CS 160: Lecture 19

Fall 2001

Nov 8, 2001

Mere presence influences speed of performance, through evaluation and competition.

Attributions of behavior causes have an actor-observer effect.

Social comparison is how we make judgements.

Groups influence our perception of self and others through norms (reference groups).

Groups influence behavior as well.

CSCW: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

Its about tools that allow people to work together.

Most of the tools support remote work
- video, email, IM, workflow

Some tools, e.g. Livenotes, augment local communication.

Video: Rich, but problems with gaze, gesture, non-verbal communication.

Audio: Conveys meaning well but not necessarily location.

Text: Good for synchronous or asynchronous communication.

Ink: Good for expressing ideas and brain-storming

Eye contact problems:
- Offset from camera to screen
- “Mona Lisa” effect

Gesture has similar problems: trying pointing at something.

Good for one-on-one communication

Bad for meetings. Spatial localization is normally lost. Can be put back but tricky.

Turn-taking, back-channeling

In a face-to-face meeting, people do a lot of self-management.

Preparing to speak: lean forward, clear throat, shuffle paper.

Unfortunately, these are subtle gestures which don’t pass well through today’s technology.

Network delays make things much worse.

Misunderstandings, talking over each other, losing the thread of the meeting.

People are good at recognizing these and recovering from them “repair”.

Mediated communication often makes it harder.

E.g. email often escalates simple misunderstandings into flaming sessions.

Our model of tele-communication is episodic, and derives from the economics of the telephone.

Communication in the real world has both structured and unplanned episodes. Meeting by the Xerox machine.

Also, much face-to-face communication is really side-by-side, with some artifact as the focus.

Sharing experiences is very important for mutual understanding in team work (attribution theory).

So context-baseddisplays (portholes)work well.

Video shows roomsand hallways, not just people or seats.

Props (mobile presences) address most of these issues. They even support exploration.

Ishii’s Clearboard: sketching + presence

Face-to-Face: the ultimate?

It depends.

Conveys the maximum amount of information, mere presence effects are strong. But…

People spend a lot of cognitive effort managing perceptions of each other.

In a simple comparison of F2F, phone and email, most subjects felt most comfortable with the phone for routine business contact.

Face-to-Face: the ultimate?

Kiesler and Sproull found that email-only programming teams were more productive than email+F2F teams in a CS course.

There you want coordination, commitment, recording.

Conclusion: Match the medium to the mission

Beyond communication

How can computers assist cooperative work beyond communication?

Can they “understand” conversation?

Speech-act based systems like the coordinator attempted to do so.

General understanding is too hard. But business communication is mostly about propose-accept-acknowledge sequences.

The Coordinator was a system that tried to track these speech acts. Users had to specify the type of each utterance (email message).

The experiment failed, it was too constraining.

But it was reborn as “workflow”. Workflow tracks documents through an organization. One-to-one speech acts weren’t that useful. Following the speech acts on a document is.

CSCL: Computer-SupportedCollaborative Learning

Sub-area of CSCW concerned with learning and collaboration.

Peer interaction is a powerful source of learning, especially in universities.

Three powerful models:
- TVI, DTVI: recorded instructor, team review
- Peer instruction: pauses for group discussion
- PBL: Problem-based learning, team problem-solving

Designed to include other learners perspectives into note-taking.