The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

a chat window is opened. As soon as the user has written something and clicked „Enter‟, a chat window
appears on the contact‟s screen. The chat may also include more than two participants.
Once the user has written one or more lines of text in the chat window and clicks „Enter‟, the text will be
sent to the other party/parties, who may choose to answer directly, in the same way. In this sense, instant
messaging can be seen as a synchronous communication medium. On the other hand, instant messaging is
„semi-asynchronous‟ in the sense that the message will remain in the recipient‟s open chat window and
may be answered at a later point, e.g. if the recipient is away for a while or if he wants to finish other
tasks first. Further, many instant messaging services support offline messaging, which means that a
message may be sent to a contact who is offline to be delivered when he logs on to the system. The user
may choose to save the conversation in a log. Instant messaging can thus be seen as a „semi-persistent‟
communication medium.
Research shows that IM tools have generally come to play an important role in the life of young people.
IM tools provide a means for developing and maintaining peer group membership and social identity
(Grinter and Palen 2002; Grinter and Eldridge 2003; Lewis and Fabos 2005). Young people “meet on
MSN”. They are also conscious about how IM supports both social and work-related interaction and what
features of IM are desirable for different purposes (Huang and Yen 2003). Young people‟s use of IM
tools, and the links to other members of the social network contained in the tools, reflect a „networked
individualism‟ and participation in a networked society (Castells 2000). A study addressing American
college students‟ perception of the differences between instant messaging and email (Lancaster, Yen et al.
2007) concludes that IM is seen by the college students to be the best option in the context of personal
and social relationships, IM being better for conveying emotions, building relationships and in ease of
use. From this research, we may infert that SE project students are likely to be skilled users of instant
messaging, utilizing the opportunities that have opened up by the popularity and extensive use of these
tools, and being aware of some of their limitations. However, we cannot assume that the students are
equally familiar with the use of IM in a context of work, for which other considerations might apply.
In the workplace, IM has become a mainstream informal collaboration tool (Cherry 2002; Stephens
2008) and has been found to support a number of different communication tasks as well as the process of
enabling information exchange, i.e. reaching out to others to initiate communication (Nardi, Whittaker et
al. 2000). Among the types of IM use is complex work discussions (Isaacs, Walendowski et al. 2002).
Research on open source development (OSD) has shown that a purely textual medium (e.g. IRC) which is
not integrated with the development tools may be sufficient for effective work-related communication
between developers (Gutwin, Penner et al. 2004). When our SE project students use instant messaging,
they are, in other words, getting experience with collaboration technology in industry use.
Whereas IM is in itself interruptive, a recent study found that overall it helps people manage their
interruptions rather than increasing the overall amount of work disruption (Garrett and Danziger 2008).
This has to do with the ways IM allows users to manage availability. One way of doing this is to flag it in
the buddy list (e.g. “working hard, will not answer”). Further, it is generally socially acceptable to
postpone IM response, because non-response means that you might be away from the computer. This is
what Nardi (Nardi, Whittaker et al. 2000) calls “plausible deniability”. The new communication patterns
afforded by IM also support interruption management (Garrett and Danziger 2008): quick answers can be
obtained without expectation of longer conversation, and a chat window can be kept open among the
communicating parties for as long as desired, allowing for queries on at-need basis with the expectation
of having an answer when it is convenient for the other party. The findings on IM tools as tools for
interruption management can be taken as an argument that in the context of project-based learning we
should not be too concerned about the popping up of chats windows irrelevant to the project work at
hand. The students are likely to be capable of managing their use of time, helped by the social norms and
sanctions within the team, and having to manage their time is part of the desired project work experience.
Rather than focusing on the use of IM that is not relevant to project work, thus, in what follows we focus
on the use of IM that is related to the project work.
In the SE projects of our study, different collaboration tools were used to support different aspects of
work. While the specific selection and usage of tools differed among teams, there was a pattern (Krogstie
2009): Lightweight project management tools (typically project wikis or issue tracking tools) were used
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