This week I bought a copy of the Courrier International (N. 842-843, pp.54-57, 21st december 2006), a French Magazine which propose a selection of international articles translated. I was attracted by this article “Jamais sans mon mobile”. The original article published in AERA (Asahi Shimbun Extra Report and Analysis) is from ITAMI Kazuhiro (text) and TAKAI Masahiko (photos).

The authors made up an interestingly rich scenario, a day in life of this Ichiro Aera, where his mobile is the remote control of his life. The funny part is that the story looks extremely futuristic for Europeans but all the described technologies are already there: we are only missing some links and the market attention. In synthesis the mayor integrations of the mobile to the current technologies are seen in the following:

1. Payment methods;
2. Personal/pedestrian navigation;
3. Mobile office;
4. Personal entertainment (TNT media);
5. Internet of things connector;
6. Annotations sharing

 

I liked the article as we are always looking for nice scenarios. 🙂

Tags: field tools, human communication, human computer interaction, interaction design, new technology

Reading through the experientia web site I stumbled upon this article wrote by Michele Visciola and Mark Vanderbeeken on a broad evaluation of the usability of the e-government web sites. I find this extremely interesting but I still have to put my hands on the article itself. Here’s the abstract (my highlights).

For the first time in history, a wide distribution of technology allows citizens to get involved in public governance and participate in institutional life on a very regular basis. Yet websites of public authorities are barely taking advantage of the power of the participatory citizen. Two factors play a key role in this gap. First, the average citizen is not well informed about how basic democratic institutions function, which dramatically reduces the citizen’s capacity to influence the democratic process. Websites can help reduce the complexity of public institutions and get people to understand the way institutions and public administrations function and behave. Second, access to public services online is increasingly separated from institutional information. While online service sites are popular, the role of the institutional sites is not clear. The authors argue that these sites can and should take on the role of a two-way communications tool on topics of policy and politics, support knowledge sharing on areas covered by the authority, and create maximum transparency on what the public administration actually does. To better understand the opportunities, challenges, and evolutions that are affecting public institution websites, the authors studied the main sites of 30 public authorities and identified several innovative approaches. A first analysis shows that a lot remains to be improved. Almost all the sites analyzed share three characteristics: (1) policy priorities are not concisely communicated and easy to understand, (2) there is only limited innovation in how regional or municipal institutions present themselves; and (3) there are no tools for active participation.

However, some of the studied sites provide elements of innovation that can be used as models and inspirations. The authors conclude that to improve information access, better communication strategies are needed and to increase participation, better usability is of crucial importance.

The publisher web site selected public services portals (not covered in the study):

• Austria: www.help.gov.at
• Belgium: www.vlaanderen.be (in Dutch)
• Canada: www.seniorsinfo.ca, www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca, www.serviceontario.ca
• Denmark: www.danmark.dk (in Danish)
• Finland: www.suomi.fi
• France: www.service-public.fr (in French)
• Ireland: www.oasis.gov.ie
• Italy: www.sistemapiemonte.it, www.italia.gov.it
• Netherlands: www.overheid.nl (in Dutch)
• Norway: www.norway.no
• Portugal: www.portaldocidadao.pt
• Singapore: www.ecitizen.gov.sg, my.ecitizen.gov.sg
• South-Korea: www.egov.go.kr (G4C—Government for Citizens)
• Spain: www.060.es (national, in Spanish), www.gencat.cat (Catalonia)
• Sweden: www.sverige.se (in Swedish)
• UK: www.direct.gov.uk
• USA: www.firstgov.gov

Tags: eGov, interaction design, politics, usability, user experience

I have been reading this paper of G. Stahl on group cognition in chat and methods for analyzing the interaction. One of the most interesting ideas is that of use threading between the messages to indicate the connections and implicit continuity within the sequence of contributions made by an individual. At the author notice:

In fact, the way that a response is taken is also part of the interaction itself. In discussing the building of “common ground,” Clark argues that shared understanding by A and B of A’s utterance involves not only B believing that he understands A, but also A believing that B understands (Clark & Brennan, 1991). This requires an interaction spanning at least multiple utterances. Thus, for instance, the most prevalent interaction in classroom discourse is when a teacher poses a question, a student provides an answer demonstrating understanding and then the teacher acknowledges the student response as such an understanding (Lemke, 1990). Here, the elemental cell of interactional meaning making is a sequence of contributions by at least two different people. It is clear that the meaning is constructed through the interaction of multiple people, and is not a simple expression of pre-existing mental representations in any one individual’s head.

