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Embracing Collaboration and Social Perspective Taking Using Interactive Tabletops

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Abstract

In a contemporary multicultural classroom in which students from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds learn together, it becomes necessary to embrace collaboration, social perspective-taking, and understanding of the other to help students comprehend classmates’ values and perspectives. Based on the already researched affordances of interactive tabletops in education, as well as promising empirical results from their limited application in multicultural settings, the authors present a case of practical and impactful technology research in a culturally diverse classroom. The study was conducted with 44 students as part of their formal, socio-emotional education course in a public school in Cyprus. The study presents evidence of perceived collaborative learning around the tabletop, as well as gains in social perspective-taking propensity from pre- to post-test, demonstrating a promising use of interactive tabletops and related technologies in the field of education.

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Acknowledgments

Authors acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme through the NOTRE project (H2020-TWINN-2015, Grant Agreement Number: 692058) as well as funding from project (ΥΕ/ΥΑ/ΤΑΜΕ/02.2015-2016) awarded to the Limassol municipality and other local authorities in Cyprus.

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  1. Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus University of Technology, 30 Archbishop Kyprianou Str, 3036, Lemesos, Cyprus

    Andri Ioannou & Vaso Constantinou

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  1. Andri Ioannou
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  2. Vaso Constantinou
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Correspondence to Andri Ioannou.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Ioannou, A., Constantinou, V. Embracing Collaboration and Social Perspective Taking Using Interactive Tabletops. TechTrends 62, 403–411 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-018-0271-z

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