Research

Invible College

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE I learnt an interesting notion last week-end : Invisible College. It describes a community that shares an interest in a common subject or discipline and communicates informally about it. The "college" is made up of generally around 100 individuals who function as the scholarly in-group within a given specialization and most of the significant research within that specialization is usually produced by its members. This research is facilitated by the informal exchange of information through contacts within this social network at conferences, by e-mail, during hallway conversations, and in other forums.

CRANE, D. Invisible colleges, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972.

dks' comments on my report

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE I saw dks last week, we talked about my report (socio-cognitive uses of space..."). Few points :

- dans mon intoduction, mettre en avant à quoi sert le document - mieux discerner viruel versus non-virtuel. - en conclusion, mettre en avant les points critiques pour la collaboration et relatifs à l'espace. (1) How does space/place relate to portals ? i.e. does a portal have places ? (2) What's the goal(s) ? For each : list of variables to optimize ? to study ? - exploiter la notion de place Peut on recréer des "places" dans le monde virtuel qui fournissent les mêmes fonctions, sans forcément avoir une représentation/métaphore spatiale. - Attention à ne pas amalgmer structure (la matérialisation) et fonction (ce qui sert : un artefact peut servir pour coordonner une tâche). - Attention de ne pas confondre coordination spatiale et navigation dans espace virtuel 3D.

- check research group about "group behavior in VR" (Swedish teams working on CAVES, Notthingham, Jolanda Tromp). - According to him, I have to find an old russian academics who died before Staline; like Vygotski. - approche marxiste discernant infrastructure (paramètres physiques) et artefact (physique ou virtuel) plus ce qui se greffe dessus. Ce que j'utilise comme plan : espace, outils et gens + activité sont les paramètres nécessaires (cf théorie de l'activité).

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE <a href="http://mediatic.blogspot.com/"Mediatic dans son post du 15-09-2003 me crédite d'une ressource intéressante sur les natels, j'en rajoute donc :)

Un autre très bon site rassemblant plutot des références : http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Enalinik/mobile.html and http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC10020/mobile_users.html

Le journal de Vodafone est intéressant aussi : http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/archive/index.html

En francais : http://tendancesmobiles.blogspot.com/

Les gens intéressés par le Mobile Learning peuvent se rendre ici : http://cc.oulu.fi/~jlaru/mlearning/

Bien sur je dois avoir encore pas mal de choses la dessus mais ces sites donnent un bon overview.

Phone and place

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Nalini P. Kotamraju, and the Incite, at the University of Surrey works on a project concerning mobile phones and teenagers’ experience of place, including its boundaries.

"As with other mobile technologies, the notion of place is key in investigating young people’s use of mobile devices. Place, of course, is extremely important in the cultural worlds of young people, who experience place, both its opportunities and constraints, in different ways than do adults. Recent research based at the University of Surrey has suggested that the widespread adoption of mobile phones has led to the practice of “location work” (Cooper & Green, 2000). An example of this practice in the United Kingdom is the utterance “Hello, I’m on the train.” Increasingly, the mobile devices themselves are being designed with such location work in mind and location work is being carried out by the devices’ technical features rather than by the users. "

Interesting bibliography here.

Sociology of the mobile phone in Switzerland here

Katz, James E., and Mark Aakhus. 2002. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, and Public Performance . Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Urry, J. (1995). Consuming Places. London, United Kingdom, Routledge.

Timo Kopomaa : The City in Your Pocket: Birth of the Mobile Information Society (Gaudeamus 2000; granum.uta.fi/english/)

Liminality

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Via Line Ulrika Christiansen : "Liminality is described, when dealing with architecture, as the conceptual momentary relationship between people and spatial environments. It refers to transitional space; neither one place nor another, rather a third space in-between. It is a space where explorations of new ways of experiencing an environment in the conceptual zone of blur between people and space can take place." As quoted by Cathrine Smith who wrote the essay ‘Looking for Liminality in Architectural Space’: “...Perhaps, if users can take a more active role rather than only occupying the architecture, but create their own spaces, then we have created the possibilities of liminality between people and space...”

Deleuze and Guattari on space

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"...every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own (...) sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by 'traits' that are effaced and displaced by the trajectory." Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 - Milles Plateaux.

How to measure Spatial Coordination

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Spatial Coordination could be measured with its outcome : a success correspond to the fact that participants among a group could stay out of sight for long periods and can link up again as soon as they wish.

