I am starting to think about a possible research project with tamara that would deal with pairs' spatial behavior when interacting when facing a computer, in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning scenario. I saw that Richard Joiner & Kim Issroff (University of Bath, University college, London, UK) worked on this topic. I found a paper about Spatial representation of collaborative interactions. It report a study of adults collaboratively completing a common multi-robot foraging task. The authors traced diagrams to study this in order to: - see how where pair went - can see if students divided the search areas between them - joint information searching
The problem is that they did not study communication and peer interaction since - interactions like communication not represented - their diagrams not represent time
I like their take about this topic : "it represents an aspect of collaboration which is not normally looked at before" !!
The paper Co-construction through interaction during CSCLby Kleine, Maarten de Lat & Van Der Meijden investigates the process of childrens attunement through the analysis of peer interaction in two different collaborative learning settings.
Another topic, widely studied is the division of labor (as in Naomi Miyake's paper) plus all the stuff with two mouses.
Why are pairs of students working in front of computer interesting? I believe studying the spatial behavior of their interactions, linked to specific collaborative processes that specifically occured in CSCL is smart. It indeed can provide us insights about how spatial behavior supports ? fosters ? mediates ? collaboration between two colocated persons
Interaction (especially audio communication)are often studied, gesturing a bit but the whole is not linked to collaboration. The only spatial behavior which has interested CSCW/CSCL academics is the act of pointing since it supports referential communication. Hence, it would be nice to study spatial behavior of pairs to broaden the scope.
A difficult thing would also be to correlate the learning gains (or the performance - it is easier) to the spatial behavior (do good pairs perform different type of gestures ?)...
There is also a book about School Design that may givess ideas:School Design by Henry Sanoff; but I am pretty sure it's going to focus on un-interesting things...
Of course the field of Augmented reality and roomware/tabletop gizmos gices more incentives about users' spatial behavior (it's not CSCL tough). For instance, "Communication Behaviors of Co-located Users in Collaborative AR ...". It is more about communication patterns but I find the method pretty nice.