Article on Collaborative Tools

A relative article to our class discussion:

http://www.kolabora.com/news/2007/03/01/collaborative_writing_tools_and_technology.htm

Social Networking Leaves Confines of the Computer

I found this article very interesting. Social networking is really going places with more collaborative tools sprouting up everyday.

Discussion Questions for Week 6

Just to give you an idea of the topics I would like to discuss in today's class :)


1. What effect does time and distance have on collaboration?

2. How can collaborative tools that encourage freedom, ease of access, and lack of structure help/hurt collaboration?

3. In what ways may unequal capabilities/privileges among users and “assigned" roles hinder collaborative creativity?

4. What role does accessibility (on-line tools, HTML knowledge, membership only, etc.) play in the success of collaborative efforts? How can the art of simplicity contribute to accessibility?

5. Is order and hierarchy important in collaboration? How so?

6. CoWeb promotes “equal power to all users”. Is this approach effective? Why? Why not?

7. How can steps to enhance the security of collaborative tools hinder/enhance collaboration?

8. When administrators (teachers, supervisors, and people with authoritative power) are present, are collaborative efforts threatened? How? Can power be viewed as an instrument of fear? Control? Respect?

9. Discuss how technology is evolved into a platform for collaboration and a melting pot/salad of ideas in addition to documents, computer programs, and other informative artifacts.

10. What role does individualism play in collaboration? How can participants of a collaborative community maintain individualism?

CoWeb's Ability to Promote Learning

The article, "Recognizing and Supporting Roles in CSCW," is an interesting read. CoWeb is such a brilliant idea. First, it's more democratic compared with Wikis. Everybody can freely edit content. The flipside of this, however, is the possibility of creating confusion. Figure out a situation where a single article generates ten or twenty comments. How does filtering takes place? Some users might decide to act maliciously, by introducing unnecessary content, just to annoy. How can such people be tamed, especially if they're outside the university system?

Another advantage of CoWeb is that it's a freeware. This enables its sustained development. Thirdly, it's audience-focused. It makes use of simple text notation and HTML, to promote learning.

I am, however, worried that CoWeb's accesibility to, even, outsiders might compromise its credibility. Since the main goal of CoWeb is to promote learning, I am wondering what would happen if somebody outside the purview of the university system construes it as just another social networking tool.

Questions for Monday's Discussion

1. Regarding ContactMaps, what are the potential advantages to everyone in an organization to make such maps public and searchable on the corporate intranet (consider the 3M case study for explicit roles documentation)?

2. As we’ve turned away from manufacturing jobs and been retrained to perform service sector jobs, do CSCW technologies provide the opportunity to build and track workflow solutions as effectively as the assembly line provided historically (consider the case study of environment sensors and data-driven change to science processes)?

3. Are workflow approaches to CSCW likely to provide richer life experiences as we are able to rotate between job functions more fluidly or more dehumanizing drudgery as we likely specialize work further (consider the EA Sports lawsuit in Vancouver)?

4. Does CMC-supported home-based work really bring family structure back towards the structure of agrarian times (do you buy the pink-collar worker vs. white-collar worker distinction argument)?

Bruce's discussion paper here.

When Will Real CSC Workflow Finally Live Up To Its Promise?

CSC Workflow technology seems to be all the rage for enabling cooperative work for work teams. From expense report processing to astronomical sky map processing, people in power or specialized skill positions are promised a better life by workflow management tools that help organize their participation. We hear of its promise in business, science, academic journal production - everywhere a process requires significant hand-off to get accomplished.

Who is going to deliver the killer framework? Could Microsoft or IBM? You would think they would be poised to deliver, if anyone. Does a bottom up framework approach have any chance of emerging to be as revolutionary as the Web browser itself? The Java community thinks it possible. And if we do get useful standards, will the same workflow tools used for business also enable workflow in our personal, scientific, academic, or governmental lives?

Build Your Own ContactMap

The ContactMap approach to social communication concerns in our personal messaging strategies is a subset of a greater phenomenon exploding on the Web. The idea of the Mind Map, turned into a million dollar idea by Tony Buzan, has generated multiple open source software products to enable us all in developing useful Mind Maps.

I particularly recommend FreeMind and would be happy to demonstrate the software to anyone interested. I find that the usefulness of such tools increases with age of the user, but can see how a basic ContactMap could be created quickly using captured photographs, e-mail links, and attached notes.

