My old hack on how to organise bibliographic information online stimulated some other attempts. Probably this is an issue for different people.

Finally, Beppe created his online presence. With a group of friends he created a portal where leaving some traits of his vision of the world and the problems he wants to fight. It seems a very promising opportunity to create some interest around themes that are usually not enough publicised.

Questo sito nasce con l’intento (ambizioso) di dare voce a tantissime persone o associazioni riuscendo però a fornire gli strumenti in modo tale da poter trasformare ciò che puo’ essere all’inizio una semplice segnalazione in un’arma da poter usare a favore dei “deboli”, caricandola del potere dei “molti”. In altre parole è la trasposizione pratica ed informatica del vecchissimo adagio “l’unione fa la forza”.

[beppegrillo.it]
 

[Persson and Fagerberg, 2002] Persson, P. and Fagerberg, P. (2002). Geonotes: a real-use study of a public location-aware community system. Technical Report SICS-T–2002/27-SE, SICS, University of Göteborg, Sweden. Available from: http://www.dsv.su.se/~petra/techReport.pdf.
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This paper report on the evaluation of GeoNotes developed in a test with 80 users. An initial question they had was how to find, access and be notified about relevant and timely information at a location with thousand of notes. Their design choice tried to attach meta-data to each message to facilita the retrieval.

In addition, they develop and incorporate another concept called “place-labels” with the intent to leave the user to define their space and connect freely notes with space.

The evaluation showed that in general people used the system for chatting with three main aims: object chat, related to an object or physical aspect of the locale; situation chat, related less to physical object and more to ongoing activities and situations in which several users took part; talk-to-me chat, an urge to chat with others indipendly from time and place.

Their results showed that the triggers of authoring were not primarily physical objects or infrastructure, but rather the ongoing social activities and situations in that physical space.

Nice discussion with Andrew (http://fisharepeopletoo.blogs.com/) about some nice features of GeoNotes. He was suggesting that the good is related to the fact that there is no map involved. Also that the authors made a precise decision restricting the field of interaction to the place. He also mentioned the emergence of spontaneous form of usage of the tool to support specific communities. This is also one of my running hypothesis.

It’s got so much good stuff. It lets users name places, it uses conversation and noticeboard metaphors, and not a map to be seen.

They also make what I think is a very good and very useful decision, which is to put a spatial restriction on posting and reading – you can only post and read when you’re in a place, not remotely online.

Even in their little trial, something great happened. People started naming imaginary places in real locations – “Floor 42” in a ten story building – in order to put in messages for their own group of friends.

Isn’t that wonderful. It seems so obvious after the fact, but you would never have been able to think that up beforehand. It emerged because their system is so good, it allows for creation.

[Tech Report]

I am getting used to the Swiss winter landscape. Today, I found all the things frozen and white. As a native Italian, I am not used to such winter beauty …

Recently I have been super interested in this concept: Abduction, which refers back to Aristotelean’s philosophy, consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them: C is observed; if A were true, C would be a matter of course; hence, there is a reason to suspect that A is true. Abduction is ‘argument to best explanation’.

[Baker et al., 1999] Baker, M., Hansen, T., Joiner, R., and Traum, D. (1999). Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches, chapter The role of grounding in collaborative learning tasks, pages 31–63. Pergamon / Elsevier Science, Amsterdam. Available from: http://gric.univ-lyon2.fr/gric5/home/mbaker/webpublications/GG-99.PDF.
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The central claim contained in this paper is that grounding is the process happening at the utterance and collaborative level. They say that when collaboration and grounding take place with respect of a specific level/object, then the two coincide. However, grounding and interaction may take place with respect to different levels/objects simultaneously in a given situation. In this case, there can be both collaboration and non-collaboration, but with respect to different levels/objects.

In another point, they say that grounding take place at semantic and pragmetic levels. At the semantic level, grounding involves searching for common understanding of refferent and meanings of terms. At the pragmatic level, grounding involves, for example, interactional participants understanding each others’ communicative intentions.

Their view on how grounding and collaborative learning are interrelates is summarised as follows: collaborative learning will be associated with gradual transition from the use of language as a medium for grounding communication (pragmatic) to grounding on the level of the medium itself (semantic), leading to the appropiation of the medium.

Another interesting point is that, for measuring grounding in collaboration they start looking at actions in their framework for modelling energy in physics (C-CHENE). Lastly, here Baker states that grounding can be assimilated to negotiation.

The Mobile Bristol Toolkit is a limited version of the Mobile Bristol Application Development Framework which has been created to ease the development and deployment of locative media. The toolkit enables almost anyone to author location-sensitive, media-oriented, mobile applications called mediascapes and to try out their creations on a handheld device with an attached GPS unit.

[link] 

Recently I have been discussing with Jakko a very simple idea: whether there is a general confusion about how grounding intervene at utterance level of analysis and at knowledge construction level. Sometimes, scholars refer to grounding, as defined and measured for the utterance level, as happening at knowledge level of analysis. Here we perceive a misuse of the term, and we are interested in finding (dis)similarities between the two different levels mentioned above. In particular we are working on a synthetic view which contains the differences we see. We are looking for early-stage comments 🙂

Working on the interaction design of the interface I am working on for the exploitation of the ‘spatialised’ communication filtering system, I sketched some icon that represent the three basic functionalities that such system must have. The first is the ability to move through the virtual representation of the space on top of which the messages are organised. The second is the ability to edit such content adding or editing previous post. The third is the ability to filter/search the content of the whole system.