Weblogs, awareness and transactive memory

How come weblogs, awareness and transactive memory are related ? As a matter of fact, weblogs, by presenting somebody's thought, references, activities, plans and so on, is a kind of asynchronous awareness tool. Dourish and Belloti (1992) gave one of the best-known definitions for awareness: “awareness is an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity”. Asynchrouns means that information is presented in an historical perspective. It can be a summary of the whole information collected after a period of time (compile function) or a differentiation between recent information and past ones (decay function). Information presented in weblogs in a longitudinal/historical way provide users with a context for their own activities.

Transactive Memory is a theory proposed by Wegner (1987). This theory examines the process by which individuals determine who knows what and who knows who knows what. Information presented in weblogs are a way to enable transactive memory within a team

Cognitive functions tu support Collaborative Work

I've made a brief review of the cognitive functions that should be fullfilled for collaborative work:Group memory/Storing the context/Group mirrors/Conflict/disagreement/Explanation/Internalization/Appropriation/Shared cognitive load/Mutual regulation/Social grounding/Division of labor/Building a shared understanding of the situation. In order to augment collaboration with mobile technologies, we should provide effective tools to support those functions. For instance, a collaborative weblog (where two or more users could post messages) is a way to support group memory.

Submitted Paper for International Conference on Groupware

I have written a paper for the International Conference on Groupware in Autrans, France (Sunday 28, September - Thursday 2, October 2003). Here is the abstract : The Impact of Awareness Tools on Mutual Modelling in a Collaborative Video-Game

This paper describes the findings of an experimental research concentrating on collaboration in a multi-player video game. The overall goal is to study the cognitive impacts of the awareness tools. The focus is in finding an effect on performance as well as on the representation an individual build of what his partner knows, plans and intends to do (i.e. Mutual Modelling). Using an awareness tools has a significant effect by improving task performance. However, the players who were provided with this tool did not show any improvement of their mutual modelling. Further analysis on contrasted groups revealed that there was an effect of the awareness tool on mutual modelling for players who spent a large amount of time using the tool.

This research was conducted for my MSc dissertation. I still want to work on the very issue of studying the socio-cognitive impacts of awareness. I think my focus will be directed towards context-awareness or location-awareness and thus relations between space and cognition.

Stuff about Social Space

Social Space is a crux issue. It should be considered as the cornerstone of joint activities and hence to collaborative work/learning. This space is build considering the traces left in the environment (virtual or not) by people. We all send signals into social space that can be decoded by others as trace for a potential use. For instance, "following the leader" to the baggage claim is an action we often perform : in this case, we see somebody (the first guy who jump off the plane :) following a certain path (this is the signal). We decode this signal as a cue : this guy may be aware of the way one should follow to get to the baggage claim. According to Per Persson and Fredrik Espinoza's talk, there is to kind of social spaces :

- direct social space : synchronous interaction like one-to-one communication (face2face, chat), copresence of people, mutual awareness, use of shared artefacts... We don't really need to decode the trace since there are some "conventions" like verbal language, signs... - indirect social space : we need to decode the signal : following the leader as I explain above, fingerprints, others were here, public crowds, recommender systems, traces of group identity (uniforms, brands), tags and graffiti, annotations...

Furthermore, human beings are definetely social animals. We love living in social space and we're all observers (yeah this is linked to Piaget's constructivism :) who interprets others' signals.

Social Navigation

The book "Social Navigation of Information Space", outcome of a HCI workshop, gather contributions about the very topic of socialnav. I've only read the introduction but it appears to be a relevant reference. SocialNav starts from the idea that "when people need information, they will often turn to other people rather than use more formalised information artefacts" (e.g. asking people for advice when lost in a city instead of studying a map). Studies on how people followed crowd are also an influence (’Follow the leader’ to bagage claim ) The concept of SocialNav was introduced by Dourish and Chalmers in 1994 : "navigation towards a cluster of people or navigation because other people have looked at something". In computer system, this could refer to a "recommender system".

Members of a team (or a community of practice like urban planners, geologists, teens hanging ou in a city... smart mobs in fact :) navigates through information spaces that should be considered as social settings.

SocialNav could be applied to lots of areas from hypertext (selected path through the hyperlinks) to ubiquitous computing. Using social navigation with wearbale stuff (mobile devices, see-through glasses...) is a also a new paradigm in the sense that there could be an overlay between the real world and the augmented world. This overlay could hence trigger new social behavior.

