Vertegaal, R. (1999). The gaze groupware system: mediating joint attention in multiparty communication and collaboration. In CHI ’99: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 294–301, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press. [url]

———

This paper argues that designing mediated systems is a problem of conveying the least redundant cues first. The central issue of supporting collaborative work at distance is that regardless of whether audio or video is used one should provide simple and effective means of capturing and methaphorically representing the attention participants have for one another and their work.

The authors quore Short et al.’s Social Presence Theory (1976), according to which communication media are ranked according to the degree to which participants feel co-located, and does suggest that the amount of social presence is improved by increasing the number of cues conveyed. However, when cues are redundantly coded, we can no longer predict the effects of a communication system. The authors concludes that we should avoid trying to improve communication by means of increasing bandwidth.

The authors concentrate on the problems of mediating multiparty communication, showing examples of how multiparty communication using video conferencing is not necessarily easier to manage than using telephony. Single-camera video systems do not comvey deictic visual references to objects or persons.

To overcome most of the limitations of previous approaches, the authors implemented a virtual meeting room where each the camera feed of each participant is represented in a moving panel that replicates the movements of the head of the real participant. This plus a lightspot on the shared workspace gives a sense of gazing at other participants and gazing at the objects used during the interaction.

The system is here described in great details but was no evaluation was reported. The paper conains also a graat review of studies showing the effect of conveying gaze direction in collaborative work.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, eye-tracking, human communication, human computer interaction

Schroeder, R., Heather, N., and Lee, R. M. (1998). The sacred and the virtual: Religion in multi-user virtual reality. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 4(2). [url]

——-

This paper presents participatory observations of virtual religious meetings. The authors participated for a coupe of weeks in these meetings and reported their experience comparing the virtual meetings to the actual meetings.

One of the difference the authors noticed was that virtual church permits design and experimentation of virtual spaces that are less constrained than a church in the real world. The authors pose the question on whether virual religion will have a corrosive or an invigorating effect on religion on the contemporary society. As Durkheim noticed, religious rituals consists of three elements: the physical co-presence of people to enhance emotionl energy, the ritualization of actions which includes a coordination of gestures and voices, and symbolic sacred object that reifies and reinforces the group’s sense of itself (1992, p.42). This three elements are absent in virtual encounters.

An interesting idea reported was that of sharing the prayers composed during the meetings with the rest of the community: “…Leader2 asks whether prayer requests may be passed to the world controller for display on a public space within the E-church world. This space, to which all will have access, fulfils the role of a church noticeboard or prayer letter, or the wider informal sharing of requests and needs which would naturally ripple out following the group meeting…”

Maglio, P. P., Barrett, R., Campbell, C. S., and Selker, T. (2000). Suitor: an attentive information system. In IUI ’00: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, pages 169–176, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press. [pdf]

———

This paper describes Simple User Interests Tracker, an attentive system that pays attention to what the user is looking at and through probabilistic models infers what his/her intrests might be. Then this information is used to create a peripherial awareness around the interesting topic.

Oh, A., Fox, H., Kleek, M. V., Adler, A., Gajos, K., Morency, L.-P., and Darrell, T. (2002). Evaluating look-to-talk: a gaze-aware interface in a collaborative environment. In CHI ’02: CHI ’02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 650–651, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press. [pdf]

———-

This short paper describes an experiments where participant pairs had to answer trivia questions. To get to the next question the participants had to interact with a software agent displayed on the wall. In different experimental conditions they could interact with the agent using: voice, gaze or text input. The experiments showed that look-to-talk was a better choice for natural human-computer interaction.

Vertegaal, R., Shell, J. S., Chen, D., and Mamuji, A. (2006). Designing for augmented attention: Towards a framework for attentive user interfaces. Computers in Human Behavior, (22):771–789. [pdf]

———

This paper contains a great review of attentive user interfaces. The authors’ argument is that computers are ill equipped to negotiate their communications with humans. The point is to design computers with channels to explicitly negotiate the volume and timing of communications with the user. The authors’ approach is to replicate human turn-taking strategies. In particular one features of face-to-face conversations indicates with great accuracy to whim the speaker wants to yield the floor: eye-contact.

Eye focus can be used to communicate the target of the user actions in a collaborative situation. The paper present a great review of systems or projects that aims at communicating user’s visual attention and interest in mediated group conversations or collaboration, like GAZE (Vertegaal et al., 1997) or SUITOR (Maglio et al., 2000). 

Tags: eye-tracking, human computer interaction

Anjewierden, A., Kollöffel, B., and Hulshof, C. (2007). Towards educational data mining: Using data mining methods for automated chat analysis to understand and support inquiry learning processes. In Proceedings of International Workshop on Applying Data Mining in e-Learning (ADML 2007) as part of the 2nd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2007), Crete, Greece. [pdf]

——-

The premise of this paper is that learners cannot be expected to oversee the whole of their communication and also that chat communication tend to be less structured than face-to-face communication (Stromso et al., 2007). Therefore they aim to build a real-time feedback system that can regulate the collaborative interactions.

This workshop paper presents a nice appriach to use a part-of-speech tagger and a bayesian classifier to categorize chat messages into 4 functional categories: regulatory, domain specific, social and technical messages. The authors used manual coders to assign each message to a category. Then they used this corpus to train the bayesian classifier, showing high accuracy results.

