Communication patterns for a classroom public digital backchannel

Abstract

Digital backchannels have become an increasingly important field of study for researchers investigating educational technologies. We designed and deployed one such backchannel integrated with a public display -- ClassCommons -- in a 15-week field study that took place in a university classroom. We extracted and analyzed the communication patterns that emerged in the use of ClassCommons. In this paper, we use these data to address the following research questions: how do students appropriate public digital backchannels in classrooms, what communication patterns are typical in classroom digital public backchannels, how if at all do students' participation in the digital public backchannels evolve over an extended period of time and what are the characteristics of the messages that get more responses from other students?