Conclusion

The interfacing for the Virtual School project is an overall effective system.    The analysis shows that the students were easily able to learn the interface of the virtual school quickly.  Their actions as active users were supported by the easy ability to correct mistakes when made, and by the metaphors used in design.  The interface to edit a notebook was very similar to other word processing interfaces which the students were probably very familiar with.  The other tools, although possibly less familiar, were easily learnt due to their similarity to real world conversation.  The groups seemed to be very open to experimenting with the software.  Many groups started out my simply typing things such as "This is my first notebook", simply to become familiar with the software.  One group in particular seemed a little concerned as to whether the things that remote group members typed in the notebook would show up in the notebook.  A chat session occured to get these remote group members to type something in just to make sure that it would show up on the other group members' copy of the notebook.  They felt comfortable enough to try this experiment although they were obviously unsure of how this action would affect the notebook.  Our anaylsis shows some areas where the interface could be strengthened to address specific user issues.  These issues fall into two categories, behaviors in real world that are not accounted for in the model, and commands in the module that are not available. An example of the first category is the awareness issue address in the "Are you there?" scenario, the second category includes the user's desire for a delete notebook command.

The awareness issue seemed to be a major problem.  Although the students felt comfortable enough as active users to attempt editing notebooks when they were unsure the editing would show up on their copy, this fact reflects an awareness problem.  Since all the group members were not right there and in fact may have been in a different school, it seems to have been a little disconcerting not to have constant feedback that all group members were still logged in.  A lot of wasted keystrokes went in to sending messages to determine whether other members were still available.  Obviously this problem is not easily solved, as we have seen from class readings and discussions, it is difficult to impart the feeling that a colleague is right there when in fact, he/she is not in direct contact.  The software makes some attempts to assure users that their group members are available, such as highlighting names of users who are active in the system.  However, these attempts did not seem to be enough to ease doubts in the minds of the students.  Some possible solutions are to have characters in chat sessions appear one by one and to allow each notebook edit to appear as it happens.  Video conferencing, which was introduced in the middle of this activity, might also help, and as students become more familiar with this type of remote collaboration they may become more confident of the presence of their remote group members.

The other major problem which we observed, that of deleting a notebook, is also not an easy one to solve.  Although the version of the Virtual School software which we experimented with did not allow the deletion of group notebooks, it did allow a user to delete all the sections and contents of that notebook.  It seems that with these capabilities, it should also be possible to delete a group notebook.  However, this is a sticky issue.   When a notebook belongs to more than one person, should it be possible for one individual simply to get rid of it without the feedback of the other group members?  This issue seems to be one that the developpers of the virtual school are still working on, as the capabilities apparently change from one version of the software to the next.  Overall, the Virtual School seems to do a good job of supporting collaboration between students in different schools, these two problems are simply things that the developpers may want to think about.  We don't think that there are any simple solutions to either of them, we have only tried to offer a few observations and suggestions.

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