The use of mobile technology among churches, congregations and other Christian communities is still in its infancy. However, there are lot of opportunities for educational technology solutions to support informal learning also in religious contexts. We have successfully applied a design research framework to build a cross-platform mobile application that allows easy content sharing and community building in religious learning environments where mobile technology is rarely exploited to enhance learning.

We investigate the role of gaze in communication and collaboration between humans in computerised environments. In this paper we describe a software solution to a multidirectional gaze display in shared-display collaborative tasks and we report on initial results of an experiment in which the system was applied to allow gaze display in a remote pair-programming lecture. Remotely, an expert was explaining two algorithms to a novice who then attempted to apply the algorithm on an unseen problem. We report on an analysis of data from the conditions when there was a gaze transmitted and displayed to the peer with the no-gaze condition. The remote gaze display reliably affected the variability of novices visual attention patterns and they were better able to focus on the information presented. Without the experts gaze display their strategies contained greater variety.

The previous research of visual attention has mostly considered the situations in which a single person performs a task. The current eye-tracking devices and software support this research situation. Applications of eye-tracking in the research of collaborative tasks have been rare to date. We present a methodological framework of a research in which visual attention of pair programmers with a single display has been studied. We discuss the challenges of such research when conducted in real-world settings and the requirements on the eye-tracking setups. The hardware setups and software solutions to the problems of acquisition and synchronization of streams of eye-tracking data are presented. We outline the methodological questions of future visual attention research of collaborative tasks.