Clark, H. H. and Murphy, G. L. (1982). Language and Comprehension, chapter Audience Design in Meaning and Reference, pages 287–299. North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, The Nederlands.

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The speaker’s goal is to be understood. Clark and Murphy define audience design as the attitute a speaker has in tailoring the spoken utterances for particular listeners, whith whom the speaker shares momentary thoughts and beliefs. In this article, Clark also defines how references in conversations are dynamic. Also audience design presupposes design assumptions: a listener cannot identify the referent without making essential use of the design assumption.

To decode the utterance, the listeners apply specific heuristics, which are based on the shared context: community membership, physical co-presence or linguistic co-presence.

We argue that the speaker designs each utterance for specific listeners, and they, make essential use of this fact in unserstanding the utterance. We call this property of utterances audience design. Often listeners can come to a unique interpretation for an utterance only if they assume that the speaker desined it hust so that they could come to that interpretation uniquely. We illustrate reasoning from audience design in the understanding of defenitive reference, anaphora, and word meaning, and we offer evidence that listeners actually reason this way. We conclude that audience design must play a central role in any adequate theory of understanding.

Tags: linguistics

Suthers, D., Girardeau, L., and Hundhausen, C. (2003). Designing for Change, chapter Deictic Roles of External Representations in Face-To-Face and Online Collaboration, pages 173–182. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, The Nederlands. [pdf]

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This study examined how learner-constructed graphical evidence maps were used by learners to support conversation through deixis to the contents of the evidence map in face-to-face and online conditions. The results show that although external representations play important roles as resources for collaboration in both face-to-face and online learning, they are appropriated in different ways to support communication and collaboration.

In face-to-face collaboration, deixis was accomplished quite effectively through gesture. Gesture is spatially indexical: it can select any information in the shared visual space, regardless of when that information was previously encountered or introduced. Online collaborators also used external representations for referential purposes, but through verbal deixis and direct manipulation rather than gestural deixis. Verbal deixis in the chat tool was temporally indexical: it most often selected recently manipulated items.

These results raised the question of whether and how online participants revisit prior information. Direct manipulation of the representations seemed to play this role most effectively, and indeed constituted an alternative means through which some aspects of communication about problem solution took place. However, communication in an evidence map (graph) is limited to propositions in the domain and the evidential relations between them.

Direct manipulation is in a sense “first order” – higher order reflections such as discussion of possible interpretations of the information available are undertaken more often in the verbal media (speech or chat). Putting these observations together, there is a danger that online discourse may be less reflective, especially in its integration of new and prior information, because the most reflective mode of interaction – verbal – focuses on recent (temporally indexed) items online; while the easiest means of reintroducing prior information is through direct manipulation. This speculation was consistent with the reduced integration scores seen in the essays of online participants.

Novak, J. D. and, J. Canas (2006). The theory underlying concept maps and how to construct them. Technical Report IHMC CmapTools 2006-01, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, FI, USA. [pdf]

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This tech report describes CMapTools, a widespear utility that helps building concept maps. One interesting features of CMapTools is that it allows the users to build maps collaboratively giving them support to a shared display and to a chat channel. The messages in the chat are not connected with the elements in the map.

Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a connecting line linking two concepts. Words on the line, referred to as linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two concepts. We define concept as a perceived regularity in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label. The label for most concepts is a word, although sometimes we use symbols such as + or %, and sometimes more than one word is used. Propositions are statements about some object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed. Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic units, or units of meaning.

Tags: collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Computer-Mediated Communication, education, learning technology

Last summer while I was an intern at MSR, I was thinking about this concept. When people are discussing face-to-face, speech is enriched with gestures (more so if you are Italian 🙂 ). Sometimes it happens that gestures depict the physical/geometrical arrangements of the objects being referenced in the discourse.

When this happens, hands moves across a sort of transparent whiteboard hypothetically placed between the speakers. I call this an “airboard”, a communication device that share some feature of a real display. For instance, invisible items can be grabbed from their position in the airboard and moved on other positions or that can be “erased” wiping the hand over the invisible item.

A pretty cool project would be to make these airboards appear with an Augmented Reality technique.

Tags: collaboration tools, interaction design, linguistics, research

Churchill, E. F., Nelson, L., and Sokoler, T. (2005). Tools that tell tales: Bridging context seams by digitally annotating physical artifacts. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Smart Object Systems In Conjunction with the Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2005), Tokyo, Japan. [pdf]

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The main argument of this paper is that instead of relating notes to a physical place, we should attach them to a physical object. This because the object is meaningful and seamless between the activity in which it is involved and the people that will be part of those activity. The paper reports the main rationale behind the prototype TackTales that augments a physical bullettin board with digital information.

In this paper we describe our method for supporting artifact-centered communication. We elaborate a design space we have been elaborating called Tools That Tell Tales, and describe the TackTales prototype which provides an instance in this design space. We show how paper postings on a community pin board can be augmented to enable conversations around the physical, paper postings. The TackTales prototype uses modified radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to establish the link between paper postings and the online communication, bridging a seam between artifacts and conversation and activity as annotation. We suggest that our approach can be a ubiquitous computing alternative to the design of general-purpose communication devices and propose artifact-centered communication as a meaningful conversational annotation. 