Googlearchy: How Google ranks our searches

If you are interested in learning more about the way Google ranks the retrievals in its search engine read this article. Part of it is very technical but there are interesting insights about the "neutrality" of our searches and the way that big websites (heavily-linked I mean) have priority in Google's search engine.

Google Buys an Online Ad Firm for $3.1 Billion

We have been discussing how Google is trying to monopolize online advertisement. This is the link to the article about Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, a digital advertising company. There are reports that Google is also targeting aQuantive, Inc., another digital marketing firm. Hurry up and buy stocks. And by the way, this company will be participating in the forthcoming job fair here in UW.

Links to Gmail articles and video mentioned in class

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbmiQhuAhU


http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3334241


And for those interested in reading about virtual "affairs"...

http://find.msn.com/search.aspx?q=Virtual+infidelity&c=0423+Virtual+affairs&form=MSNHM3

The Virtual Life: Special report on Business Week

For those of you interested in virtual cyberspace, there is a new special report on Business Week that discusses this theme applied to different CMC genres.

Read ahead...

Week 5 Response Paper

Hello 505ers,

Here's my response paper for Week 5.

Google's New Tool: Web History

In an effort to personalize even further the search results you get in Google, the company just released their newest tool "Google Web History". Interested in monitoring your own browsing activity? Interested in getting more personalized results in your search?

I haven't had a chance to read in detail what this is about, I just read some criticisms to this new web 2.0 tool. Here is one example of such reviews

Have a good weekend

From Anchored Conversations to The Hab

This week's readings covered a broad range of topics from document chatting to virtual reality. In regards to anchored conversations, my biggest concern is with the lack of personal social interactions that may result. Can an increase in technology in the workplace lead to a decrease in valuable personal interactions (i.e., mentoring relationships)?

In a virtual world, capabilities (what the user is able to do) and characteristics (how the user is able to do it) as well as how these functions operate in relation to other users, drive design. But what happens when this virtual reality, originally intended for "entertainment only" becomes some one's reality? How do you keep your player life separate from your real life....it may be harder than you think!

Google office

Google has announced another piece of software to add to their Google apps package. They have now completed their "office suite". Now that Google has covered the basics (word, excel, power point) I believe this will definitely strengthen Google's credibility as office software. It'll be interesting to see how many people will use it and for what purposes.

Blogs and Wikis consider a threat to power in working environments

Check this article in business week In a time when knowledge and information equal power, companies' executives and employers fear that the free flow of info in wikis and blogs can threathen the status quo in terms of power dynamics in work place.

Rather than considering Web 2.0 as an opportunity to hear a diversity of voices, this research found that companies are wary of wikis and blogs in terms of information control.

A Clean Slate Internet

Some university researchers, with the blessings of the Feds, want to scrap the current internet protocol and start a "clean slate." They're apparently motivated by the need to address security challenges that the internet, as we know it today, pose. Some commentators think this is absurd, but is it doable? Were this to happen, how would it impact CMC? It would be interesting to know if we, as CMC experts, have issues or concerns we would like incorporated in the "new internet."

Community Building with Blogs

I got this from a grad school announcement email. They have an event next Saturday. I can't make it, but thought it was interesting to read about anyway.

Read here

Myspace is not the web

Not necessarily related to this week's topic, but I thought I'd pass along this article:
Note to Everyone: MySpace Is Not the Web. Get Ready to Move On

The headline's meant to be a little provocative -- MySpace isn't going away anytime too soon. But it's a good reminder about how quickly the media we all use to communicate can change incredibly quickly in this computer-mediated age. If Myspace dwindles as a communication medium, its initial replacements will be similar I'm sure (Facebook and other social networks). These "institutions" can change so quickly -- how does affect our study of the field?

Good Historical Review of New Media

I found the following reference very thoughtful and of useful perspective:

A Brief History of New Media
Andrea Botero Cabrera & Teemu Leinonen
UIAH Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki Finland

Hope you do too.

Virtual Community

I learned a lot from Howard Rheingold back in the early 1990s. His book, The Virtual Community was a very useful read for me back then. It covered the history of successful virtual communities in San Francisco that were completely text based (there was a platform called The Well that let 10,000 connect in threaded discussions on character-based terminals). I notice he continues to write commentary on the subject.

I was disappointed by Howard though when in 1997 his Electronic Minds project fell flat and he couldn't afford to put any more resources into it. He was organizing threaded discussions on the Web on very sophisticated topics - envisioning a book club atmosphere for those of us who wanted the Web to have depth and yet provide connections to others. I was sucked in for the first three weeks and enjoyed myself immensely. I was then very discouraged that it wasn't successful for the long-term. I ask myself still whether such a community will emerge eventually. Anyone seen any on-line discussion groups with some well moderated depth to them?

