Research

Mobile Learning

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE There is smart review of problems encountered by mobile learning designers in Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, September 2003 - Volume 19 Issue 3 Page 255-398. Jeremy Roschelle claims that "First, ‘wireless, mobile learning’ is an imprecise description of what it takes to connect learners and their devices together in a productive manner. Research needs to arrive at a more precise understanding of the attributes of wireless networking that meet acclaimed pedagogical requirements and desires. Second, ‘pedagogical applications’ are often led down the wrong road by complex views of technology and simplistic views of social practices. Further research is needed that tells the story of rich pedagogical practice arising out of simple wireless and mobile technologies. Third, ‘large scale’ impact depends on the extent to which a common platform, that meets the requirements of pedagogically rich applications, becomes available. At the moment ‘wireless mobile technologies for education’ are incredibly diverse and incompatible; to achieve scale, a strong vision will be needed to lead to standardisation, overcoming the tendency to marketplace fragmentation."

The issue also provide readers with very interesting papers about this very topic, especially he one by N. Pinkwart, H.U. Hoppe, M. Milrad, J. Perez ("Educational scenarios for cooperative use of Personal Digital Assistants"). The others deals with collaborative mobile learning scenarios, tools for planning the wireless classrooms, what the authors learns from previous experiences in classrooms and museum and so forth.

Map matching

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Global Positioning System (GPS) has been widely used in Vehicle Navigation Systems. It helps the users to determine the vehicle position or provides users with proper maneuver instruction.

GPS only gives the location, it's just a component of the system since it is unaware of the roads, paths or places. Map matching algorithms consist of using digital map data and GPS satellite signal to locate the vehicle on proper poison relative to digital map. The confontation between the absolute position and the digital map data, users could benefit from a nvaigation aid.

Territoriality

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE When dealing with people and location, the fundamental use of space concerns human territoriality. It reflects the personalization of an area to communicate a group (or an individual) ownership. There is a wide range of research concerning human territoriality and its various dimensions. Each of these dimensions are related to a specific psychological functions.

First of all, territories support social roles among a community : specific contexts are related to specific roles (Prohansky et al., 1970). This means that the meaning of a particular place is endowed through its exclusive use. For each place thus corresponds a set of allowed behaviors. Territoriality could also be defined as a way to achieve and exert control over a segment of space (Prohansky et al., 1970) and then to maintain and achieve a desired level of privacy. As a matter of fact, individuals from a specific territory decides and knows what information about themselves should be communicated to others. According to Minami and Tanaka (1995), "Group space is a collectively inhabited and socioculturally controlled physical setting". The activity than becomes a group activity in terms of interactions with and within space as well as control to the degree of space maintaining.

The third dimensions of territoriality it that it also “serves as a basis for the development of a sense of personal and group identity” (Holahan, 1982:261). This sense of group identity emerges from common territorial habits, knowledge and experiences (e.g. eating in the same restaurants, shopping at the same stores). The ways a group of people appropriates a territory is very large, ranging from residing in the same neighborhood to extreme territorial markers like wall graffiti (Ley and Cybriwsky, 1974). The inter-relation between group identity (feeling that we belong to a larger human group) and spatial identity (based on our experience and knowledge about the environment) is of tremendous importance. One of the most striking feature is that the topic of territoriality in virtual space strangely received very little attention. Nonetheless, Jeffrey and Mark (1998) studied whether social norms like personal space, crowding or territoriality really exist in virtual space as in the physical world. They focused on virtual worlds like Active World or Online Traveler. They found that territoriality was an important feature in the context of virtual worlds. For example, building one’s house in Active World is a way “to provide a territorial marker and provide a feeling of ownership for the owner” (Jeffrey and Mark,1998:30). Furthermore, it seems that people build their house in existing neighborhood rather than in uninhabited places.

This leads us to the fourth dimension of human territoriality which is trust. Studies concerning neighborhood and social networks showed that people may trust one another simply because they live in the same neighborhood (Edney, 1976). Unlike interaction in the physical world, trust is more difficult to maintain in remote interactions. Rocco (1998) compared trust emergence in team of strangers in both settings (face-to-face and collective e-mail communications). She found that trust (in this context, trust correspond to cooperative behavior in a 28 turns social dilemma game) emerges only with face-to-face communication. A pre-meeting enables trust emergence in electronic contexts. This conclusion is however doubtful since lots of users employ e-commerce sites like Amazon without any face-to-face contact. References .

