Idea Wall: A Real-Time Collaboration Tool to Support and Orchestrate Knowledge Construction Across Multiple Social Planes

Abstract

The Idea Wall is a collaborative technology that aims to support collective knowledge construction and idea negotiation across multiple social configurations. Further, to support multiple entry points for student collaboration, the Idea Wall provides (and requires) multiple modalities for interaction through text, collaborative discourse, and spatial orientation of ideas. To support the teacher in implementing and orchestrating Idea Wall activities, we designed: 1) an authoring portal to enable teachers to quickly create Idea Wall instances; 2) a whole class view to support whole class discussions; and 3) a set of real-time agents that can alert the teacher when students may need teacher intervention or new groupings based on natural language processing of students’ co-constructed ideas within the Idea Wall.