The HIT Lab moderated the sci.virtual.worlds Usenet group for six years in the early 90s. Amazing what information we were privy to and how much good press we got for doing a great moderation job. We had a top-notch cybrarian managing the news group and the fallout. People came to visit us in person from all over the globe as a result. What a shame we couldn't keep her funded! She's teaching remedial computer skills for the King County unemployed. Teaching in English and Spanish and making a difference to the community. But, not *the* community of which I am most interested for CMCs to thrive.

Censorship, Anonimity, and Ethics in Blogs

I found this resource today and it fits perfectly with what we were discussing last class about codes of conduct for blogging. This is a particular case since the handbook is written for people who are political/social activists but still offers an interesting approach to deal with issues of censorship and ethics.

The issue I found most interesting is that while O'Reilly and the Wikipedia guy (sorry I always forget his name) are advocating that anonymous posts are deleted, this handbook uses anonymity actually as a technological resource to overcome censorship and repression.

How to prevent phising

I mentioned a resource that can help you keep phishers away. All what you need to do is to install a Netcraft toolbar on your browser. Every time a phisher attempts to lure you to a bogus website, Netcraft warns you not to go.

Japanese emoticons

In computer mediated communication a lot of social cues are lost because we cannot see the body language or gestures of those we are conversing with. As a result, the use of emoticons have become increasing prevalent in CMC. These emoticons help compensate for the sometimes dry and stale nature of on-screen text. In class, we talked about how people use emoticons to represent some social cues to give our online conversation more meaning/feeling. This brought up a good question. How do different cultures express their emotions in CMC?

In Japan, there are a variety of ways to express an even larger variety of expressions/emotions. For example, a Japanese user could use a bowed head to represent "thank you".

ｍ（．＿．）ｍ
[the m's are the hands and the head is slightly lowered due to the position of the eyes]

Another example,
＿|￣|○
[someone on all fours - meaning he/she is tired or in total despair]

From Google I found Japanese Smileys, which is a website that showcases some of the more common emoticons (it's amazing to see the sheer number). It also gives a brief history of how they evolved. It wasn't just a cultural issue but also a technological one as well (Japanese fonts are 2-bit instead of 1-bit for the Roman alphabet).

Some articles

Lately, I've seen some interesting random articles around.

Time article. Mentions Twitter and "1 in 8 Americans suffers from some form of Internet addiction..." I think in our class it is higher :)

Read here.

One in NYTimes on manners for blogs. Do you think that would be possible?

Read here

One in the Wall Street Journal about attracting job offers through a blog:
Read here

Powerpoints Put People to Sleep

Yes, Powerpoints make people sleep. I have been a victim. I didn't, however, understand the theory behind until I came across this article. Based on cognitive load theory, the article argues that the brain is not accustomed to synthesizing information in two simultaneous forms.

Week 3 response

Hello class,
For tomorrow's discussion I was thinking about covering the first three readings in the syllabus then saving the last two for Wednesday.

Trust/deception topic: Here is a link to the DallasFood forum about Noka chocolate. I was trying to show you about a hired PR guy that posted as an "AvidReader." It didn't take long for people to figure it out and blast him.
Forum here


Here is my response paper.

The Trust Issue Is Huge

Something about reading outdoors during Friday's wonderful weather made this week's readings scream out to me. I see how and why trust effects behavior dramatically. I liked the paper I found on-line entitled Empathy and online interpersonal trust: A fragile relationship. It suggests that an accurate portrayal of empathy builds trust when followed up by a supportive attitude, but an accurate portrayal of empathy builds relative distrust when followed up by minimizing comments. The negative trust effect of dismissing an empathetic issue is even stronger than the cases with or without support if empathy is not demonstrated by a communicator (though perhaps not significantly so).

One of the benefits of going through a bad life event is the opportunity to empathize with others. CMCs show great promise in spreading that empathy and empowering individuals to deal with emotional baggage brought on by the experience. Of interest is how to tie this consideration of empathy with the issue of deception and what thoughts that gives us of creative writers who offer up fictional stories that we accept for entertainment at face value without requiring details about the writer's personal life story.

Getting Wiki with it

Upon the rising popularity of wikis, they have started to infiltrate businesses and are becoming valuable tools in collaboration. Businessweek.com now has a video describing wikis and how they can be used in a business setting. As James mentioned in class, tools such as this really compliments and supports virtual work. Wikis allow virtual teams to share and discuss ideas without the "massive" emails or the inconvenience of scheduling phone calls.

