Investigating face‐to‐face peer interaction patterns in a collaborative Web discovery task: the benefits of a shared display

Mobile computers are now increasingly applied to facilitate face‐to‐face collaborative learning. However, the factors affecting face‐to‐face peer interactions are complex as they involve rich communication media. In particular, non‐verbal interactions are necessary to convey critical communication messages in face‐to‐face communication. Through gathering discourse and non‐verbal interaction records, this study explores the peer interactions supported by two collaborative applications: one with mobile computers and the other with shared‐display groupware (SDG). The results show that the students tended to interact with each other according to a distributed and an unsocial interaction pattern when using the application with mobile computers. In contrast, the students who learned with the SDG demonstrated a shared interaction pattern, whereby they often jointly focused on and referred to the shared work. The analysis of the students' work further found that a higher level of discussion was generally associated with the shared interaction pattern. The results seem to support SDG as being useful in augmenting face‐to‐face peer interaction supported by mobile computers. The implications derived from the findings also support the argument that non‐verbal interaction records are useful for quantitatively and qualitatively analysing face‐to‐face peer interactions.