Variables to take into account : - group dispersion (distance between the participants) - topology/environment setting - other persons (from empty space to crowd)

I should check the literature about video games level design to have a state-of-the-art view of this topic.

Functions of space in a MOO environment

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE In the real world, the space impacts on our behavior in some functional ways (e.g. we cannot cross walls, we cannot see across a mountain, we cannot ski in a lift) and also by social uses (e.g. one should not sleep in one's office). A MOO environment reproduces some of these functional constraints (e.g. users must use doors to leave a room), but not all of them (e.g. tele-transportation is possible). We can express these functions with Clark and Brennan’s (1991) terminology:

· Space controls access: Most commands can only be performed on the objects in the same room as the user (e.g. look, read, get, take, ...) · Space controls visibility: Objects and partners can only be viewed (i.e. described by a piece of text) if they are in the same room; the action of another user is often only visible if (s)he is in the same room · Space controls audibility: What user-A can hear depends on where user-B is and which communication command he uses. The command "Say hello" displays the "hello" message to all users in the same room, while the command "Page Kaspar hello" sends the message "hello" only to Kaspar, but wherever he is. Actually audibility is just a special case of visibility since messages are typed text.

In other words, by its very design, a MOO imparts two functional aspects to space: because access to information and visibility are space-bound, the spatial path reifies the information search process; and because visibility and audibility are space-bound, space contributes to differentiate private and public conversations. Becauseo fthese functions, space awareness (knowing where you partner is) contributes to knolwdge awarness (knowing what you partner knows), a criticial factor in CSCW design, but - as we willl see in the experiments presented here- space awareness maintained can be at lower costs than knowledge awareness.

In addition to these functions, intrinsic to the design of standard MOOs, space can have task-specific functions. Typically, the importance of space is different if two users have to write a text collaboratively in the MOO or if they have to escape collaboratively from a labyrinth. The tasks selected for the empirical studies presented here differ by the extent to which spatial aspects play a role in the solution process. The user’s behavior may be influenced by the virtual space beyond these constraints. For instance, if two users prefer to discuss their work when they meet in their virtual office while they would rather talk about their private lives when they meet in the virtual bar, this difference of behavior cannot be explained by the functional factors mentioned above, but only by the transfer of social habits from the real world into the virtual environment. In this contribution, we measure the impact of space by detecting cases where space influences the users behavior beyond strict functional necessity.

Meeting with pierre

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE My grafifti : a wall that just show one's graffiti when one pass by. Audio in the megawatch project ? which use ? Biowall ? Group aggregation ?

We discriminate two research tracks : - community approach : self-organization, use of the awareness tool, see what appears... - group and task track. We'll focus on this track.

Two other tracks : - spatial coordination : studying the cognitive processes involved. This is where I want to go. - see what's going on if we give a social map to a group.

My SMS project : in october : 5-6 persons, invite them at the restaurant at the end.

Read Hutchins : Cognition in the Wild

Create a task (game with mobile devices)...

Discussion avec xavier

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE A propos de jeu video et spatialisation xavier (de kawaii studio) me repond: "Pour ton travail je pense qu'en effet la localisation spatiale de tes collaborateurs dans un espace virtuel est importante mais au delà de ça c'est la perception rapide de leurs intentions qui est primordiale (pour une bonne collaboration ou un combat intéressant) Enfin en tout cas c'est un sujet passionnant.Effectivement ça m'intéresse d'en savoir plus! Si tu veux je peux te donner les coordonnées d'un très bon joueur de CS qui est en stage de game design chez nous."

Military and Awareness

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE The topic of Awareness is often used in military operations. Studies focus on Situation Awareness, that could be defined as : "Shared situational awareness . . . translates to a clear and accurate, common, relevant picture of the battlespace for leaders at all levels and a reduction in the potential for fratricide. Situational awareness answers three fundamental battlefield questions: Where am I? Where are my friends? Where is the enemy? The sharing of timely information enabled by digitalization improves significantly the ability of commanders and leaders to quickly make decisions, synchronize forces and fires, and increase the operational tempo.” (Kern and Abrams)

Mutual Modelling

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE On définit grossièrement le Mutual Modelling par la représentation que A se fait de son/ses partenaires : en particulier, ce qu’ils savent et prévoient de faire et ce qu’ils savent que A sait. C’est cette définition que l’on a retenu pour mon mémoire.

