Investigating face-to-face peer interaction patterns in a collaborative Web discovery task: the benefits of a shared display

Mobile computers are now increasingly applied to facilitate face-to-face collaborative learning. However, the factors affecting face-to-face peer interactions are complex as they involve rich communication media. In particular, non-verbal interactions are necessary to convey critical communication messages in face-to-face communication. Through gathering discourse and non-verbal interaction records, this study explores the peer interactions supported by two collaborative applications: one with mobile computers and the other with shared-display groupware (SDG). The results show that the students tended to interact with each other according to a distributed and an unsocial interaction pattern when using the application with mobile computers. In contrast, the students who learned with the SDG demonstrated a shared interaction pattern, whereby they often jointly focused on and referred to the shared work. The analysis of the students' work further found that a higher level of discussion was generally associated with the shared interaction pattern. The results seem to support SDG as being useful in augmenting face-to-face peer interaction supported by mobile computers. The implications derived from the findings also support the argument that non-verbal interaction records are useful for quantitatively and qualitatively analysing face-to-face peer interactions.