The video is a bit dry (NYU professor just talking away about wikis). But there are other articles there discussing wikis in the work place.

new news

I heard about these two interesting examples of online media and thought they might be of interest to us:
Crosscut Seattle
New West Network

They're basically news services, but they incorporate newspapers, TV news, blogs, columns and a lot of other media to deliver local content online.

The original story I heard was on Weekday this morning. You can listen to it here if you're interested. It's the segment from hour two called "Paperless Newspapers." A MP3 version is here.

Event

I got an announcement for this event from one of the CS professors and thought I'd pass it along. I can't go, but I'd love to know if anyone else is interested in attending.

Youth Forum: "Gaming, IMing, Internet: Onboard or Overbored? Kids Speak Out about Living in the Digital Age"

Date and Time Monday, April 30th, 2007 - 5:30 PM
Location Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Ave

Download e-Flyer

From virtual reality games to the internet to Instant Messaging to MP3 players, technological devices have become part of our everyday lives. What is the impact of these new forms of technology on the social life and self-awareness of young teens? Come hear middle school students talk about their experiences in a friendly, youth-oriented forum. Parents, teachers, and others are welcome to participate in the discussion.

Sponsored by the Reclaiming Childhood Project at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Discussion Questions

(Posted by Janice)

Here are some questions I'd like to discuss in class tomorrow:

What do you think of the recent “merging” of different online communication media? For example, where there used to be AOL IM, MSN, Yahoo, etc for personal chat, now there is Trillian and Adium that combine most of the major systems. Most blogs can also integrate photos posted on Flickr and videos from YouTube.

How to technologies like Skype fit in to the models/frameworks proposed in the readings? Do they count as CMC or is it just a different way of using a telephone? How does the addition of video change the communication paradigm?

The de Souza article talks about emoticons as substitutes for body language online. Are there other symbol systems that supplement online communication to make up for the lack of face-to-face interaction?

Would you agree with the prediction made at the end of the Herring article that internet will become a less-interesting communication environment as time goes by?

How do projects like SETI and Folding@Home fit in to the larger idea of CMC? How else could this kind of distributed computing be applied?

And here's a link to my response paper. (pdf)

Articles mentioned in class

Posted by Marita

Hi class. Here is the article I mentioned in our class discussion last week. This was part of Time Magazine's series on the brain. I found it interesting.

Generation M

Here is another short one mentioning MySpace and Generation Me:

MySpace and Generation Me

Online Social Networking Tools a Force to Reckon With

By James Wachai
Nothing excites me more than how the web is dictating how we socialize. With “how we socialize”, I don’t just mean exchanging niceties, and sometimes nasty oddities, online, about our social lives. Corporations are aggressively exploiting online social networks to market their products or/and services. Sample this video post in MySpace.com, where Dr. Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace International, touts benefits of vinyl.

Lately, vinyl has come under attack, mainly by environmental activists, who argue that since it’s non-degradable, its impact on the environment can be devastating. Dr. Moore is evidently defending vinyl on behalf of Vinyl News Service, a service of the Vinyl Institute, a U.S. trade association representing the leading manufacturers of vinyl and vinyl products.

Or watch this YouTube video about benefits of genetically modified foods. Its original source is Conversations About Plant Biotechnology website, a web page in Monsanto.com. Monsanto Company is the major manufacturer of genetically modified seeds. Here, Monsanto aims to dominate the debate about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) using You Tube.

Other online social networking tools such as digg, del.icio.us, flickr, squindoo, wikihow, ning, frappr, furl, Stumbleit, are influencing the flow of information on the web.

Week Two Discussion

CMC genres and the importance of design in establishing norms for users and usage

Class Discussion Questions (comments in parentheses to be expanded in class):

1) Do you agree that text will continue to be dominant as the lowest common denominator? (and what are the ramifications of your answer)

2) How much should we bet on the wisdom of crowds for driving design? (consider if CMCs can really facilitate political advisement from the masses)

3) How far can we automate our investigation of CMC design success with on-line applications? (consider Google's competency and the potential of PNNL glass box software).