A posteriori, cette définition apparaît beaucoup trop vague et généraliste. On peut en effet discriminer plusieurs strates dans le modèle de l’autre : - Inférences générales sur l’autre (social category membership, interests) - Compréhension :modèle du domaine (ou de la tâche) par l’autre. - Intentions, stratégies de l’autre. - Modelling émotionnel : mood de mon partenaire (est-ce qu’il s’emmerde ? est-ce qu’il agit avec moi ?) - Transactive memory : traits de personnalité de l’autre, ses compétences

Caractéristique de ce modèle de l’autre : - Plusieurs strates (on les a définies ci-dessus). - Dynamique : le modèle que A se forme à propos de son/ses partenaires est réactualisé, incluant les inférences réalisées à partir des événements divers (interactions des autres, audience design…) - Deux niveaux sur un axe lié à la tâche : général (connaissance de l’autre) / finalisé (MM = ce qui apparaît pertinent pour le(s) partenaires dans le contexte de la tâche). - Deux autres niveaux sur un axe plus « linguistique » : global (au niveau de la tâche globale)/local (au niveau linguistique, grounding : est-ce que mon partenaire a compris ce que j’ai voulu dire ?)

Collaborative learning is often more effective than learning alone, but not always. The attempts to control the conditions for effectiveness were not successful. Collaboration effects seem produced by specific types of interactions (explanation, negotiation,...) rather than by general conditions. Hence, a growing attention is paid to the interactions through which peers develop and maintain a shared understanding of the task. To detect misunderstanding or disagreement, the subjects must have some representation of what their partner understands. A rudimentary model of the partner is sufficient for most everyday dialogues. However, in order to observe cognitive effects, we study collaborative tasks which require fine-grained mutual modelling. This project investigates three research questions. How accurate is the partner model that pairs maintain during collaborative learning? Do awareness tools increase the degree of mutual modelling? What are the learning outcomes of building a detailed partner model?

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Clark définit les différents type d'acitivtés (autonome, participative et jointe). On peut considérer la coordination spatiale comme un subset des joint activities. Dans ce cas, il serait intéressant d'étudier comment elle se réalise, quelles "coordination keys" sont employées pour reparer les erreurs... (en analysant donc les speech acts par exemple). Un autre aspect sous-jacent, serait d'étudier quels outils (awareness tools : localisation, direction, présence notamment) permettent de supporter cela, et de réparer les erreurs de manière préventive. Par exemple recevoir le contexte avec le message dans le cadre d'une tâche ou ce contexte (la localisation par exemple) ferait sens (dans un hopital ou il y a un matching entre lieu et activité : scanning room/waiting room/salle d'operation...)

Video Games Study about Space

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE If we consider the actions performed in a first person shooter as a Joint Activity in the sense given by Herbert Clark, we could analyse speech acts that occurs during the game in order to better understand how gamers carry out spatial coordination, which "coordination keys" they use and so forth.

I could use the spaceminers audio logfile in order to study speech acts that occur in a computer game (though spaceminers is not a FPS...)

HOWEVER, I should first analsyse and discriminate the actions carried ou in FPS with respect to Herbert Clark's classification (autonomous action, participatory action and joint activity). I hence need to list FPS interactions.

Research 1 : list of FPS interactions concerning spatial coordination, classified with Clark's terminology. Methodology : observation and participant observation + player's interview. Research 2: how spatiality in video-games supports social interactions ?

Framework for my phd

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Herbert Clark describes three types of activities : autonomous/participative and joint. Spatial coordination is a subset of all the existing joint activities. Considering lingustics concerns, when problems occur, people use 'coordination keys' (in Clark's terms), We hence could study how spatial coordination is supported, if there is a 'spatial grounding'.

An example of coordination key is, in a moo, when you page somebody, it's written "A magic daemon brings you a message from icon [KRAFTWERK] (aka Nicolas Nova) [15:22:08] He pages, "test" So here we have few contextual information like time, place (though it is virtual it could of interest). This kind of awareness tool is useful because it could help to prevent future "repair".

Possible research agenda : -> discriminate spatial coordination problems (like Catherine Cramton's paper study about dispersed collaboration and corollary problems. -> how people do spatial coordination -> effects of media on spatial coordination (computers, phone...) -> how people repairs problems

In addition, the issue we would like to investigate relates to coordination gains due to mutual awareness of spatial positions.

Others questions to adress : what do the users gains ? do they understand more the domain ? do the interact more or less ? what are the learnign gains ? is there more or less conflicts ?

