Talking Teenagers and Tables: Conversation Styles of Teenagers around Interactive and Non-Interactive Surfaces

Multi-touch interactive surfaces are becoming increasingly more affordable and will soon become commonplace in school environments. However, there is currently little or no knowledge of how students’ conversation styles differ around these surfaces when compared to traditional noninteractive tables. This paper presents the findings of a study that observed the conversation styles of teenagers working on interactive and non-interactive surfaces. Overall, teenagers working on interactive surface showed a higher number of utterances than those on the noninteractive table. The utterances of interactive surface participants contained a greater number of individual identification and authoritative identifiers, while the noninteractive surface participants showed a greater number of utterances per minute and responses per minute especially in the first five minutes of the task. We describe the implications of these results for designers of interactive surfaces for educational purposes.