The picture below shows one of the nice example contained in the paper. The car window itself is the communication space, being annotated with a wax marker, with explicit instructions on the collaborative repair process.

Tags: distributed cognition, RFID, ubiquitous computing

Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. (2004). The importance of awareness for team cognition in distributed collaboration. In Salas, E., Fiore, S., and Cannon-Bowers, J., editors, eam Cognition: Understanding the Factors that Drives Process and Performance, pages 177–201, Washington. APA Press. [pdf]

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This paper contains a framework for evaluating the impact of awareness of distributed work. The paper is a mine of definitions. The main definition of workspace awareness is the knowledge created through interaction between an agent and its environment-knowing what is going on. Outlouds are running commentaries that people commonly produces alongside their actions. Consequential communication is the mechanism of seeing and hearing other people active in the workspace.

More of interest for my work is the definition of feedthrough: the mechanism of determining a person’s interactions through the sights and sounds of artifacts (Dix et al., 1993). Feedthrough is importantfor direct manipulation. Maybe in the context of my work I should talk about mediated manipulation. Coupling is the degree to which people are working together.

An interesting passage defining the role of deixis and workspace awareness:

The role of workspace awareness in deixis (i.e., where one’s pointing or gesturing action disambiguates conversational references, such as when one says “this one” while pointing to an object), visual evidence and gaze awareness means that the elements of awareness are part of conversational common ground in shared spaces (Clark 1996). This implies that not only do you have to be aware of me to interpret my visual communication, but that I have know what you are aware of as well, so that I can safely make use of the workspace in my communication.

The paper summarizes a previous work (Gutwin and Greenberg, 1999) on the impact of a radarview telepointer on collaborative work at distance. The participants used a minimap.

Bauer, M., Kortuem, G., and Segall, Z. (1999). “Where are you pointing at? ” a study of remote collaboration in a werable videoconference system. In Proceedings of the3rd International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC ’99), pages 151–158, San Francisco, CA, USA. IEEE. [pdf]

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The results show that by using a reality-augmenting telepointer a remote user can effectively guide and direct a wearable user’s activities. The analysis of verbal communication behavior and pointing gestures clearly indicates that experts overwhelmingly used pointing for guiding workers through physical tasks. While the use of pointing reached 99%, verbal instructions were used considerably less. In more than 20% of all the cases experts did not use verbal instructions at all, but relied on pointing alone instead.

The majority of verbal instructions contained deictic references like ‘here’, ‘over there’, ‘this’, and ‘that’. Because deictic references are mostly used in connection with and in support of gestures, this finding is a strong indication that participants naturally combined pointing gestures with verbal communication, much the same they

do in face-to-face conversations.

Adams, J., Rogers, B., Hayne, S., Mark, G., Nash, J., and Leifter, L. (2005). The effect of a telepointer on student performance and preference. Computers & Education, 44(1):35–51. [pdf]

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the studies involving the use of telepointers. The paper itself demonstrate how the presence of the telepointer in an experimental course improved the students’ recall of the contents thaught. [More]

While the telepointer has been widely accepted in the Computer Supported Collaborative Work community, little work has been done to quantify its effect on performance and perception. We present preliminary results quantifying the telepointer’s effect on knowledge retention and satisfaction in an online collaboration. In experiments, a remote expert communicated with small student groups to explain an online scanning probe microscope (SPM) interface. The expert used two-way audio-video plus a telepointer to describe the interface to half of the participants, and only two-way audio-video (no telepointer) with the other half. The data show that use of a telepointer improved task completion time tenfold and long-term knowledge test performance by 30-40% on specific concepts. The telepointer group was also more likely to rate the online SPM as a substitute for a local SPM and felt the expert was significantly less distant than did the non-telepointer group.

Tags: Computer-Mediated Communication, education, learning technology

Reyes, P. and Tchounikine, P. (2004). Redefining the turn-taking notion in mediated communication of virtual learning communities. Intelligent Tutoring Systems, pages 295–304. [pdf]

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In our research on social interactions taking place in forum-type tools that virtual learning communities use, we have found that the users have the following particular temporal behavior: they answer generally some messages situated in different threads in a very short time period, in a digest-like way. This paper shows this work pattern through a quantitative study and proposes an integration of this work pattern in a Forum-type tool developed for supporting the interactions of virtual learning communities through the creation of a new structure we will name Session. This structure allows the turn-taking of threaded conversations in an orderly fashion to become visible.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Computer-Mediated Communication

This is one of those iMode services that emerges from the FOMA ecology. We are not going to see it soon in Europe. The concept behind is really interesting. showing your position while you chat enriches each message with contextual information. Then the chat participants can phrase their messages in a different way. They do not have to specify lots of details as these are already encoded by the availability of their position.

“iMapFan” is a map service for imode which offers a range of services including a map-based search, car navigation and “I’m here!” emails. Today they launched a new service, “Map Messenger” – a map-based GPS chat application.

Members of the chat are displayed on the map with according to their GPS location and the application has three modes – centre on yourself, centre on the other parties or an automatic mode which zooms in and out of the map to provide the best view of all chat members. It also has an alert function which vibrates when someone on your buddy list is near.