INCORPORA

TING DIGITAL TOOLS FOR INFORMAL PEER

GROUP LEARNING

Kenneth Thilakarathna, Chamath Keppitiyagama, Kasun De Zoysa

University of Colombo School of Computing, No 35, Reid Avenue, Colombo 07, Sri Lanka

Henrik Hansson

Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, DSV, Stockholm University, Forum 100, 164 40 Kista, Sweden

Keywords:

Informal peer group learning, Collaborative learning tools, Higher education, Collaborative learning.

Abstract:

Peer group learning is being introduced in many educational systems as an effective way of developing social

and cognitive aspects. We observed that there is a spontaneous informal peer group activity among university

students which takes place mostly at outdoor locations. Since it is difﬁcult to acquire conventional mediation

tools and artifacts at an outdoor location, conducting group learning activities in such resource constrained

environments is tedious. Nowadays, most students carry wireless connectivity enabled laptop computers which

can successfully be used as a mediation artifact. Our objectives in this research is to develop an appropriate

framework to help and motivate students to conduct peer group learning activities using their laptop computers.

In this paper we provide a comparative study of existing potential collaborative and cooperative peer group

learning tools, describe their features and emphasize the need for a speciﬁcally developed tool for informal

peer group learning that can incorporate these features.

1 INTRODUCTION

Social interaction plays an important role in the devel-

opment of cognition. Furthermore, individual learn-

ing and development is dependent on the institutions,

environmental settings, and cultural tools and arti-

facts in one’s social milieu (Bonk and Cunningham,

1998),(Kozulin et al., 2003). In higher/university ed-

ucation culture peer learning is being promoted for

its beneﬁts and effectiveness (Boud et al., 1999). We

have observed that there is a cultural peer learning ac-

tivity at University of Colombo in Sri Lanka where all

peers are students and there is no teacher involvement

at all. This learning activity takes place among small

student groups informally. It is a multi way recip-

rocal teaching phenomenon where peers dynamically

change their roles as teachers and students (Palincsar,

1986). It is a very interactive activity. In sociocultural

theory it has been identiﬁed that, mediation tools and

artifacts play an important role in learning (Bonk and

Cunningham, 1998). This has been supported by the

fact that white board/black board is being used suc-

cessfully as a core artifact for supporting teaching and

learning activities in many educational systems for

ages, and with the evolution of technology, in some

settings, white board/black board has been replaced

by more sophisticated audio/visual teaching aids.

Since, informal peer group learning is a sponta-

neous event, it is very common to see that students

conduct peer group discussions in locations where

they use to have their social gatherings; such as in stu-

dents shared lounge, cafeteria, and even under trees.

Even though it is possible to have a white board in a

students shared lounge, it is not possible in all other

potential locations where students used to gather. In

such settings, it is impractical to have learning arti-

facts readily available for spontaneous informal peer

group learning activities. As an alternative, students

tend to use other mediation artifacts and tools such as

papers, printed notes, tutorials. With the development

of information and communication technology (ICT),

currently there is an inclination among students for

using laptop computers as a mediation artifact in peer

group learning. Associating laptop computers as a

mediation artifact has been considered as an effective

way to improve learning (Gulek and Demirtas, 2005).

However, laptop computers themselves have lim-

itations such as small localized screens than projec-

450

Thilakarathna K., Keppitiyagama C., De Zoysa K. and Hansson H. (2010).

INCORPORATING DIGITAL TOOLS FOR INFORMAL PEER GROUP LEARNING.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 450-453

DOI: 10.5220/0002798904500453

 SciTePress

tors or white boards. Furthermore, when using sev-

eral laptop computers to cope informal peer group

learning, the problem of not having a common vi-

sual screen imposes constraints on sharing applica-

tions and presentations among the group participants.

These affects the learning when it is used as a me-

diation artifact within a peer group activity. In addi-

tion to that, students can not expect to have a readily

available network infrastructure to share any informa-

tion at an outside location from institutional setting.

Since, there is no appropriate mediation tool to ful-

ﬁll these requirements, students face difﬁculties when

conducting informal peer group learning activities us-

ing laptop computers.