Edney, J.J. (1976). Human Territoriality. In Prohansky, H.M., Ittelson, W.H., & Rivlin, L.G. (Eds). Environmental psychology: People and their physical settings. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Holahan, C.J. (1982). Environmental Psychology. New York: Random House.

Jeffrey, P.and Mark, G. (1998). Constructing Social Spaces in Virtual Environments: A Study of Navigation and Interaction. In: Höök, K.; Munro, A.; Benyon, D. (ed.): Workshop on Personalised and Social Navigation in Information Space, March 16-17, 1998, Stockholm (SICS Technical Report T98:02) 1998) , Stockholm: Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), S. 24-38.

Ley, D., and Cybriwsky, R. (1974). Urban Graffiti as Territorial Markers. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 64(4): 491 – 505.

Minami, H. and Tanaka. K. (1995) Social and Environmental Psychology: Transaction Between Physical Space and Group-Dynamic Processes. Environment and Behavior 27(1), 43-55.

Prohansky, H.M., Ittelson, W.H. & Rivlin, L.G.(1970). Freedom of choice in a physical setting. In Prohansky, H.M., Ittelson, W.H., & Rivlin, L.G. (Eds). Environmental psychology: People and their physical settings. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Rocco, Elena (1998). Trust Breaks Down in Electronic Contexts but Can Be Repaired by Some Initial Face-to-Face Contact. Proceedings of CHI’98, ACM.

Paper ?

in

I was wondering about writing a paper about the very notion of PLACE in virtual environments. Few ideas about that : 1. Intro

Rem Koolhas : "words that die in the real world are reborn in the virtual": webSITE, fireWALL, chatROOM... Spatial metaphor is often used...

2. What is a place

2.1 Definition of space : artefacts/people/interaction Place : area to carry out an activity, discrete location, privacy concerny

2.2 Physical Places Library, thrid place, Shcelling Point. In an hospital, each place is related to a specific activity

2.3 Functions of place - Place affords a kind of activity, division of labor/roles, social navigation - Territoriality : Personalization of an area to communicate a group (or an individual) ownership, Social roles among a community, control, privacy, group identity, trust and place attachment - Space settings : Physical settings of the segment of space, Constraints social interactions and conversely those interactions modify space, action planning. - Co-presence : People are mutually aware that they share a common environment - Visibility : People see other people and objects in the environment

3. Places in a virtual environment

3.1 Places in video games 3.2 Places in portals 3.3 Places in groupware

4 Discussion Functions of space supported by virtual environments... Other things that shoudl be implemented... What functions are not supported, could we provide somehting for that... Awareness Tools

Psychogeographical Markup Language

in

Via Social Fiction :"PML is a protocol that contains transferable & unified metadata about space recorded during psychogeograhical drifts. PML is the name of the data-structure behind the psychogeogram: the diagrammatic representation of both informational, physical & emotive aspects of urban space."

I am strongly in favor of that kind of thing !!!!! The future : street artefacts and street shops will contain RDF data !

Space Syntax Methodology

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE The space syntax methology is a mathematical/graph theory procedure intended to analyze nodal diagrams of plans to arrive at cultural norms behind the morphology of buildings. Maybe it would be interesting to use this technique for other purposes : studying space potentialities to suppport cognition or CSCW.

