Abstract:

In the last decade, the modern classroom has introduced a number of technologies in the learning process, and the lockdowns imposed by the Covid 19 pandemic in recent years have further pushed the development of applications and software that allows for distant and hybrid collaboration. Among these emerging tools, many online resources provide educators with tools for creating a collaborative environment where students can contribute their own content, tools that assist in various tasks such as collaborative research, note-taking, testing and peer evaluation, and writing.

In this hybrid environment, that mixes online tools and spaces with physical interaction and discussion, this contribution focuses on the need for tools that enable a mixed discussion environment, in which participants of the discussion can provide inputs, questions or themes to be discussed; moderators can organize such contents in advance in order to organize a preliminary outline of the contents; and the discussion can be carried out by positioning the contents on a virtual board, interactively adding new contents to the discussion, and rearranging them in order to cluster and organize the single contributions in terms of macro-topics and themes.

While a number of software and applications that address similar needs (known as virtual whiteboards or virtual sticky notes) have emerged in recent years, their use may not be suitable for every situation. While these solutions are powerful applications that allow a range of features, rich contents and functionalities, most of them do require a commercial license that often limits the number of concurrent users that work on the same project. Moreover, most collaborative whiteboard applications require users to have a registered account, effectively disallowing anonymous participation in the discussion, and require a moderate familiarity with the application in order to actively contribute.

This contribution presents an open-source prototype for a software app that enables synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and discussion, on a shared virtual whiteboard, using commonly available tools such as shared Google Sheets spreadsheet for data storage and Google Forms as a data input mechanism, and an easily customizable web-app for the visualization, filtering, organization, and exploration of such contents.

The software allows users to contribute content to a shared space through the familiar interface of a Google Form survey, thus allowing for both free text and structured data (e.g. categories), anonymous and authenticated participation, synchronous and asynchronous contribution (during or before the discussion). The contributions can then be rendered on screen as “cards” through the use of templates that can represent contents and categories textually, visually, through color or any other visual means. Such cards can be dragged around by any participant of the discussion to be visually organized or clustered, can be filtered by category, and can be colored in order to highlight or classify them during discussion. Changes are saved locally in the browser.

While the prototype is necessarily limited in its features, an exploratory proof-of-concept has been tested in the context of the conference of the Department of Design of Politecnico di Milano, where more than 70 researchers have contributed more than 230 suggestions, classified by “strategic area” and “thematic pillar”, to be used in four brainstorming sessions.

Keywords:

Education technologies, collaborative learning platforms, virtual whiteboard, low tech, google forms.