VisualMail+ as a Dialogue-oriented Forum: An Empirical Case about Cooperation and Learning

Abstract

This study experimentally tested whether cooperation among participants increases when they use a forum application with added functionalities derived from the language-action and situated-action perspectives compared with participating in a forum without such features. We used two versions of a visual-based forum application that included functionalities to visualize the threads of an argumentation. The first one is called VisualMail, and the situated language-action enriched-forum is called VisualMail+. A total of 84 college students participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one of 20 different groups. Subsequently, these groups were randomly assigned to use VisualMail or VisualMail+. The results indicate that using VisualMail+ significantly increases cooperation among participants compared with VisualMail, with a large effect size (d = 1.01).