To overcome this, one solution is to build an

application framework which can support cooper-

ation/collaboration and building applications from

ground up with sharing in built. Ycab (Buszko, 2001)

is an example for such frameworks. Currently a vast

amount of ICT based applications and tools are be-

ing used in many educational systems. Most of these

applications and tools are not built to support co-

operative learning. Implementing all these applica-

tions to comply to a provided application framework

would not be a feasible solution. A second solu-

tion is to use screen sharing. Using screen sharing

techniques, all the applications can be used for co-

operative work without any alterations to the appli-

cation. This approach has been used in several other

research activities on cooperative/collaborative group

learning/working as well (Brian et al., 2002). In this

paper we have carried out a comparative study of ex-

isting screen sharing peer group collaboration tools in

section 3.

2 BACKGROUND

We have conducted a survey among students to iden-

tify the use of laptop computers and to estimate the

popularity of informal peer group learning. Four rep-

resentative groups were considered according to the

student participation for informal peer group learn-

ing. The results of the survey presented in Figures1

reveal that informal peer group learning is very pop-

ular among both junior and senior students. We can

also observe that the number of students who have not

participated in any informal peer group activity within

their last year of study are less signiﬁcant compared to

the total student population. Furthermore, it can also

be observed that the popularity of the event does not

deteriorate with the maturity of students, i.e. infor-

mal peer group learning has a positive effect or ben-

eﬁt on students learning process. Therefore, students

4th Year

3rd Year

2nd Year

1st Year

4th Year

3rd Year

2nd Year

1st Year

4th Year

3rd Year

2nd Year

1st Year

4th Year

3rd Year

2nd Year

1st Year

Participation(x) as a percentage

Amount of events participated

x > 106 < x < 110 < x < 6x = 0

Figure 1: Participation for informal peer group learning by

students.

continuously involve in informal peer group learning

throughout their entire undergraduate studies.

With recent technological advancements, portable

wireless devices such as laptop computers are get-

ting cheaper in price and there is a rapid increase in

the number of students possessing laptop computers

in higher education institutions in Sri Lanka. From

the survey results depicted in Figure 2 we can clearly

observe that the number of junior students possess-

ing a laptop computer is higher than the senior stu-

dents possessing a laptop computer. This clearly wit-

nesses the inclination in using laptop computers and

the growth in the number of undergraduate students

using laptop computers.

To use laptop computers as a mediation artifact

for peer group learning, they must be interconnected

with each other by some mean. However, the interest

to connect to the network through provided wireless

network (802.11x wireless network) at the university

using the laptop computers has been revealed to be

considerably low (Figure 2). It should also be men-

tioned that, by observing answerers to open ended

questions provided with the survey and by interview-

2004-2005

4th Year

2005-2006

3rd Year

2006-2007

2nd Year

2007-2008

1st Year

Percentage of students in a batch

Percentage of Laptop Owners of a Batch

Percentage of Registered Students for UCSC-WiFi

Figure 2: Comparison of Laptop Owners and Registered

Students for the wireless network.

INCORPORATING DIGITAL TOOLS FOR INFORMAL PEER GROUP LEARNING

451

ing several students, we came to the conclusion that

the main reason behind not registering to the wireless

network is the lower data transfer rate experienced by

their registered colleagues. This is due to access point

saturation during peak hours. In addition to that, wire-

less network has become unreachable at most outside

locations. Therefore, students prefer to use their own

wireless connectivity such as HSDPA even within the

university premises.

3 SCREEN SHARING TOOLS

AND TECHNOLOGIES

Cisco WebEx (www, 2009j) and Adobe Acrobat Con-

nect Pro (www, 2008) have a fully web based ap-

proach which supports desktop sharing and individ-

ual application sharing

. In order to use these tools

users must login to a central server hence the Internet

connectivity. In addition, these tools provide facilities

such as shared white boards, chat, and video confer-

encing with voice based communication. A competi-

tive, with limited facilities, open source tool for these

two proprietary applications is Open Meetings (www,

2009f). Since the server can be obtained and installed

in a local machine, Internet connection is not manda-

tory.

Screen sharing applications such as Glance (www,

2009b), Lotus Sametime Unyte (www, 2009c), Yu-

uGuu (www, 2009k) and ShowMy PC (www, 2009g)

also provide a web based viewer. However, the host

machines of the cooperative activity must install a

software application. There are several feature dif-

ferences between above mentioned fully web based

solutions and these applications.

Microsoft Shared View (www, 2009d) is a screen

sharing solution for cooperative activities from Mi-

crosoft Corporation. In contrast to YuuGuu, Mi-

crosoft Shared View does not provide a web inter-

face for viewers. Furthermore, even though it claims

to support individual application sharing, child win-

dows of a shared application are not shared. Cross-

Loop (www, 2009a) is a similar application and is not

capable of sharing individual applications.