Augmenting socio-cognitive interactions

I've found notes I've written when attending a talk by my phD director. I put it here since it could be seen as a framework for my phD. 1. Communication tools fulfill cognitive fonctions :

- Group memory : a chat, for instance, keep an history of the conversations, the questions asked... An email is a also a part of a cognitive system and not only a link between two persons. A whiteboard enable participants to have a joint understanding of the problem. The wire can play a role in solving the problem. For instance, in a chat you can scroll back to read the questions asked by the participants and answers to them sequentially (wheras in oral conversation, one cannot say "yes, no, yes) to three questions asked by three different adressees. - Storing the context : masters thesis Ott, 1999 - Group mirrors : ArgueGraph : when one give a group a picture of itself, it triggers reactions. Jermann; Donath. - Awareness tools : mutual modelling - Interaction analysis  …

2. Distributed cognitive systems : the group members and the tools constitutes ONE cognitive systems : shared memory, shared cognitive load, ... group metacognition.

3. Mediated communication is a substance : people interact with each other and we can do something with it.

4. Learning science needs computer science. Our approach : model/hypotheses + design/build + test/analyze (empirical studies)

Virtual Communities and social network

I am just entering the field of research concerning virtual communities (gathering of geographically dispersed people with common interests and activities) and other social considerations. My interest towards this area is quite old : from minitel stuff at the end of the 80's till the discover of the www in 1995. At that time I haven't thought I would study socio-cognitive things about those topics ! Howard Rheingold's book, The Virtual Communitiesis available on-line. Even though it's a bit old (1993), it's a good starting point. The problem with that vision (and often with Rheingold's book) is that there is no discussion about people who don't (and NEVER) use this kind of technology. I think the guy is far too optimistic...

However, I still believe it's an interesting field of research I would like to step into :) All those technological widgets needs an evaluation (from a social and cognitive point of view).

Amy Jo Kim's book "Community building on the web" seems to be a must-read for people who looks for on-line community builders. It also appears that she is writing a similar book concerning social architectures for networked video games.

Rheingold's last book - Smart Mobs focuses on mobile collaborative "clique". He defines a smart mob as "people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities"

The book covers his experience watching smart mobs in Tokyo or Stockholm as well as the threats of location-based technologies (is it Foucault's always-on panotpicon ? or just a cooperation amplifier ?). The link he made to Foucault's Surveiller et Punir is very relevant. I gotta use that kind of stuff too for the limit of my phD. It's cleat that my work needs contextualising, for instance literature about social interaction and awareness (e.g. Erving Goffman, Deirdre Boden, Christian Heath)

Another corollary area is also Social-Network Mapping Tools : all those visualizing stuff seems attracting. I should ask Yvan to show me his work as well as what Patrick did for his phD.

Memo about my research

After having focused on the cognitive impacts of awareness tools in a collaborative video-game, my phD will adress the question of the social and cognitive effects of context-awareness tools in collaborative mobile activities. I have to find a joint activity where users are engaged in joint tasks that require collaboration and mobility. I am considering using geological field studies. Last week, I met a guy at ENS Lyon named Vincent Lignier who is a sedmentologist. He explained me briefly how they work (actually I know this sort of thing since I have a degree in biology/geology) taking the example of a mission he participated in. This conversation was very interesting since there it seems to be a niche for the use of social navigation.

The objective of this project led by Pr. Dr. Beck Christian was to provide a detailed sedimentary record of changes in precipitation and temperature in the Chilean Lake District for the last 10,000 years, in order to define the regional impact of "El Niño Southern Oscillation".

The research was divided in three parts : - A detailed geophysical reconnaissance allowed to select the most suitable lakes for this purpose and to locate in these lakes the most appropriate sites for coring. - Coring - Multidisciplinary analysis of long sediment cores from two selected lakes.

The sites for coring are located thanks to GPS stuff. It could be interesting to provide teams with mobile devices that can enable them to "attach" information (like geophysical data, seismic surveys, geotek analysis ...) to GPS points. We can also imagine a wearable socialnav application to help them between phase one and two.

I think I have to explore literature about socialnav to find out relevant stuff for this domain... I have already found articles written by Paul Dourish (he's the guy who introduced the concept of socialnav in 1994) and other things worth to read. I like this term of "Footprint in the snow" as a metaphor for socialnav !