Over the past few years, the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the need to develop remote and hybrid education by identifying effective teaching practices and developing pedagogically meaningful technological infrastructures. Videoconferencing solutions are a key technological resource enabling so called synchronous hybrid education, i.e., teaching which simultaneously allows on-site and remote participation for students.However, new (educational) technologies have also been criticized for unsubstantiated hype and lack of impact on teaching practices (e.g. Selwyn, 2016). In this presentation, I investigate how one recent videoconferencing technology, the telepresence robot, is used as a tool in hybrid language education. Unlike autonomous or semi-autonomous social robots, the telepresence robot isa remotely controlled and moveable videoconferencing device,a kind of a material representation or 'proxy' of the remote participant in another location, such as the classroom.
The presentation is based on an on-going project, currently including 11 lessons of video-recorded language teaching interaction (Finnish, Swedish, English, German) taught at university-level in Finland. In these face-to-face lessons, a Double 2 or 3 robot is used to enable remote student participation. The robot is located in the classroom, and can be connected by a remote student via internet to set up a videocallwith the classroom-based teacher and students. Unlike with many other videoconferencing tools, the remote participant can control and shift visual attention by turning and moving the robot's position and orientation in the classroom space.
In this presentation, I address the research gap regarding multimodal practices of hybrid education (e.g. Rae et al., 2020) and focuson remote, robot-mediated participation in instructional activities involving the use of a classroom whiteboard or blackboard. Drawing on the methodological perspective of multimodal conversation analysis (e.g. Sidnell & Stivers, 2012),Iaim to show how the telepresence robot is managed by participants in ways that enable the remote student to follow, and participate in, board work. This includes practices for initiating board-centered interactions, identifying and navigating the robot into classroom locations that provide sufficient visibility to the board, attending to situationally-relevant text on the board, and closing board-centered instructional activities.
The findings are expected to shed light on asymmetries in multimodal participation between classroom-based and remote students in hybrid education, and social practices that participants deploy to overcome such asymmetries.More broadly, the findings will also illustrate how educational practices are shaped by new kinds of material and technological spaces. The presentation will conclude by discussing the implications of the study's findings, and of telepresence robots more broadly, for hybrid teaching praxis.
References
Raes, A., Detienne, L., Windey, I., & Depaepe, F. (2020). A systematic literature review on synchronous hybrid learning: Gaps identified. Learning Environments Research, 23(3), 269–290.
Selwyn, N. (2016). Minding our language: why education and technology is full of bullshit… and what might be done about it. Learning, Media and Technology, 41(3), 437–443.
Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.). (2012). The handbook of conversation analysis. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.
