Exploring remote synchronous, collaborative interaction between learners using multi-touch tables and Skype

This paper presents findings from a study of two groups of children, located inclassrooms300 miles apart who used Skype and an extensible multi-touch tabletop collaboration framework, to simultaneously collaborate on a single problem relating to coal mining and relevant to their respective history curricula. It builds upon the existing corpus of research from the Synergy Net project, specifically on: i) the advantages of multi-touch based collaborative reasoning activities compared to paper-based activities (Higgins, Mercier, Burd & Joyce-Gibbons, 2012); and ii) the role of the teacher in orchestrating the collaborative process at single group and whole-class levels (Joyce-Gibbons 2017). Recent developments in Synergy Net has enabled its deployment in multiple classrooms, supporting simultaneous, non-co-located collaboration between learners(McNaughton, Crick, Joyce-Gibbons, Beauchamp, Young & Tan, 2017). This paper reports the findings of this novel deployment relating to participant behaviours, participant recollections of their activity in delayed focus group interviews and teacher behaviours when managing the collaborative process