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.

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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]

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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.

Wyche, S. P., Hayes, G. R., Harvel, L. D., and Grinter, R. E. (2006). Technology in spiritual formation: an exploratory study of computer mediated religious communications. In CSCW ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pages 199–208, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press. [pdf]

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This paper aims at explaining the use of technology in religious life. The author performed a series of intervies with Protestant Ministers. Most pastors responded with a list of duties including educating the laity, preaching, and communication. More in details they reported using thechnological means to organize Bible study groups, for the pastoral care of the laity such as reaching sick parishioners or conunseling those in spiritual or personal crisis.

A good part of the article focus on thechnological enhancement to preaching and presentation. An interesting reported finding is that altough Ministers reported using commercial products for their presentations such as PowerPoint or Keynote, they expressed their misgivings about the fact that these software were designed with generic purposes in mind and that they do not support the peculiarities of spiritual training or presentation.

Some pastors expressed their feelings about the fact that using technology is essential for the church to be ‘contemporary’ but at the same time it is a matter of negotiation: a tradeoff between ‘relevance’ and ‘reverence’, but also a tradeoff between connection and distraction, remoteness and actual encounters. E. G., for spiritual practices solitude might be important.

Finally the authors reported interestingly that parishioners used technological access to spiritual material at work. So, we observe an ‘infiltration’ of domestic life in working settings. This allowed them to practice during the week instead of waiting for Sunday.

On a critical note, focusing the study on a single religion might have somehow biased the results. It might be interesting to broaden the spectrum of analysis to see if the same results apply.

Zhao, J. and Coleman, D. J. (2006). Geodf: Towards a sdi-based ppgis application for e-governance. In GSDI-9 Conference Proceedings, Santiago, Chile. Military Geographic Institute of Chile. [pdf]

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This paper present a good review of system aiming at supporting Public Participation in decision support. One of the main argument of the paper is that in order to make useful and valid decision while lack of required information, it is important to add community knowledge (Craig et al., 2002). Public participation is a process that “allows those affected by a decision to have an input into that decision” (Smith, 1993).

Dix, A. (1995). Cooperation without (reliable) communication: Interfaces for mobile applications. Distributed System Engineering, 3(2):171–181. [url]

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The author reviews in this article some factors that make mobile devices less functional, for collaborative purposes, than stationary equivalents.

The aurthor uses a nice visual representation for the CSCW framework (figure 2), explaining what are the relationships between participants and artifacts in a face-to-face cooperative working situation. If the participants are cooperating, then we might expect that their direct communication is about and makes reference to the artefacts on which they are working. In F2F working, these references are very rich.

In remote communication it is often the relationship between communication and action which is lost. Often explicit means are introduced to help. The author refers to ‘group pointers’ as an arrow that can be picked up by one of the participants and then displayed on all the screens.

Annotations supports this link between action and communication in asynchronous applications. The author refers to systems as Quilt (Leland et al., 1988) and Prep (Neuwirth et al., 1992).

Feedthrough (figure 3) is the term that the author uses to define the feedback that is offered when one of the participants act on the artifacts and this action is then visible to the other participant(s). Feedthrough can be seen as a form of communication through the artefact. Feedthrough is usually slower than general feedback, however the author cautions that when these two are too out of step a problem of deictic reference might occur.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human communication, human computer interaction

Schrott, G. and Gluckler, J. (2004). What makes mobile computer supported cooperative work mobile?  towards a better understanding of cooperative mobile interactions. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 60(5-6):737–752. [pdf]

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The authors aims at comparing coworkers interacting using mobile devices and stationary computers. Thez sets the following questions: a) do mobile messages fiffer from stationary messages with regard to frequency and time? b) underwhat conditions do users prefer mobile over stationary communications? and c) Do people use different technologies to relate to different people?

Apart from indipendence of location, mobile collaborative work presents the same strategies and content of stationary collaborative work. However given the limits of mobile technology, mobile communication is not yet capable of entirily replacing stationary communication.

The authors asked a group of student to develop a product together interacting over stationary and mobile emails. The monitored the messages exchanges and used social network analysis techniques to indentify differences between the media.

They found that mobile messages differed from stationary messages in terms of size and that the use of mobile emails prevailed over stationary emails under conditions of stress.They found also that the social structure of mobile communication corresponded with the structure of stationary communication. This indicates that mobile communication technologies support existing communication relations rather than creating new relations.

This collection is quite unique. Probably these different contributions were assembled for an art exhibit. Psychological Maps were studied by Stanley Migram in his seminal work on how Parisian’s people represented Paris. Maps are always distorted around social places: locations which have a special meaning for that person. The map below is particularly representative, it was titled: “my “heart” is somewhere here”.

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Tags: maps, psychogeography

FixMyStreet is a Location-Based Annotation platform where users report problems with the street system around where they live. Once in a while when enough complaints are filled, the system sends them all together to the council responsible for these particular streets. Complaints could also ranked socially so that most urging problems are sent first.

Tags: collaboration tools, Location Based Services, maps

Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., Balin, J. A., and Paek, T. S. (1998). Definite reference and mutual knowledge: Process models of common ground in comprehension, ,. Journal of Memory and Language, 39(1):1–20. [pdf]

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This paper argues that when language users disambiguate definite references they do not follow the cooperative principle as suggested by Grice (1975), or the relevance principle as suggested by Sperber & Wilson (1986), or the optimal design principle as defined by Clark, Schreuder, & Buttrick, 1983). Instead the authors present evidences that speakers follow a Perspective Adjustment Model:

Our model assumes the operation of two processes during comprehension: A fast, un-restricted search that interprets the definite reference by assigning a referent with no regard to mutual knowledge. This process is coupled with a monitoring and adjustment process that is sensitive to considerations of common ground. It uses the meta-knowledge that an entity is mutually known and attempts to correct violations of common ground. In contrast to the unrestricted search, the adjustment process is relatively slow — mainly because it activates higher level, meta-knowledge memory structures. The model assumes that the two processes proceed not in a strict serial fashion but instead in cascades (McClelland, 1979).

The results of this work account for the fact that there is no definite reference: even if the common knowledge between the speakers is fully explicit and readily available in the interaction this does not guarantee that the speakers will use it for disambiguating references during the collaboration process.

References:

Clark, H. H., Schreuder, R., & Buttrick, S. (1983). Common ground and the understanding of demonstrative reference. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 245 – 258.

Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press

McClelland, J. L. (1979). On the time relations of mental processes: An examination of systems of processes in cascade. Psychological Review, 86, 287 – 330

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1982). Mutual knowledge and relevance in theories of comprehension. In N. Smith (Ed.), Mutual knowledge. London: Academic Press.