Tags: data mining, research, research methodology, text data mining

M. Cherubini, P. Dillenbourg, and F. Girardin. Effects of ‘spatialized’ communication in tightly coupled work. Technical Report CRAFT-REPORT-2006-001, CRAFT – Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL, Ecublens, Station 1, CH-1015, Switzerland, 2006. [pdf]

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This technical report describes the advancements on our research on collaborative annotations of maps. Particularly, we are trying to answer the following research question: does making explicit the location references of the elements of a discourse enhance the participant’s understanding and the related problem-solving?

This paper contains recent advancements on the STAMPS project.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, controlled experiments, data mining, human communication, human computer interaction, research, research methodology

G. Stahl, A. Zemel, J. Sarmiento, and M. Cakir. Shared referencing of mathematical objects in online chat. In S. A. Barab, K. E. Hay, and D. T. Hickey, editors, Proceedings of ICLS2006, the 7th International Conference of the Learning Sciences, volume 2, pages 716–722, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, June 27-July 1 2006. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [url]

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This paper stress the centrality of joint referencing to collaboration. The author tested ConcertChat, an explicit referencing chat environment (Muhlpfordt & Wessner, 2005), in the case of virtual math teams. The participants had to discuss a geometrical concept of a non-traditional geometry and came out with a set of questions. The researcher studied the chat log to analyze how they interacted using the particular chat system.

In the example propose, we can see that the explicit referencing do not solve completely the issue of ambiguous utterances. However the study does not stress the comparison of the tool with a standard chat tool so it is not possible to see quantitatively how much this is true and in which conditions.

Interestingly, the authors compare this communicational medium with face-to-face conversation: “…In a face-to-face setting, the participants could have pointed to details of the drawing, could have gesturally described shapes, could have traced outlines or shaded in areas either graphically or through gestures with ease. Converationaly, they could have interrupted each other to reach faster mutual orientation and burdensome due to the restricted nature of the software environment. …”

The paper opens with a nice passage of Vygotsky, which describes pointing as an example of how gesture become meaningful artiacts for individual minds through socual interaction.

Tags: cognitive science, collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human computer interaction, interaction design

Alexander Repening presented recently his work on distributed simulations. One of his project, called Mr. Vetro [1], captured my attention as I found it similar to another project I participated into, called SmokeRings. Mr. Vetro is an example of application based on a distributed simulation framework called C5.

C5 is a distributed simulation framework that uniquely combines five principles for compact, connected, continuous, customizable, and collective simulations. It integrates hardware and software components into a unique and effective learning environment. Learners in a C5-enhanced learning environment engage in connected learning activities through wirelessly networked handheld devices (such as HP iPAQs equipped with IEEE 802.11b or BlueTooth) acting as simulation clients. These clients can access the Web through a simulation server. The simulation server is a centralized computer that lets users combine results from their individual simulations for general comparison, reflection, and group analysis. The server gathers data from client simulations and projects them serving as a visualization, simulation coordination, and classroom discussion tool. C5 is especially well suited for collaborative science and math projects.

Mr. Vetro is a simulated human being whose organs such as the heart and lungs are distributed on client simulations running on handhelds. On the heart client simulation parameters such as heart rate and stroke volume can be varied using sliders. Similarly, on the lungs client simulation parameters such as breathing rate and tidal volume are controlled. A third client simulation, the brain, is used to enter decisions such as whether to exercise or not and in what intensity (e.g. running speed). The central simulation running on the server includes the complete Mr. Vetro aggregating the parameters from the distributed organs, as well as a life signs monitor.