4) Are the efficiencies of genres worth induced limits to our creativity? (consider Heinz Frankl’s early life memoir and the willingness of Barnes and Noble to stock)

Response to Readings

Identifying CMC genres facilitates growing a critical mass of users working together to establish norms for effective technology use and associates those norms with terms that can consistently be communicated to efficiently promote that use. But critical mass is not a panacea. Susan Herring suggests that massively used CMC technologies are evolving into blander tools with SMS messaging representing rock bottom. She suggests that historically the mass use of any technology tends to remove the radical edge away from cultural change and towards cultural assimilation. The masses have arrived through the immediacy of browser-based facilities, ubiquity of mobile devices, and entrenchment of text as the path to cross-pollenization among CMC genres. Although in the late 90s we were moving away from the medium driving the message, mobile devices are bringing us back toward it. Instead of using sophisticated CMC applications to embody and document an increasingly useful hive-mind knowledge base, we are growing our use of CMCs to facilitate our social lives in the real world - a perpendicular use that gives extroverts bandwidth. More than ever, I see the need for organization and moderation across facilities in cyberspace to help us make sense of our collective use. I wonder when the semantic Web and info-mining bots will help us facilitate the radical ideas that show merit for positive human and planetary impact irrespective of the stabilizing trend of the masses?

Software design significantly affects genre use. Preece and de Souza identify an Online Community Framework to help CMC technology designers assess whether CMC tool designs are as effective as possible in driving use towards intended purpose. The suggestion is obvious to match sociability and usability in order to facilitate each genre. If the focus is on building a better hive-mind knowledge base for humanity, the interface can suggest a thoughtful asynchronous participation. If the focus is on real-world social networking facilitation, the interface can suggest immediacy and opportunity for synchronous negotiation. Designers can pursue design clarity by observing users share aloud the inner dialogues they have when using technology, verifying the chosen sign systems and communications function as intended. Lemerich and Molder suggest CMCs can help users evolve their social being by demonstrating flexible identity construction instead of a consistent, engrained cognitive identity they maintain at all times. The Holy Grail of design might entail designers focusing on facilities that nudged users toward developing their best socially effective identity.

Overarching general design principles exist to help us improve CMCs. Brenda Laurel suggests an activity-based design focus promises the user a potential emotional response similar to participating in good drama. We decide an appropriate action we wish to take and the other actors (existing within the computer or manned by humans through other computers) arrange themselves appropriately to let us perform our desires. The more other humans are participating with us, the more the technology plays a role of plot consistency enforcer instead of trusted agent. We naturally desire a coherent plot to immerse us in the drama. CMC genres can follow appropriate plots, just as books and movies do, through representation in the interface - with a coherent personality for non-human functions. Don Norman’s rule of visibility suggests the interface anticipate appropriate actions and make the action visibly obvious for those purposes. Having a virtual representation (ideally a coherent metaphor for beginners) means inappropriate actions can lack a visible means of execution. Appropriate feedback (multimodal to increase immersion) reinforces positive action and curbs negative action. The stakes are raised as visual virtual environments confront issues of gender and race and users pay their way into the reality they wish to explore. The bottom line is that all the design dimensions work as one when driving human psychology, a true Gestalt phenomenon that must be congruent with genre in order to satisfy.

Meaningful Conversation on the Web

Regarding on-line incivility: is there a cure ...

I also spend a lot of time dwelling on the question of just how much meaningful conversation is possible on the Web. But, I don't frame the question in terms of political content. I frame it in terms of sparking imagination that can evolve into creative solutions to one's work and life passions.

The most meaningful conversations I have had on the Web have been asynchronous communications that help me frame problems and envision solutions so that I can determine where to put my energy efficiently. Useful static documents on the Web are conversational if I choose to follow up with the author. If I have put the time in to understand the document, organize my thoughts, script some creative interaction that appears relevant to the author, and approach the author thoughtfully, I find that the conversation that ensues is as meaningful as I could imagine in a non Web-mediated process. I'm appreciative that the Web has assisted me in finding the conversation.

I agree with the sentiment that

It may very well be that aggressive forum moderation is the only way to create public spaces in which constructive discussion can thrive regularly.

is important if there is a larger group participating in the dicussion. I see how we all need to learn how to best understand documents, organize our thoughts, script some creative interaction that appears relevant to the author, and approach the author thoughtfully. We should support and push for moderation by those who seem the most gifted at those skills. Those skills should be a valued and rewarded (financially if desired) by those who try to build successful CMC examples.

Meaningful conversations in the synchronous mode are leveraged by immediacy. If I need to know something with urgency and I can get a satisfactory answer from a discussion that is established by CMC services, I am likely to be supportive of CMC in general.

There is a gradient of depth of meaning in the word meaningful. Each of us has to develop our consciousness of meaning and use CMC flexibly to match depth with use.