Telepresence With iPads: A Matrix for Collaboration in Lower Secondary School

Distributed learning is a growing issue in education following the mainstreaming of technologies for videoconferencing. However, though distance and distributed learning have been common in adult education and business since the 1990s little is still known about the use of videoconferencing in elementary education. This paper draws on ongoing research in three rural schools in Denmark where videoconferences are used as part of the teaching in lower secondary schools as a means of collaborating between schools. The research focuses on how students learn from videoconferences that are both one-to-many and peer-to-peer and that are meant to strengthen relationships between teachers, learners and external experts across schools. Videoconferencing, conceptualized by the schools in question as telepresence, is performed in a unique combination of desktop interaction through mobile devices (iPads) and auditorium-based large screen lectures and interaction. The paper discusses how relationships between desktop interaction through mobile devices such as iPads and videoconferences through auditorium-based large screens can support learning in rural lower secondary schools. As many schools have invested in several generations of technologies the potential for using multiple technologies to support learning increases. However, technologies are to a large extent still seen as isolated actors in learning, not as involved in relationships with other devices or resources that may benefit learning. Understanding relationships, connections and differences between technologies in learning may therefore provide new perspectives on how technologies work in practice. In the project data have been collected through multi-sited ethnography, which has contributed to mapping relationships between schools and studying their collaboration through telepresence. As collaboration between schools is built into the project, multi-sited ethnography has followed telepresence as a phenomenon that emerges within these collaborations, i.e, the idea is that looking at it from one locality is only seeing it partially. Preliminary results of the project suggest that schools need to work more on organizational frameworks for collaboration and that synchronous connections could be extended through asynchronous communication to support the potential of collaboration via the telepresence with iPads matrix.