conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with all team members.
At first I want to report some results, how the students designed the new form of co-operation. For lack of a better English word I use “to design” in the broader sense of the German “gestalten “ including planning, organizing, doing.
Previously the team members had used e-mail only for one-to-one communication. To use this medium for team communication implied to adapt it to the requirements of few-to-few communication. For example they designed and used new forms of addressing in the e-mails. One-to-one e-mails usually start with “hi” or “hello”; the analysed mailing list e-mails start for instance with “hello all together”. The receivers are addressed as a team and not as individuals. But sometimes a team-mate is individually addressed in a paragraph of the e-mail like for example “Marc, could you send me the paper?” So one e-mail contains at the same time a personally addressed message and information for the team. In one-to-one e-mail communication such namely addressing of a person is obviously not necessary, because the receiver and the addressed person are identical.
In many text passages the sender uses the pronoun “you” (German “ihr”) to address the team. In German language this pronoun is distinctly in the plural and therefore it’s clear that all team members are addressed. Much more sophisticated is the use of the pronoun “we” (German “wir”). The pronoun “we” is used in inclusive and exclusive form. The inclusive “we” refers to the whole team including all it’s members, that is the sender and all receivers. For example: “At the next video conference we will have to present our timetable.” The exclusive “we” refers to the sender and only a few team members or to the sender and persons not belonging to the team at all. In the following example the “we” refers to a local sub-unit of the team: “Marc and I will look for special information. We don’t have anything else to clear up.” Within one e-mail there are often several changes between the exclusive and the inclusive form and like in the foregoing example the referent of the “we” is often explicitly explained, likewise in the following example: “We, Roland and I, will not be ready until then.”
Using these inclusive and exclusive forms of addressing the whole team and subunits of the team are one important adaptation of e-mail communication to the requirements of few-to-few communication. When working collaboratively the addressing is important for example to make clear competences and responsibilities and to share work.
Another adaptation of e-mail communication for the requirements of few- to-few communication is explicitness in referring to prior passages of the interlocutors. I suppose that this explicitness in referring to prior passages is an important condition for designing successful asynchronous team communication. When a working team is communicating via mailing list, relations between text passages must be established explicitly. In order to avoid misunderstandings and incomprehensibilities, the reference of text passages must be made much clearer in few-to-few e-mails than in one-to-one e-mails. This can be arduous especially because of the many parallel sequences occurring during an e-mail communication. It contains many central themes – not just one – and the communicants must be able to identify them continuously (cf. Schmidt 2004).
In the following I give a few examples how the team-mates experienced and valued their working together apart.
In the interviews the four active members of the observed team reflect the teambuilding as a learning process in the course of time. One typical statement was “Am Ende kann man sagen, dass es wirklich Gruppenarbeit war.” (One can say it was really teamwork at the end.) In another interview the final stage of the teamwork is valued as “eingespielt” (well practised). One of the team-mates had the impression that after a while the other group members did “emerge” as individuals “Man weiß, was macht der gerade. Was sind da für Probleme, wer macht gerade Prüfung, wessen Oma hat Geburtstag.” (You know what a certain person is doing at the moment, what the problems are, who is doing his exams, whose granny’s birthday it is.) All of them agree, that there was a good group atmosphere during the final phase. They also agree that the initial phase was difficult. They did not know each other and there was no discipline, as one of them calls it, to answer to the e-mails as quickly as necessary. One of the team members values the work via e-mail as extremely stressing; especially in the initial phase she felt pressed to be in time for the team presentations in the seminar and got nervous because she had to wait a long time for answers to her e-mails. All of them mention that it takes an enormous amount of time to co-operate via e-mail, especially because you have to wait for answers and have to answer yourself immediately. One of the active students describes this permanent demand as “am Ball bleiben müssen” (to be on the ball).
All team members report that asynchronous CMC takes much more time than face-to-face communication. Therefore they value two points as important for effective co-operation via e-mail: to answer always immediately and to announce absence times.
From this and other interpretations of interviews and case studies in the underlying project - not all of them as deeply analysed as the one I just told about - I deduced theses about the use of asynchronous CMC for learning groups.
My main thesis is, that during collaborative working via asynchronous CMC new ways of using the media are designed by the communicants. The communicants have to adapt the media and the ways of using them to the requirements of their co-operation. As I said before I use “design” in the sense of “gestalten”. I don’t speak about the professional development of learning environments for collaborative learning. These environments have – as I think - to support the designing processes of the users and to provide adaptable media. Sophisticated learning environments can’t replace the personal “gestalten” of the media and of the ways of their use during the team communication.
The main requirement of team communication is to adapt the media and their use not only to the requirements of the tasks but also to the requirements of the social relations of the team members. With regard to the social relations I agree in some issues with the social information processing perspective of Walther. Finally I want to discuss my theses referring to the social information processing perspective. At first I give a brief description of this theoretical approach.