Towards balanced discussions in the classroom using ambient information visualisations

In a collaborative learning environment, the promotion and support of well-balanced student participation is an important step towards the achievement of learning outcomes. Ambient information visualisations can help raise awareness of the balance of distribution in meetings and small learner groups. This paper explores the use of ambient information in the classroom, where we attempt to encourage a proper balance of feedback between student groups during 'design critique' studio sessions. The contribution of the paper is two-fold: (1) we present necessary design choices for ambient visualisations that promote feedback balance in classrooms, motivating under-participators while limiting over-participation (2) we show the effects on student perception and feedback participation through the actual deployment of such visualisations in 'real classroom sessions'.