Group participation

TITLE OF PAPER: CSCL Symposium
PRESENTED BY: Ulrich Hoppe

CONFERENCE: CSCL Symposium
DATE: October, 7th, 2004
LOCATION: EPFL, CRAFT


REAL-TIME NOTES / ANNOTATIONS OF THE PAPER:

-F. Hesse, from DFG, DE-
Why group-awareness tolls can undermine participation: the effect of providing participants’ portraits in a virtual information-exchange environment.
[1]

Communication with shared databases: information is distributed among people: individuals need information from others: shared repository/ shared db.

Barriers for contributions comes from low intrinsic motivation; from the messagin threshold (Reid et al 1996); contributing takes time anb effort; knowledge is a source of power; information sharing is not rewarding…

Formal Structure: Social Dilemma [Dawes, 1980]
Social situation: high anonimity. No social cues; no awareness about others; people do not feel embedded ina group with a common goal.

A Solution: providing group awareness
Three type of awareness (Carroll, Neale, Isenhour, Bosso, Mc Crickard, 2003)
-social awareness
-group awareness
-activity awareness

SIDE-Model (Lea & Spears): effect of anonymity in group discussion
it consider the effect of the “identifiability” or effect of “visual anonimity”.
Identifiability of contributions leads attention to the individual.
Viceversa the group identity leads attentio to the group and far from the individual.

Therefore the portrait should have both approach depending on the mood of the contributor to preserve both the group identity and the personal identity.

The outcome of the experimental study showed that depending on the initial mood of the contributors influenced their attitude towards the system, namely if haveing the potrait would be perceived as positive or negative.

CSCLSymposium_hesse.jpg

-J. Tholander, DSV.SU.SE-
Embodied programming with visual and tangible representations.

Two different project: SPLASH, Weblabs [2].
To understand children’s interaction and leaning in construction and programming activity. Four main pedagogical approaches: kids own creations; collaboration; new programming representations; webbased shared and decision making models.

Representations for learning: Logo is textual; ToonTalk is animated; AgentSheets follows graphical rules.

What are these representations? Simplifications? Alternative representations?
To overcome some limitations of this approach they introduce the term Embodied programming follwing P. Durish Embodied Interaction (Dourish, 2001).

Three microanalytical investigations of children’s programming with animated pictures and tangible representations: a) pointing and gesturing “ouside” the computer; “inside” the computer; social representation of social elements.

They used some fast prototyping technique and video recording of children’s activity as a way to gather experimental data. They deducted that lots od feictic references are usually used in this kind of interaction (two kinds in front of the computer, programming a game). Again, the discussion involves the combination of talk and gestures.

Three issues:
– programming is seen as a mental activity
– knowing in tool-intense activity
– how do we interpret learning in these embodied forms of interaction?

They argue that is worth to look at this kind of interaction. Is it possible to interpret learning from the microlevel of activity? Are you looking at the engagement or at the learning? What is your definition of learning? Is it a change of your problem-solving at a certain time? We cannot assimilate learning with activity. For learning in a group the core concept is the share of the knowledge.

CSCLSymposium_Tholander.jpg


REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below}

[1] http://www.wissenkommunikation.de
[2] http://www.weblabs.?

Leave a Reply