Interesting project on the net of a group of journalists and Researcher who wanted to have their voice on current themes of politic. The site is organised as a group blog and the readers can have their space leaving comments to each article or writing articles. Also, the groups are organised by arguments. An RSS feed is provided. However, the interactivity of the internet site is very low and is difficult to keep track of how users respond to what. It would be nice to have a visual map of the contributions to enhance the co-reference of the participants.

[La Voce.info]

I wanted to share some of the thoughts I had on how the tagging algorithm for ‘spatialised’ conversation should work. In the following, I will offer an example of tag construction for one of the messages left into the system as the algorithm should operate. The idea is that every time that a message is posted, the algorithm should operate an analysis of the connected markers and later assign a computed tag to the message. In the next example, I will describe a situation in which Mike leaves a message in the system for Paul.

In the initial phase, Mike post the message: “Jog 2 PM?”, standing in his office. Paul retrieves the message from his office. In phase 2 Mike moves to “Hyde” park at the location where the message was posted. In the third phase, Paul joins Mike at the park. The algorithm, at this point, should “googles” a bit on WordNet, trying to find a meaning for Jog. Then it should relate this with jogging, then sport. In addition, following the indication of time that matches with the time of meeting of Paul and Mike in the park, the algorithm should also recognise that the message is about coordinating for a meeting. Finally, two tags are added to the message MSG contained in the database: “sport” and “meeting point”.

This should go on Nico’s lifehacks 🙂
After messing around a bit, I found a brilliant plug-in for WordPress (WP-Wikify) that connects [CamelCase] words with WikiPages. After haveing discovered a bug between WordPress and Safary, namely that they do not agree on what the HTTP standard is when gzip-encoding is turned on (thanks Andrew Chan), I configured the plug-in to link the words of my wiki every time they are typed in the blog.

So, for instance, if I type HomePage it should link to the corresponding page of the wiki. Now, … it will be super cool it this would be done also for pages without a CamelCase name like “co-reference”.

Andrew told me that a new version should be released soon. Let’s wait and hope for this miracle also.

Some references I found on this topic, by Susan Fussell:

Fussell, S. R., & Benimoff, N. I. (1995). Social and cognitive processes in interpersonal communication: Implications for advanced telecommunications technologies. Human Factors, 37, 228-250. Download Preprint (PDF)

Fussell, S. R., & Krauss, R. M. (1992). Coordination of knowledge in communication: Effects of speakers’ assumptions about what others know. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 378-391.

Fussell, S. R., & Krauss, R. M. (1991). Accuracy and bias in estimates of others’ knowledge. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 445-454.

Krauss, R. M., & Fussell, S. R. (1991). Perspective-taking in communication: The determination of others’ knowledge and referential language use. Social Cognition, 9, 2-24.

Fussell, S. R., & Krauss, R. M. (1989a). The effects of intended audience on message production and comprehension: Reference in a common ground framework. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 203-219.

Fussell, S. R., & Krauss, R. M. (1989b). Understanding friends and strangers: The effects of audience design on message comprehension. European Journal of Social Psychology, 19, 509-525.

I recently moved to the countryside of Lausanne. This is the view I get from the window of my kitchen.

I found a nice quote via Mathemagenic:

To the extent that a person becomes aware of his or her processes of construction and takes control of them that person acquires self-organisation in learning.

I like it a lot because it reflect the active nature of learning and the key fact that each person has to deal with a self reflection on his methods and processed of acquiring knowledge. This also made me think about the reason why I started using this blog as a way to reflect on my reasoning processes. I would argue that the main reasons why I use this blog are the following:
1- it keep tracks of my thoughts;
2- I can search through my notes;
3- it force me to write down what I think;
4- it force me to be intelligible because others have to read it;
5- it helps me to build the definitions of the terminology I am using;
6- I can see the evolution of my thoughts;
7- it force me to write at least one post per day;
8- it enables me to share my thoughts with others;
9- I can receive comments on what I am doing;
10- …

Interesting link from Patrick, on this online repository of the mayor theories of learning:

TIP is a tool intended to make learning and instructional theory more accessible to educators. The database contains brief summaries of 50 major theories of learning and instruction. These theories can also be accessed by learning domains and concepts.

