Supporting copresence

The most difficult aspect of using Breeze as a videoconferencing platform is its inability to support two-way audio. The system requires the person speaking to press down a button on the interface in order to talk to the other end. While the button is depressed, the other end cannot over-ride the control, so must wait for the button to be turned off to respond. In addition, the software has no echo-cancellation, so if one speaks, ones voice emerges from the speakers at the other end, which is then picked up by the microphone at the other end, and fed back through the speakers at the near end. The result is one’s own voice fed back with a split-second delay, making speaking very difficult to continue.

Workarounds were employed to overcome these constraints. To overcome the lack of echo- cancellation, the speakers at the end with the microphone on were turned off. This also meant that people at the other one could not interrupt to ask a question or to let those speaking know if they couldn’t be heard. To overcome this, two different workarounds were employed, the chat box was used as a backchannel and questions were typed into it as they arose and a series of hand gestures were developed to communicate with varying success.

Mark: Were there particular gestures that worked?

Lecturer: Well there was the hand cutting across the neck and I was like, are you trying to kill me or …? The hand to the ear, that means “I can’t hear you.” Two hands cupped

120 to the ear means I haven’t heard anything for five minutes so I’ve just been chilling out! Big friendly waves, thumbs up to show it’s working. All these kind of hand gestures.

This was a finding of Becker and Mark (2002; 33) in which they found that social conventions were created that had the effect of maximising the degree of copresence experienced within an environment. Despite the inability to have two-way audio, Breeze did support communication well enough for successful exchanges to occur during the discussions.

Webconferencing was said by the students to support discussions better than it did lectures. Lectures were held to be only adequate if held face-to-face whereas discussions held over the webconference medium worked well.

Student A: If they’re in the same room they have a presence and you can look at them and read their lips. There’s something about lectures that is quintessentially …” Student C: It’s got to be in the same room. It’s not just visual it’s being in the same room with someone.

Student A: It’s different in a discussion, because there are points you remember. With a lecture where it’s just *speaks in a declamatory manner+ me delivering what I’ve got to say now and I’m not going to stop because that’s not a lecture you just deliver what you’ve got to say and there are questions at the end questions at the end and it’s *ends declamatory manner+ it’s just hypnotic.

Student A: It’s different being in a seminar. The discursive element seems easier because it’s interactive. Without the element of interaction, when it’s just a lecture that’s being delivered rather than a discussion, then there is a tendency to switch off. I found it very difficult to follow.

Previous research, for example Childs and Dempster (2003), suggests that the limiting factor with teaching through webconferencing is the usually poor backchannel properties of the interface, i.e. while teaching it is often difficult to see, and sometimes impossible to hear, the audience. For this reason, a standard recommendation is for lecturers to frequently stop and actively elicit feedback. When this technique was described to the students the response was:

Student A: That’s what I mean. That’s a very good idea actually. If the lecture had been broken down into say five topics and at the end of each topic we had paused and had a brief discussion now and from both sides we’d asked questions then we would probably have made more sense of it.

It seems, therefore, that discussions through webconferencing are easier to follow because they are interactive and the lack of physical presence of other participants is therefore not as much of a

121 problem. In lectures, if they are not interactive, then the lack of physical presence of the lecturers will be a problem. In terms of the categories of experience, this could be explained as the social presence of the participants reinforcing the creation of copresence, and this copresence then reinforcing the participants’ social presence, represented in figure 3.3.

Figure 3.3: Relationship between social presence and copresence of participants

That is, if one is delivering a lecture, then fostering an experience of interaction and involvement amongst the students will make them feel more engaged and hence have more social presence themselves. They will then feel they are together, with the lecturer, in the same space. This will then be an effective means to enhance the lecturer’s social presence. In short, letting people talk is the most effective way to get them to listen to you.