Combining collaborative workspaces with tablet computing: Research in learner engagement and conditions of flow

This paper reports on efforts to blend tablet computers with collaborative workspace technologies. An underlying conjecture is that this blend, evaluated with support from Microsoft Research and the National Science Foundation, may help increase learner engagement substantially. The pedagogical logic is that if an instructor can effect a high volume of precise feedback experiences, engagement levels and learning will climb. The intervention needs to afford the teacher a vivid lens on learner processing, and to furnish learners with means to construct representations naturally but electronically. It would also need to furnish means to mediate the rapid flow of those representations and instructor responses to them. These design principles were met with two collaboration workspace technologies and a tablet PC, critical because it allows users to make handwritten representations as one would do with paper and pencil. Results show significant increases in learner engagement that resulted from the tablet PCs/collaborative software combination, based on paper and pencil measurements, electronic engagement measurements, and interviews of faculty and students.