In this blog post I am reporting the real-time notes which I took during the round of presentation of the Mobile Learning workshop happening in Villars, Switzerland.

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Some initial notes from the Mobile Learning workshop I am involved in this week. The organizers, Inmaculada Arnedillo-Sanchez, Mike Sharples, and Giansemi Vavoula, introduced the activities in which we will be involved during these days. They are particularly interested in using mobile technologies for shifting from being a ‘spectator’ of media to ‘creator’ of media.

One of the pedagogical value they see in these is the fact that media creation can bring a group of participant to a negotiation of perspectives.  The idea is to discuss what media creation will mean in the future.

The first activity is an hands-on media creation using a script/technique refined at Trinity College. The activity begins filling a mind-map-like template which helps building the script of the movie that we need to make. After, the group splits in three sub-groups: one of them makes the shooting, the second the sounds recordings for the effects, and the other group will edit the raw content and add the effects.

The editing is also done in group to have a sense of the whole movie and to check whether the raw material correspond to the script defined in the initial part. The shooting was fun and the editing was even better. I hope the result will be on youtube before the end of the day.

The final phase of the script involved a group discussion:

1- Maybe there is a missing phase in the script like transforming the story into dialogues;

2- Have you ever thought of dividing the team into acts-team to reduce the editing time?

3- The editing process was extremely creative as the different media needed to be smoothed or adapted in order to make sense together; What is was difficult was guessing the intentions of the different teams creating the media;

4- Different opinions points out that the whole process could stimulate creativity at a whole. Each production phase involved a discussion process where the participants had to negotiate the perspectives and the processes to reach those perspectives;

5- This activity fits extremely well in the mobile learning framework, as the external world contribute changing the story and modifying perspectives;

6- The script would need to be adjusted to support a documentary creation;

7- Doing film-making with mobiles is a rapid prototyping technique; The script that we use was adapted from a film-making class;

8- having an end-rpduct is extremely important as it supports appropriation.

Tags: collaboration tools, education, field tools, mobile learning, ontologies, urban exploration

Finally in Villars for the Alpine Rendez-Vous. It quite exciting to be here and to meet again friends and the CSCL community. It is nice to see the human-side of great researchers. In the first part of the week I’ll be working on the mobile learning workshop participating in hands-on on media authoring and future technologies brainstorming.

Recently I came across this nice exploratory data analysis technique called stemplot. I like it because it seem a low-tech technique for data exploration. It has the advantage to retain the original data and order the data like in a histogram.

In statistics, a stemplot (or stem-and-leaf plot) is a graphical display of quantitative data that is similar to a histogram and is useful in visualizing the shape of a distribution. The are generally associated with the Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) ideas of John Tukey and the course Statistics in Society (NDST242) of the Open University, although in fact Arthur Bowley did something very similar in the early 1900s.

Typically, the leaf contains the last digit of the number and the stem contains all of the other digits. In the case of very large or very small numbers, the data values may be rounded to a particular place value (such as the hundreds place) that will be used for the leaves. The remaining digits to the left of the rounded place value are used as the stems.

Tags: data mining, statistics

Fabrice Hong is currently working in a visualization for ConceptGrid, one of the first CSCL script available on the ManyScript platform developed at CRAFT. In ConceptGrid, the students participate in an integrated learning activity pivoting on different social planes: an individual plane, a group plane and a class plane. Here is a nice summary of the theories behind.

Fabrice added some spice to the mix, offering a nice ‘spy tool’ for the teacher to look insight the group’s work. We tested the tool in the CSCW course I am TA’ing with 9 groups of 3-4 students. Each group had to read a couple of papers and then give a definition for 9 concepts. During the group phase, these concepts should be arranged in a 4×4 matrix. Whenever two confining cells of this matrix contained definitions then the students had also to assign a meaning to the relation between them.

Fabrice constructed then a 9×9 matrix where a cell is black whenever a definition for two concepts in that position were assigned a defined relation. He also added a cumulative view of the 9 grids.

Tags: collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, information metric, information visualization, research

Nicolas pointed me to this superb page containing a periodic table of visualization methods. The authors tried to define and compile existing visualization methods in order to develop a systematic overview based on the logic, look, and use of  the periodic table of elements.

