I found an interesting link, reading Jakko’s paper, to a study by P. Reyes and P. Tchounikine on how to support the emergence of threaded learning conversations through augmenting interactional and sequential coherence.

Browsing the content of the article, I was captured by the interface they designed as a proof of concept. It is a very simple layout which concentrate on the threading of the messages, showing how people replied to which part of the previous message. Overall, it is very simple to have a view on how the messages are concatenated. This reflect on supporting the co-reference of the peers during the conversation.

To me this can be a magnificent tool to support opinion forming and online discussions.

[Stahl, 2000] Stahl, G. (2000). A model of collaborative knowledge-building. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conferences of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), MI, USA. Ann Arbor. Available from: http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/cscl/papers/ch14.pdf.
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This paper starts from some recent studies of Koschmann to define a personal and social knowledge building. The most striking claim he raise, in accord with other scholars, is that learning is a social process, and as such it is not always possible to resolve the problematic character of our personal understanding internally. Then we may need to enter into an explicitly social process and create new meanings collaboratively through articulating our initial beliefs in words (or actions) and expressing ourselves in public statements.

“It may be inferred that every time war has recovered the aspect of a game, this was because society wished to reintroduce the passion myth into its culture – that is to say, wished to confine a lawless force within a framework and give it a ritual form of manifesting itself.”

Denise de Rougemount

I was reading Femina and I found an interesting link to this company, called filtra that tries to evaluate the filtering solutions for internet parental control.

Filtra est un projet de Action Innocence qui a pour objectif d’évaluer, tous les 6 mois, les solutions de filtrages et de contrôle parental vendus sur le marché.

This reminded me of a study I did for my bachelors thesis about the usability and ergonomy of children internet sites. At that time, I was advocating for the definition of ‘Kinternetgartens’, a sort of on-line kindergartens where children could meet and interact with a guardian watching on the interactions and keeping out dangers. After 4 years, I still believe is a good idea that I like more of having a mechanical filter that blocks content out.

After a while of submarine existence, I started using more intensively my newborn wiki, that I am planning to use as a research glossary. The idea is, at some point to automatically link all the keyword appearing here in the blog with existing wikipages. I am planning the development of a specific WordPress plug-in.

The first use I want to do of this system is the definition of the term: Mutual Modelling. Of course I would be happy to hear your feedbacks.

1- Current models of grounding do not distinguish between grounded materials and materials that is partially or falsely grounded. [illusion of shared understanding]

2- Current models of grounding are concentrated at the utterance level of analysis and therefore the distinction of 1 lose weight.

3- However, at knowledge level of analysis, we observe a nuanced view of the degree of ‘groundedness’. The distinction between grounded or ungrounded is an oversimplification.

4- When studying grounding at a level of collaborative working and learning, what is ‘necessary/sufficient to continue talking’ is often not sufficient for a succesfull collaboration.

5- It seems more reasonable to infer grounding from evidences of the grounding effects, like commitment in a dynamic interaction.

6- ‘Perspective taking’ or ‘Mutual modeling’ markers should be integrated in the grounding model as good grounding efforts which increase the probability of updating successfully common ground.

Repast seems to be an interesting platform on top of which we can test some of the ideas or findings of our cognitive studies. This may even be the pandora box for Nico’s search for a computational flavor to his thesis description. :-O

The Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit (Repast) is one of several agent modeling toolkits that are available. Repast borrows many concepts from the Swarm agent-based modeling toolkit. Repast is differentiated from Swarm since Repast has multiple pure implementations in several languages and built-in adaptive features such as genetic algorithms and regression. … Repast is at the moment the most suitable simulation framework for the applied modeling of social interventions based on theories and data”.

[Koschmann and LeBaron, 2003] Koschmann, T. and LeBaron, C. D. (2003). Reconsidering common ground. In Kuutti, K., Karsten, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Durish, P., and Schmidt, K., editors, ECSCW2003: Proceedings of the Eight European Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, Amsterdam. Kluwer Academic Publishing.
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This paper contains a critics to Clark’s Contribution Model, providing applied situations, like communication in an operating room, where the relationship between the presentation and the acceptance phase, as described by Clark, are muddled. Their data contrast with Clark’s model, because the component parts of the sender-receiver model (e.g., environment) may be brought into being through human interaction whithin and upon it. In other words, the boundaries of a contribution may be ambiguous when conversation is tied to an ongoing activity, and/or embodied phenomena. The authors also add that in Clark’s model are also neglected the features of the material and social environment that participants draw upon in making sense of their own and other’s utterances. This paper is in accord with my idea that common ground is something difficult to grasp. However, the author extremise this idea saying that c.g. is not a thing that can be measured, either directly or indirectly.

Interesting application for SmartPhones to annotate physical objects with virtual information developed in Denmark. I am interested in this for the external bluetooth integration they did. More generally for the Interaction Design of the interface.

HyCon is a framework and infrastructure for context aware hypermedia systems developed primarily by the hypermedia group at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The HyCon framework encompasses annotations, links, and guided tours associating locations and RFID- or Bluetooth-tagged objects with maps, Web pages, and collections of resources. The HyCon architecture extends upon earlier location based hypermedia systems by supporting authoring in the field and by providing access to browsing and searching information through a novel geo-based search (GBS) interface for the Web.

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Fab and Patrick are speeding up the development of ShoutSpace here at CRAFT. This is a system for ‘spatialised’ communication which uses wifi positioning. I did not contribute too much so far but I am interested to test there some of the ideas I have on the collaborative processes of this kind of communication. Eventually, I might contribute for implementing a filter mechanism in the interface.