introduction imd09120: collaborative media brian davison 2011/12
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
IMD09120: Collaborative Media
Brian Davison 2011/12
Contents
• General introduction – main themes• Module overview• A little history• Short break• Social psychology• Statistical evaluation• Summary: Grudin’s 8 challenges
Introduction
• What are computers for?– Doing difficult maths– Communication
• Email: invented in 1971 - accounted for 75% of Internet traffic by 1973– Hobbes Internet timeline
• The main themes of this module are– Social psychology of cooperation– Computer Mediated Communications (CMC)– The evaluation of social systems using statistical methods
People
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/27/endangered.languages
• Social behaviour is an essential human characteristic• It is biologically based• Individuals have differences which affect social situations• Social situations influence individual behaviour
Technology
• Provides a medium for communication
• Can facilitate or be a barrier
• Can distract from the social behaviour itself
• Can generate new phenomena
www.officemuseum.com/communications_equipment.htm
PACT
• People
• Activities
• Contexts
• Technology
Planning, decision-making, problem-solving, team-working, developing, trading, negotiating, co-authoring,
discussing, critiquing, providing mutual support, maintaining a community
As a job, for fun, as part of a community, as a friend, as a
professional, as a parent, in an office, outdoors, at home, while travelling, in a
foreign country, in a competition
Is Collaborative Media all about HCI?• No
• HCI is about the individual’s communication with the system across the user interface
• CM is about the communications behaviour between people using the system as a channel
• The design of the interface is important, but not the main focus
Is CM all about social networking?
• No
• Social networking is an obvious example of a social phenomenon
• Not clear that collaboration is the central focus
Evaluation
• Not the same as testing
• Testing: Does it work?
• Evaluation: How well does it work?
Does it have the intended effect?
Which option is better?
Evaluation problems
• No hard and fast facts• Must be based on collected data• Often relies on pooled opinion• Statistical methods deal with variation
Statistics in this module
• Basic concepts• Different types of test• How to interpret statistical results• How to define an experiment• How to draw conclusions from the results
• Minimum maths• Maximum use of Excel functions
Module structure
• Lectures– Theoretical concepts
• Practicals– Statistics– Prototype building
• Tutorials– Group exercises– Discussions– Assessment preparation
Assessment
2 components:
1. Week 9: Critical assessment of an existing collaborative system and proposed redesign
2. Week14: Prototype of your redesign and evaluation using the instrument provided
• Note the timing: One week each
A little history1971: Email1973: Plato Notes1978: CBBS1984: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)1985: The WELL1988: Internet Relay Chat (IRC)1989: Lotus Notes1990: Mosaic Web browser1990: LambdaMOO1996: ICQ chat1997: Blogs1997: SixDegrees2003: MySpace2003: Second Life2006: Facebook
PLATO
• Education was one of the first beneficiaries of collaborative systems
Definition of CSCW“ … the design of computer-based technologies with explicit concern for the socially organised practices of their intended users.” (Suchman, 1989)
the study of work in situ which involves people
working cooperatively (i.e. not in parallel)
towards some common end or goal
using networked IT systems
Some basic vocabulary• Time
– Synchronous: working together at the same time
– Asynchronous: working together at different times
• Space– Co-located or face to face (f2f ): in the same physical space
– Remote: in different places
The place-time matrix
TimePlace Same Different
SameMeeting support
Design toolsEmail
Post-it notes
DifferentTeleconferencing
VideoconferencingInstant messaging
LettersEmail
Discussion forums
After Applegate, 1991
Technology
• There are two predominant metaphors– Shared information spaces
• Sites• Navigation• Pages• Go to...• Save...
– Conferencing• Conversation• Thread• Participate
Short break
Main themes
• The social psychology of cooperation
• Computer Mediated Communications (CMC)
• Statistical evaluation
Social psychology
SociologyCognitive
psychologySocial
psychology
Social thinking: How we perceive ourselves and others, our judgements,
beliefs and attitudes
Social influence: Cultural and social
pressures that affect our behaviour
Social relations: Prejudice, aggression,
attraction, helping, group identity
Studying cooperation
• Anthropological and naturalistic animal studies (especially in primatology)
• Experimental and social psychological• Mathematical• Explicit CSCW studies
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
A General Form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Strategies:• Cooperate• Defect
Payoffs
You
C D
MeC (3, 3) (0, 5)
D (5, 0) (1, 1)
Individual variation
• Personality preferences are one type of variation• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
Extravert
Sensing
Thinking
Judging
Introvert
Intuitive
Feeling
Perceiving
Focus
Perception
Judgement
Strategy
E
S
T
J
I
N
F
P
Myers-Briggs types
ISTJ ISFJ INFJ INTJ
ISTP ISFP INFP INTP
ESTP ESFP ENFP ENTP
ESTJ ESFJ ENFJ ENTJ
Effects and biases
• Identified behaviours that are more or less predictable
• eg Spotlight effect
Common sense?
• Paul Lazarsfeld (1949) studied American WWII soldiers:– Better-educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems
ie – Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses
– Southern soldiers coped better in hot climates that Northerners
ie – Southerners were more accustomed to hot weather
– White privates were more eager for promotion than black privates
ie – Years of oppression had damaged achievement motivation
– Southern blacks preferred Southern to Northern white officers
ie – Southern officers were more accustomed to interacting with them
Hindsight bias
• I knew it all along...• That’s just common sense...• It’s obvious...
http://www.sigmaxi.org/resources/merchandise/harris.descriptions.shtml
Theory formulation
• You must try to discover the rule that connects the three numbers below.
• To work it out, you may propose different sets of three numbers, and I will tell you whether they obey the rule.
12 24 48
Confirmation bias
• The tendency to seek confirmatory evidence for one’s own belief
• This is natural – everyone does it
• This is one reason we need statistics
Statistics
• Allow us to draw objective conclusions based on the mathematical characteristics of populations and samples
• Population: whole group we are interested in
• Sample: a small number drawn from the population for testing
Samples and populations
General public
Students
UG students
Napier UG students
SoC UG students
IMD students
Year 3 IMD studentsYou
Is a high-cue environment more effective than low-cue for small
group decision making?
Distributions
Agreed measure of effectiveness
Number of scores
Central tendencyMean MedianMode
SpreadVarianceStandard deviation
Comparing distributions
Agreed measure of effectiveness
Number of scores
High-cueLow-cue
}?
Eight challenges for developers
• Jonathan Grudin wrote a seminal paper in 1994 on what the key issues are in designing for groupware
1. Disparity in work and benefit
2. Critical mass and the prisoner’s dilemma problems
3. Disruption of social processes
4. Exception handling
5. Unobstrusive accessibility
6. Difficulty of evaluation
7. Failure of intuition
8. The adoption process.
Six
Difficulty of evaluation– The almost insurmountable obstacles to meaningful, generalisable
analysis and evaluation of groupware prevent us from learning from experience
– Group applications necessarily must be evaluated from multiple perspectives
Seven
Failure of intuition– Intuition in product development environments is especially poor
for multi-user applications, resulting in bad management decisions and an error prone design process.
What’s next?
• Statistics tutorial• Personality typing
• Next week:– Social psychology– Statistics practical exercises– Group exercises – what is your Myers-Briggs type?