In this paper, they describe the current fragmented state of the visualization field. Then they outline the rules and criteria they applied in conducting their research in order to present a revised periodic table of 100 visualization methods with a proposition how to use it.

Interestingly, in the same page it is possible to see two nice visualizations on software visualization in engineering and visualization studies. Both are of high interest for the work I did at Microsoft Research this last summer. Here a working draft.

Tags: information metric, information visualization, research, research methodology, reverse engineering, software visualization

P. G. Wojahn, C. M. Neuwirth, and B. Bullock. Effects of interfaces for annotation on communication in a collaborative task. In CHI98: Human Factors in Computing Systems, Conference Proceedings, pages 456–463, Los Angeles, CA, USA, April 18-23 1998. Association for Computing Machinery. [url]

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This paper present a solid study on the effect of annotation interface on collaborative writing. The authors compared three types of interfaces: a split screen interface, where the annotations are presented in a separated footnote-style panel; a interlinear interface, where comments are differenciated from the text through formatting features; and finally aligned interface where the annotations are visible “at-a-glance” horizontally aligned to the primary text with which they are associated, but in a distinct space in the margin.

The authors found that time on task did not vary significantly across conditions and did not interact with dependent measures. Additionally an LSD ANOVA indicated that those in the interlinear and aligned conditions communicated about significantly more problems than those in the split-scree condition. Also, subjects in these two conditions communicated about more equivocal problems than subjects in the split-scren condition.

They results were contrary to their hypothesis that interface effects would be greatest when problems are most difficult. The author pointed to a possible explaination for these results from the computer-mediated communication literature: humans compensate for greater communication difficulties not sacrificing the production of important ideas but communicating those ideas more tersely.

Tags: collaboration tools, collaborative writing, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human computer interaction, interaction design

D. Suthers and J. Xu. Kükäkükä: An online environment for artifact-centered discourse. In Education track of the Eleventh World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2002), pages 472–480, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 7-11 2002. [url]

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This paper present Kukakuka, an environment for artifact-centered discourse (ACD) that was developed by the authors following the conclusions of several studies showing that linked ACD is more efficient that other forms of collaborative annotations. The evaluation of the system reported in the paper is extremely informal but presents interesting findings. Messages collected with this system are overwhelmingly “on task” with little topic drift. Second, the focus of the discussion is maintained as much by the ability to form a new thread centered on a new artifact as it is by the restriction that all messages within a thread are displayed along with the single artifact for that thread. The ability to handle multiple artifacts within a single discussion space is critical.

The paper also contains some nice background references for ACD applications and studies pointing out problems of threaded conversations.

Tags: collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human communication, human computer interaction, interaction design, research, text data mining, user experience

M. Smith, J. J. Cadiz, and B. Burkhalter. Conversation trees and threaded chats. In CSCW ’00: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pages 97–105, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, New York, NY, USA 2000. ACM Press. [pdf]

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This paper presents ThreadedChat, a prototipe chat interface which structures the chat turns as a tree similar to Microsoft Windows Explorer. The elements of this structure are the threads, pockets of turns and responses.

According to the authors, a proper use of ThreadedChat eliminates the possibility of ruptured sequences of turns, one of the major usability problem of common chat application.

The user study did not reveal any significant effect in performances of ThreadedChat over a control application. However the authors claimed a significative effect in the turn balance.  Additionally the application was rated significantly worse than standard chat application as it breaked the flow of the conversation into many points of focus, with a consequent increase in the cognitive load.

Tags: human computer interaction, text data mining, usability, user experience

There is a new useful shortcut in the latest version of OSX. You can trigger Apple’s built-in dictionary in almost any system window, such as TextEdit, Safari, and Mail. This allows you to quickly get spelling and definitions for tens of thousands of words. To activate you need to hold down the command-control-d keys, all at the same time with your mouse over a word (the command key is the Apple key, next to the space-bar.)

The built in dictionary will pop up, as pictured below.

(via)

I also found a couple of interesting links of OSX shortcuts:

[1] Keyboard shortcuts in OS X;

[2] Top X keyboard shortcuts in OS X;

[3] Mac OS X Shortcuts! A Tiny Guide.

Tags: graphical user interface, hack, mac