I also need to find a relevant task where there could be match between space and activity (specific activity or not) like in a hospital (radiology room/scanning room/lift/waiting room/...)

La syndication en France

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Encore une fois les français sont à la bourre avec le net. Notamment au niveau de la syndication de contenu. Les medias francais sont en retard seuls les communistes de L'humanite proposent un fil RSS !

Via transfert.net : Selon Stéphane Allaire, responsable technique d'eTF1, le site de la chaîne ne proposera pas, dans l'immédiat, de fil RSS, "parce qu'on ne veut pas que tout le monde récupère nos informations, même si certains bricoleurs peuvent l'aspirer de notre site". "Actuellement, les médias français ont plutôt tendance à limiter l'accès à leur contenu, souligne Jérome Relinger, directeur commercial de Netaktiv, la société prestataire du site de l'Humanité. Il n'est pas étonnant de voir si peu de fils RSS.

C'est assez lamentable cet espece d'esprit "On garde nos infos"... deja que google news peut pas explorer les old posts du monde...

ADSL and TV

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Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE I see that France Telecom/Orange is going to propose ADSL Television in Lyon first (in december) and then in Paris (2004).

Via Les Echos "Longtemps attendue, la télévision sur ADSL (Internet rapide) va enfin pouvoir décoller. France Télécom et TPS, le bouquet satellitaire contrôlé par TF1 et M6, viennent en effet de signer un accord de déploiement. Objectif : déployer la télévision sur ADSL dès le mois de décembre à Lyon, et au premier semestre 2004 à Paris. A terme, 23 villes de France devraient être couvertes, ce qui correspond à environ 8 millions de foyers en zone urbaine.

L'ADSL permettra l'utilisation simultanée de la ligne téléphonique pour converser, accéder à l'internet haut débit, recevoir sur le téléviseur le bouquet de chaînes de TPS, des programmes à la demande et des services interactifs. L'offre, provisoirement « TPSL », pourra être souscrite en prenant auprès de France Télécom un accès vidéo (accès ADSL vidéo et équipement relié au téléviseur) et l'un des forfaits que commercialisera TPS. Les programmes à la demande seront commercialisés par l'opérateur télécoms selon un modèle kiosque de type Minitel, ont précisé les deux partenaires."

dks and blogs

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[+][tecfa] You ask Kaspar [MAILCRAFT], "bientot daniel avec MT ?"[+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] says, "pff never" [17:16:44] [+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] smiles, "i am against :)" [17:16:54] [+][tecfa] You ask Kaspar [MAILCRAFT], "how come ?" [+][tecfa] Vivian [cablefree] says, "haha war starts! Blogs against portals ¦ dks attacks :))))" [17:17:23] [+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] says to you, "it's like personal computing: empowerment to individuals, BAD BAD BAD for organizations" [+][tecfa] You say to Kaspar [MAILCRAFT], "blog can be used to feed newsportal (that's what we try to do here)" [+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] says, "mhh if there is some improvement yes, else you get information overflow" [17:18:54] [+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] says, "in addition: not all data should be chronologically ordered, e.g. yahoo is useful, but it is no blog" [17:19:20] [+][tecfa] You say to Kaspar [MAILCRAFT], "..." [+][tecfa] Vivian [cablefree] smiles to you, "don't give up nico, fight back! :))))) i enjoy this kind of discussions that come back every now and then :)" +][tecfa] You say to Vivian [cablefree], "I do agree with K on certain points" [+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] says to you, "in addition: girls don't read your blog" +][tecfa] You yell to Kaspar [MAILCRAFT], "TOTALLY WRONG !!!!!" [+][tecfa] Vivian [cablefree] smiles, "good point dks :)" [17:22:05] [+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] says to you, "vivian does not, she just admitted" [+][tecfa] Vivian [cablefree] says, "oops! or ot ? " [17:22:15] [+][tecfa] You say to Kaspar [MAILCRAFT], "a blog COULD be a CHICK MAGNET" [+][tecfa] Kaspar [MAILCRAFT] says to you, "a portal is better, because it has cooking recepees" [+][tecfa] Vivian [cablefree] smiles to you, "I went to attack to dks physically :)" [+][tecfa] Vivian [cablefree] says, "dks-icon: 1-0" [17:25:15] [+][tecfa] Vivian [cablefree] says, "or should I say 1-0.5? u defended yourself well " [17:25:43]