[Allwood et al., 1993] Allwood, J., Nivre, J., and Ahlsén, E. (1993). On the semantics and pragmatics of linguistic feedback. Journal of Semantics, 9(1):1–29. Available from: http://wwwantique.ling.gu.se/~jens/publications/B%2520files/B33.pdf.
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This paper is the base on top of which Dillenbourg and Traum developed their 4 level model of the grounding process. However, I registered a difference of perspective, because Allwood called the four level as: contact (willing/able to continue), perception (willing/able to perceive), understanding (willing/able to understand), and attitudinal reactions (willing/able to react). Particularly, Allwood mean by this last level, the attitude of the receiver to react by the various aspect of the content that the sender is displaying or signalling. All of this is for Allwood the linguistic feedback. Later in the paper, Allwood extend this definition of the attitudinal reaction adding that this comunicative act is manifested through some types of reaction such as: (non-)acceptance, (dis)belief, surprise, boredom, disappointment, enthusiasm.

In Dillenbourg and Traum, this last level is manifested through (dis)agreement. In both cases, the chose type of reaction leading to a comunicative act seems to point to grounding at utterance level and missing the collaborative dimension of the communication. Agreement, as disagreement seems to point ot acknowledgment which again does not reflect knowledge grounding. In both cases they seems not to refer to actions or commitment.

In conclusion, they argue that linguistic feedback can be described pragmatically, but in order for this to be possible, feeback expression an feeback mechanism shoulld be regarded as highly context dependant.

Mäkitalo, K. and Häkkinen, P. (2001). Building and maintaining common ground in web-based interaction. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction, Friburg, Switzerland. Available from: http://newmedia.colorado.edu/cscl/123.pdf.
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Interesting link provided by this paper points to Veerman (2000). This author expand on Dillenbourg and Traum 1999 and says that grounding can exist also at the level of understanding thematic information in relation to certain task and learning goals.

The authors here state that this is achieved through negotiation, which they consider central to collaborative learning. For them collaborative learning environment should be designed to offer possibilities of disagreement and misunderstanding as well.

For them the key of people interacting in such environments is for them to keep the focus not just on the content but also in the way they are proposing such content. They have to be mor eaware of the reactions of the partners to their contributions. They have to seek evidences. The central claim is that even when adaquate level of common ground is established, it does not guarantee that interaction will continue. They say that this common ground has to be maintained by heeding mechanism of contact, perception, understanding and attitudinal reaction.

They are extracting this four levels from a study by Allwood (1991). However, I have got the impression that they mixed up these four levels with the concept of linguistic feedback, which they represent into a separate filed in the diagram of the mechanism of common ground. On the contrary, for Allwood, this feedback is embedded in the four levels described.

[Dillenbourg and Traum, 1999] Dillenbourg, P. and Traum, D. (1999). Does a shared screen make a shared solution? In Hoadly, C. and Roschelle, J., editors, Proceedings of the Third Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, pages 127–135, California: Stanford University. Available from: http://www.ict.usc.edu/~traum/Papers/cscwHTML/cscl99-dil&traum2.html.
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The main concept contained in this paper is that the term ‘shared understanding’ is used inconsistently at linguistic level and at cognitive level. In the first case, the term is concentrated with the understanding of a sentence. In the second case, it is concerned with the understanding of a problem and its solution or even with the understanding of a domain. The authors stated that it is hard to find a relationship between the cognitive and the linguistic level, namely to describe how grounding mechanism contribute to build a shared solution.

Therefore their approach was to describe how grounding mechanism vary according to task criteria. The ‘grounding criterion’ is, for them a syntetic account of various parameters, such as the probability of non-grounding (high for ambiguos or polemical messages), the cost of non-grounding (how detrimental it is to misunderstand) and persistency of information.

The first question they try to answer is wether a shared witheboard contribute to grounding utteraces. They proved that witheboard was used to fix a shared representation of the ongoing problem solving, wether the dialogues in the chat was used to ground witheboard information.

In this study they assimilated grounding intensity with the rate of acknowledgment. And, to this extent, the rate of acknowledgment is not related to the global performance measure.

Two last comments: (1) I feel that a possible link between the grounding at utterance level and grounding at a cognitive level may be represented by the introduction of markers that look at perspective taking and mutual modelling; (2) I dout the assimilation of grounding intensity with the rate of acknowledgment for the same extent that acknowledgment in not a direct reflection of grounding. I might acknowledge an utterance for the sake of continuing the conversation without a real comprehension of the emitter comunicative intent. Can we use here different markers, like actions which might reflect more to what the person understood? (3) I like the idea that we can assimilate understanding, misunderstanding and disagreement for the purpose of learning: both activates a situation (sometimes conflictual) which can support negotiation and therefore mutual understanding (Blaye, 1988).