Adam, A. (2002). Practicing the disseminary: Technology lessons from napster. Teaching Theology & Religion, 5(1):10–16. [url]

———

This paper describes how the success of Napster can be applied to theological education. The main point of the article is that should by no means perpetuate yesterday’s media in tomorrow’s environments.

The author reported a case study from diferent semesters of teaching where he used online discussions and materials to support the classroom work. He noticed interestingly that students that were shy during classroom discussions tended to post regularly online. Also he list interesting drawbacks of common technologies used in classroom teaching. Reserve materials are always printed as reading online is difficult and you cannot annotate the content easily. PowerPoint presentations are great but they may convey certainty to enduring problems and mysteries.

Most educators tend to react to new media imposing control. The author argues that a newway of thinking is required: the way of production and distribution of knowledge are now inexpensive. He proposes the concept of “Disseminary”, a common effort to put as much theological sutenance at the disposal of as many people as possible.

He proposes 5 lessons from Napster: 1) It is not the interface: we should put more effort in the production of content than on its presentation; 2) Free: this is the main value of the internet. Knowledge access shouldn’t have a cost; 3) No one gets awards from Napster, and no one would care if they did. The music is its own reward: it is more blessed to give than to receive; 4) Users who have downloaded large amounte of music tend to be better acquainted with more music; 5) Users who are enthousiastic about music they download will buy the CD and will especially go to the concert.

He notice that many educators fear that free distributions of online materials will diminish the appeal of on-campus education. However he highlights that theological education depends for some of its deepest formation on in-person interactions.

Roschelle, J. (1990). Designing for conversations. In AAAI Symposium on Computer-Based Environments for Learning and Teaching, Stanford, CA, USA. April. American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

———

This paper examines the tole of computer-based representations in learning, distinguishing a dominant assumption in many analyses of representation use, epistemic fidelity, from an alternative, symbolic mediation. Epistemic fidelity refers to the quality of the denotational relationship between a computer display and the desired knowledge structures. A display with high epidemic fidelity is often thought to be a better learning tool because it should enable students to decode the denotational relationship and internalize the target knowledge. Symbolic mediation, in contrast, refers to the utility of a display as a resource for managing the uncertainty of meaning in conversations, particularly with respect to the construction of shared knowledge. When taken as a framing assumption for the design of learning technology, symbolic mediation can lead designers to construct external displays the will bridge the gap between commonsense and scientific interpretations of the world by providing an enriched physical situation to act in a talk about. I develop the contrast between these perspectives using the concrete example of a computer simulation of velocity and acceleration called the “Envisioning Machine”. I argue for a greather emphasis on designing mediational tools, and discuss guidelines for designing for conversations including minimalism, persistence, selective redundancy, direct manipulation for communication, and activity fidelity.

English, L. M. (2000). Spiritual dimensions of informal learning. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, (85):29–37. [pdf]

———

Informal and incidental learning occur contrinuously in the everyday world. In this chapter the author focus on three primary learning strategies: mentoring, self-directed learning (SDL) and dialogue. She explores how each of these strategies can facilitate spiritual development. The main argument of the author is that informal learning can foster a (a) strong sense of self, (b) concern and outreach to others, and (c) continuous construction of meaning and knowledge.

(a) Adults learn from their encounters with others about alernate and varied ways of being. Spirituality develops from a strong sense of self (MaKeracher, 1996).

(b) A fully integrated spiritual person reaches beyond his or her self and acknowledge the interdependance of all of creation, appreciate the uniqueness of others, and ultimately assumes responability for caring.

(c) The opportunity to engage with others and in the activities in which one is involved assists in the process of constructing meaning from experience (Merriam and Heuer, 1996). The search of meaning is bound up in the understanding of everyday life. It involves a realization that life is greater than our sphere of influence.

Human potential requires nurturing. This can be stimulated by study circles and by the learning by doing. An objective of adult education should be to help individuals make meaning our of their experience. The learner should be brought to take charge for his/her learning experience. A technique that can go in this sense is a journal of the student educational practice.

Also, knowledge is constructed collaboratively. Therefore it is important to develop self-understanding and awareness as these abilities put the learner in contact with others. The community should be engaged in collective activities of constructing meaning.

The author concludes with a final remark that shed light on her idea of spiritual dimension: “although all humans have spititual aspects in their being, not all are aware of this dimension in their lives. Informal and incidental learning provide the context and support that nurture this spiritual component.”

for this we pray is an art installation inspired by the tradition of lighting candles during prayer. The user can select one of several prayer cards, each with an embedded RFID tag inside, and hold it close to a wall-mounted “srine” reminiscent of a stained-glass window. Once the card is recognized, a light is turned on.

The author, Aya Natalia Karpinska, argues that:

The technology employed brings something new to reading, it ties the writing to an action that enriches the experience. Writing becomes performance. The use of cards is inpsired by the prayer cards I would receive after special Catholic masses as a child, cards with an image of a saint on one side and a lyric or prayer on the other side. These cards are kept in your bag or in your prayer book, wherever you would be likely to happen upon them and reflect once more on the essence of the thought the prayer card communicates. Each of the cards in for this we pray are devoted to a specific intention, each is a fragment, a musing on the role of prayer in the life of a hyper-digital urban atheist such as myself.