TightVNC (www, 2009h) is an open source desk-

top remote control solution. TightVNC can also be

used for desktop sharing by adding client hosts to the

TightVNC server. Since, TightVNC server is installed

in a local machine no Internet connection is required.

Easy Broadcast VNC (www, 2009i) is an extensive

Individual application sharing is the feature that only a

particular application running on the desktop can be shared

among others without having to share whole desktop.

work done to ease the desktop broadcasting for a de-

ﬁned list of hosts.

NetSupport School (www, 2009e) is a LAN based

comprehensive application for controlling and man-

aging a classroom. It is equipped with features to

broadcast activities between the teacher and students.

4 DISCUSSION

Most screen sharing applications focus on supporting

people who stay far from each other. Therefore, ap-

plications are deployed at a central location which

require a working network connection to access it

through the Internet or the Intranet. Even if the wire-

less network is available, poor download speeds af-

fect the motion of screens. Though, students can use

their HSDPA connections which are paid per Mega

Byte to communicate, few students have HSDPA con-

nections due to high costs. Moreover, projection de-

lays at viewers display due to accessing a remote

server make mentors instructions asynchronous with

the projection.

Even though students used to have their infor-

mal peer group learning activities in outdoor loca-

tions, members of each group gather themselves at

one physical location. Therefore, an isolated wireless

ad hoc network can be created to achieve connectiv-

ity between available laptop computers. Furthermore,

interpersonal communication can be achieved by us-

ing face-to-face vocal communication. In this setting

it would be the most effective way of interpersonal

communication. Hence, communication bandwidth

and processing power which are used for voice com-

munication can also be saved.

Most screen sharing tools are based on a client-

server architecture and therefore the users are re-

quired to connect to a server. However, there can be

limitations such as number of concurrent connections,

outbound network bandwidth. Therefore, broadcast-

ing screen information to peers can be an effective

way of achieving sharing. Moreover, implementing

a screen broadcast can be effective than managing

client-server connections among the peers of an ad

hoc network.

Most applications share whole desktop screen.

However, sharing individual applications have several

advantages over sharing whole desktop. First, stu-

dents can keep conﬁdential information intact. Sec-

ond, students do not have to hand over the total sys-

tem control to other parties when control handing over

is required. Third, resource consumption can be re-

duced; for example, when calculating difference be-

tween current screen buffer and original screen buffer,

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

452

bigger screens result in longer calculation times.

Motivation is an important factor for learning.

None of the available tools encourage user to do col-

laborative/cooperative work. Students can be encour-

aged to do informal peer group learning using notiﬁ-

cations. For example, students can be notiﬁed of the

reachability of a colleague and prompt for a cooper-

ative session initiation. In addition to that, students

even can be notiﬁed of existing informal peer group

sessions. Hereby, notiﬁcation interrupts can be used

in an effective way to guide students.

5 RELATED WORK

Mighty Mouse is a multi screen collaboration tool

which has been built to support peer group collabo-

rative activities using laptop computers (Brian et al.,

2002). It uses a common screen that is visible to all

the participants and participants can use the mouse

pointer to move to the screens of other participants,

i.e. by moving mouse through left of screen moves

a person to the screen left to the current screen and

moving it through right screen edge put him on the

right screen. However, additional video switching

hardware are needed to use the tool with a projector.

NetSupport School is a software tool that is espe-

cially built to support computer aided formal learning

on a LAN (www, 2009e). This tool provides facilities

to restrict and control users over the usage of appli-

cations, network etc. Although it is equipped with

some of the features that are required to support con-

sidered informal peer group learning scenario, it does

not have built in support to work in isolated environ-

ments from communication infrastructures.

6 CONCLUSIONS

Informal peer group learning is a popular way of

learning among students at University of Colombo.

Survey results indicate that there is no deterioration

effect on the popularity of informal peer group learn-

ing with maturity of students. Laptop computers are

becoming a popular tool among students and they

tend to use laptop computers as a mediation artifact

in support of learning. However, there is no tool to

support informal peer group learners in resource con-

strained environments. Existing solutions mostly ad-

dress the problems with remote learning. Therefore

providing a tool which can fulﬁll the needs in a spon-

taneous informal peer group learning activity would

help students to improve the effectiveness of learning

through informal peer group learning. The effective-

ness of the tool itself can be improved by considering

the properties of the speciﬁc environment of applica-

tion.

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