Studying Response-Structure Confusion in VMT

Online text chat has great potential for allowing small groups of people in school or at work to build knowledge and understanding together. However, chat participants often post in parallel, making it difficult to follow the conversational flow and to identify who is talking to whom about what. The loosely ordered succession of turns contributes to “response-structure confusion.” Parallel posting results in overlap of different topics; as a wave of discussion swells, another washes over it, causing ambiguity of linguistic references. Some chat environments implement tools to reduce the confusion. This paper presents an investigation into the effect of a graphical referencing tool for combating response-structure confusion. The paper documents the problem in a classroom setting and demonstrates the tool’s effectiveness in a research lab.