This reminded me of SmokeRings [2] a project in which I participated while at MLE. The basic idea was that people could carry around an handheld device with an environmental sensor so to record the exposure to passive smoke during the day. Then with the recorded data it was possible to customize a simulation showing the effects of such exposure over a long period of time.

Another project related to Mr. Vetro is wiSim, a distributed simulation environment that was developed at CRAFT. An ordinary simulation executed on a computer is generally controlled by a single user who enters the data (inputs) and gets the results (outputs). Instead of maintaining all in one place controls and results, wiSim spreads these elements across a group of participants. In this way users have to negotiate verbally the interaction onto the simulation, thus striving for an optimal collaborative effort of their learning experience.

Every participant can interact in wiSim using a mobile device. Initially, the user can choose a specific group to join or he/she can create his/her own for other to join. Afterwards, the group can start working on a simulation taken from a list available on the server. Subsequently, the server divides the inputs and outputs of the simulation among the group members. The following step requires the group to enter the parameters necessary to initialise the simulation, which is executed on the server. The results are then dispatched to the users’ mobile devices, allowing them to discuss the extra tweaking required to solve the assignment.

As final remark I would be interested in reading a study where the effectiveness of these distributed simulations have been evaluated. So far the stuff I have been reading describe these systems more at the design-level than at the use-level.

REFERENCES:

[1] An interactive flyer enables you to play around with Mr. Vetro’s parameters to get a sense of the interactions that occur and explains each aspect of the application.

[2] Strohecker, C. 2005 (invited). Designing for sensing, sensibilities, and sense-making. International Journal of Knowledge and Learning 1:3, 269-285. [pdf]

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, ecology, education, environment, experimental design, field tools, information visualization, interaction design, mobile learning, participatory simulations, pedagogy, distributed simulation

M. Mühlpfordt and M. Wessner. Explicit referencing in chat supports collaborative learning. In Proceedings of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning 2005, pages 460–469, Taipei, Taiwan, May 30 – June 4 2005. [url]

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This paper describes a system called ConcertChat, which implements explicit referencing in computer mediated communication (CMC). Explicit referencing means that while producing a message an object in the shared environment can be selected and assigned as referential point to that message. They call the directed relation between the message and this referential point a reference.

This paper report experimental findings showing that referencing has a positive impact on chat conversations. They observed references used to express a variety of conversational relations as well as to point to important objects in the history or in the shared material. Also, they saw the tendency to focus on one reference per contribution to highlight the most important relation.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human computer interaction, interaction design, interaction regulations

Pierre pointed me to this nice example of communication tool which makes explicit the communication context. This is greatly related to my research agenda as I am studying how these systems affect user performances in a task setting.

Communication is always embedded in a specific communication context. The participants build up knowledge using learning material, they discuss a draft or react to a message in a discussion. Existing chat systems do not pay attention to this context. The participants have to re-construct the communication context on their own. This is timeconsuming and leads to misunderstandings.

… technology tends to overwhelm common sense

[D.A. Freedman]

I found some minutes for my blogroll and I red this post of Beppe Grillo on a crime story (the article is in Italian only) in southern Italy. It is just one of those stories that appears more and more frequently in the news. We tend to underestimate its value because of this bias of repetition, but in fact, it is an horrible example of how our society is becoming more and more corrupt.

Crime is bad, but there are different kinds of crimes. Violence is bad, but there are different kinds of violence. Given a certain series of circumstances we should try to understand people who committed violent crimes. However, when it comes to violence on minors, then I am not able to feel any forgiveness in my heart. It is the one-case where I doubt about the death penalty, and worse …

Two portraits fits very well in our evolving-society: the first one that came to my mind was Primo Levi‘s book “If this is a Man“; the second is Marco Risi’s movie “il Branco“.

I feel sad, and scared: where are we going?