Example : if there is many links/doors/access, it will be more difficult to solve rendezvous problems

There is always a link with military shtuff

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE There is always a link with military shtuff !!!! Via Marc Tuters : "In Virilio"s military origins of the city, urban space is controlled by military cartographers, whose lines of sight have determined the extent of mapable, and thus, controllable territory. The further the cartographer"s view of the territory/city extended, the more time it allowed to defend the city, and the further in turn the city grew outwards; making the city a temporal event related to control of the territory. Thus the Atlantic Wall of bunkers that the Germans built to defend fortress Europe in World War II, in Virilio"s theory, transformed Europe into a continent wide city. Following this line, the entire planet has become a generalized urban security zone, surveillanced by military satellites such as GPS, with which one"s exact location can be determined from anywhere on the planet by triangulating the time of arrival of satellite transmissions. "Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory, but in the control of the territory", and, as William Bogard notes, in the generation of its simulation which distracts attention from the underlying disciplinary regimes of power in space"

"One cannot understand the development of information tech, without understanding the evolution of military strategy" Paul Virilio

"there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons"Giles Deleuze

While, in an increasingly mediated society, military derived technologies of surveillance and simulation attempt to control people, there remains a destabilizing force at the heart of Virilio"s city. While cartographers organize space by attempting to control its flows, the city essentially emerged at the intersection of the flows when nomads settled down in walled cities giving-up some of their freedom in exchange for protection (thus urban space is a defensible space of "habitable stasis"). The anarchic Virilio believes that the city"s streets retain a connection to the nomadic territorial order and continue to introduce nomadic vectors which cannot be controlled and out of which all the meaningful movements in history have emerged.

Inspired by Virilio"s early work Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of nomadology as a way of constructing space that grows out of a territorial connection with place. As an example, they present the itinerant labourers who built the great cathedrals of Medieval Europe. These "freemasons", whose guilds have always remained outside of "the State", constructed space from the rock itself, in contrast to the conceptual space of the architects according to whose plans the monuments were built. Similarly, for Henri Lefebvre, all social movements produce their own integral fluid spaces, while architects and urban planners, as handmaids of "the State", produce "representations of space" that encode hierarchical power dynamics into the built environment, where they become naturalized and erased from view. These "representations of space" marginalize and fracture the social body so that the head can no longer see the feet (Lefebvre), severing meaningful connections with place (Deleuze and Guattarri), and ultimately, through an abstract spectacle of circulation, they exert perceptual control on the atomized individual generating a cultural nihilism which manifests itself as a will to speed (Virilio). Yet, while the State"s dominator culture attempts to channel the flows of the nomad, it tends to be sedentary and static while nomads are mobile and emergent (for which Deleuze and Guattarri use the metonym of the rhizome; a decentred, heterogeneous collective assemblage)"

Portal and Place

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Very interesting discussion with DKS today about the notion of Place with respect to web portals.

What is a place in a portal ? Is the portal one place ? Do a portal have places ?

Method : 1. What is a place ? it's a space with : an activity that occurs in it, filled with artifacts and people who interact.

2. What do we have in a portal ? we have activities (= scenario/script, tools to support this, registratin/authentication, co-writing...), artefacts (resources, tools...) and people who interact. Not "discrete", sort of continuous.

List portals' features : RSS feed, communication tools (chat, forum, shoutbox...)...

3. Link between portal and place ? -> I have to check in my report about Space and Collaboration in order to do that. What could be improved considering all the amount of research in environmental psychology (reviewed in my report).

Geodemographics

in

Via GEOG_8291 :"Geodemographics. Basically categorizing neighborhoods. It's well used in marketing. The obvious example is store site selection. You want to build your store near the people who would shop there. Who are those people and where are they? Geodemographics."

Impact of the medium on grounding

in

Clark and Brennan's paper (1991) offer a very interesting framework to discriminate the impacts of media on commmunication, particularly on the grounding process (= the process of building a common understanding of the situation carried out by the participants). Grounding changes with the communication medium. For instance, in a face-to-face conversation, saying « ok » is an easy sign of acknowledgement and grounding. The situation is very different in a chat or a mud (i.e. multi-user dungeon). Indeed, timing precisely an acknowledgement is much more difficult, the « ok » can be understood as an interruption. Clark and Brennan (1991) stress the fact that the acknowledgement cost is higher in the chat case. This is due to the least collaborative effort rule. The effort of making something (producing an utterance, repairing it…) depends on the medium. Thus grounding is affected.

Here are constraints and examples ((inspired from Clark and Brennan, 1991) :


Constraints
Definitions
Examples of medium satisfying the constraint

Copresence
Participants A and B share the same physical environment
Face-to-face conversation

Visibility
A and B are visible to each other
Videoconference and face-to-face conversation

Audibility
A and B communicate by speaking
Telephone, Videoconference and face-to-face conversation

Cotemporality
B receives at roughly the same time as A produces
Chat, Telephone, Videoconference and face-to-face conversation but not in e-mail

Simultaneity
A and B can send and receive at once and simultaneoulsy
Chat, Telephone, Videoconference and face-to-face conversation

Sequentiality
A’s and B’s turns cannot get out of sequence
Chat, Telephone, Videoconference and face-to-face conversation but not in e-mail

Reviewbility
B can review A’s message
e-mail and chat but not the others cited above

Revisability
A can revise message from B
e-mail but not the others cited above

Example of Joint Activity to study

in

A counterstrike missionGoal : capture the opponent's flag Situation : two teams, each of the team has the same goal. Tools/artifacts : ammo, weapons...to be listed... communication tools... Constraints/scope : 3D environment, a computer for each participant...

Research questions : - which coordination keys are exchanged by the blue team participants during an attack ? - what are the coordination problems concerning flow in the blue team... - coordination in a stressful situation when time...

And after I could see with the Distributed Cognition framework which joint strategy ? Outcome : an appliance, and this stuff could be of interest to know which keys we should put into the device...

RDV Stefano

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE A lire : Précis de Psycholinguistique (Jean Carron)

2 frameworks : Clark et Malone/Crowston For Clark, coordination is a way to solve practical problem (the participants share a common goal). These problems comes from the lack of common ground. Solving strategy : exchanging coordination keys. For Malone and Crowston, coordination deals with dependency management (gestion de dépendances) between related activities. Three kinds of dependence : fit, flow, share. Those categories allow us to categorize the problems Clark deals with. The problemes emerges (in the Malone and Crowston framework) a bad definition of the processes. Solving strategy : exchange of certain types of keys : specific processes.

According to Clark, there are two types of activities : AUTNOMOUS and JOINT. Joint activities - division of labour between participants : division into Participative Activities. People perform participative activities so as to complete the joint actitivity (Sum of the participative activities). In addition, there could be a certain level of dependence between two participative actions (it's a continuum form no dependence to total dependence).

Stefano criticizes the notions of primary and coordination actiivity because it depends on the point of view (for example a postman who carry a paper to be collaboratively written by somebody does not perform a coordinative activity since he is out of the task/goal).

I have to observe a real situation; with regard to the grounding cost of the media (Clark and Brennan), see what we loose in the mediated communication setting and how we ca support it with computational tools.

Awareness + 3D + mixed reality = contextual information... (what is the best coordination key to exchange ?)

Distributed Cognition : Halverson, Broadbent, Belotti

Cerner l'univers, l'angle de base, avant d'articuler la question de recherche.

The rendezvous problem on discrete locations

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE E.J. Anderson and R.R. Weber (1990), The rendezvous problem on discrete locations. J. Appl. Prob. 27 839-851, 1990.

Abstract : Two friends have become separated in a building or shopping mall and wish to meet as quickly as possible. There are $n$ possible locations where they might meet. However, the locations are identical and there has been no prior agreement where to meet or how to search. Hence they must use identical strategies and must treat all locations in a symmetrical fashion. Suppose their search proceeds in discrete time. Since they wish to avoid the possibility of never meeting, they will wish to use some randomizing strategy. If each person searches one of the $n$ locations at random at each step, then rendezvous will require $n$ steps on average. It is possible to do better than this: although the optimal strategy is difficult to characterize for general $n$, there is a strategy with an expected time until rendezvous of less than $0.829n$ for large enough $n$. For $n=2$ and $3$ the optimal strategy can be established and on average 2 and $8/3$ steps are required respectively. There are many tantilizing variations on this problem, which we discuss with some conjectures.

Meeting with Mauro

in

Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE Things to do : - list joint activities taken from the real world and related to mobility (micro : same building or colocation; macro : geographical distance). - what is coordination and in particular : spatial coordination ?And then I have to find hypothesis (people coordinate better when they...) - maybe there are special activities that people do to augment their spatial awareness ? Download Quake and the level builder. How to build a proper level, an interesting levelto conduct experiments about spatial coordination (putting Schelling Point ?).