Lecture 2: Cooperation Technologies

1. Lecture 2: Cooperation Technologies Dr. Xiangyu WANG

2. Agenda • Classifying cooperation technology • Examples of cooperative applications: tools supporting communication • Formal vs. informal communication • Using affordances to compare communication technologies

3. 3 “C” • Communication: asynchronous and synchronous • Collaboration: share information • Coordination: "integration and harmonious adjustment of individual work efforts toward the accomplishment of a larger goal"

4. Formal vs. informal communication • Formal communication • Scheduled in advance, • Arranged participants, • Preset agenda, • One-way, • Impoverished content, • Formal language, • Used for predicted situations (co-ordination), • Not useful for social maintenance of the group, • Informal communication • Unscheduled, • Random participants, • No arranged agenda, • Interactive, • Rich content, • Informal language, • Used for unpredicted situations, • Used for social maintenance of the group,

5. Informal communication • Normally there is no clear border between formal and informal communication. • Informal communication is important for mutual knowledge creation.

6. Informal communication • Normally around 40% of workers are involved in informal communication. • Normally 90% of communication is informal. • The visual channel (sighting) is crucial for informal interactions.

7. Communication Tools • Communication technologies should provide a communication channel that is rich enough to satisfy its users needs. • Communication technology should provide lightweight, easily available, and easy to use mechanism for: • support multi-party communication • switching from informal to formal communication and vice versa

8. Which communication tools do you know/use?

9. Traditional Online Communication Tools Supporting Education • Today, online tools have greatly improved remote collaboration. • The online communication tools commonly used for both asynchronous and synchronous instruction. • Common asynchronous tools include email, listservs, and web bulletin boards. • Synchronous tools include chat rooms, application sharing (including whiteboards), tele- and videoconferencing, and occasionally text-based multi-user domains (MUDs/MOOs). • Other tools, such as streaming video, webpages, online tests, and computer-based training (CBT) systems are for use by single users, and have little to do with communication and community.

10. Traditional Online Communication Tools Supporting Education • Asynchronous tools have an important role in the “anywhere, anytime” paradigm of distance education that makes it attractive to many people in the first place. • Synchronous tools such as whiteboarding, however, are recognized as being very useful for brainstorming-style discussion sessions or small group meetings, which are fundamental to many of the modern educational techniques. • Predominantly focused on interpersonal communication and there are a lot of limits on the transmission of social information, including the restriction of “social presence”, diminished social-context cues and restricted number of channels, particularly nonverbal modes of expression: e.g., we cannot see the facial expressions or body language of colleagues as we conduct discussions;

11. Collaborative Virtual Environments • Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are computer-enabled, distributed virtual spaces or places in which people can meet and interact with others, with agents and with virtual objects. • CVEs vary greatly in their representational richness from 3D virtual reality to 2D and even text based environments. The main applications to date have been military and industrial team training, collaborative design and engineering, and multiplayer games. • CVEs can help meet some of the communication requirements that have long been recognized as important to interactive discussion, particularly when negotiation is a key role and complex topics are being discussed.

12. Tools • If we focus on the usage and benefits rather than technical details of different online communication tools): • Forums are like social mixers, where everyone is at equal level, and content is usually segmented by topic. • Blogs are like a keynote speech where the speaker (blogger) is in control of the discussion, but allows questions and comments from the audience. Blogs are journals often authored by one individual, and sometimes teams. • Social Networks are like topic tables at a conference luncheon. These are great tools to get people of like interest to connect to each other and share information.

13. Tools • Every tool fulfills a different need. Therefore, before you jump to tools, you should first understand • who your community is, • where they are, • how they use social technologies, • what they’re talking about.

14. A classification of technologies • Multimedia applications: People see each other “through the technology.” • Examples: Media spaces, telephone, audio/video communication. • Virtual reality applications: People see each other “within the technology.” • Examples: CVE, buddy lists.

15. Multimedia Applications

16. Virtual Reality Applications

17. Classification of cooperation technologies Groupware (Ellis et al. 1991): computer-based systems that support groups of people engaged in a common task (or goal) and that provide an interface to a shared environment.

18. Classification of cooperation technologies • Common task: to what extent do participants focus on common task? • Common context: to what extent do they provide information about the participants, the current state of the project, and the social atmosphere? Synchronous document editing system Electronic Classroom system

19. An example of Electronic classroom From “teams educational resources”

20. Classification of cooperation technologies • Based on the notions of time and space • Meeting room technology (Same time and same places) • Physical bulletin board (different time and same places) • Real-time document editor (same time and different places) • E-mail (different time and places)

21. Application-level Taxonomy • Message Systems: asynchronous, e.g., email, bulletin board • Issue of “Information Overload” • Add “Intelligence” • Information Lens • Imail • Multi-user Editors: • Asynchronous: ForComment TM • Synchronous: Collaborative Editing System (CES), Shared Book, and Quilt. • Some multi-user editors provide explicit notification of other users‘ actions: Mercury • Group Decision Support systems and Electronic Meeting Rooms • Exploration of unstructured problems in a group settings • Assistance in alternative ranking and voting tools, Idea generation, Issue analysis • PlexCenter Planning and Decision Support Laboratory at the University of Arizona

22. Application-level Taxonomy • Computer Conferencing (computers serve as communication medium) • Real-time computer conferencing: collocated or distributed, audio only • Computer teleconferencing: Telecommunication support for group interaction (no exchange of text and images), examples are conference calls and videoconferencing. • Desktop conferencing: better than the above two, example is MMConf system • Coordination systems • View actions • Trigger actions

23. Facts about tools • Being together in time and space is essential for human-human communication and social behavior. • Most technological solutions support short-term preplanned interactions. • Communication technology should support continuous and long-term virtual presence/awareness

24. Limitations in Online Environments • The verbal message must be supplemented with a corresponding visual medium. • The presentation of subtle behaviors such as facial expressions and body language requires communication • media that are not bound by limitations of emotional expression. • Body gestures and posture can visually illustrate the ideas of a verbal message. Underlying an exchanged message may be an important emotional context that needs to be understood and communicated.

25. Limitations in Online Environments • This dual channel of verbal information and visual body language strengthens the understanding of the communication context. • Unfortunately, Most of the non-verbal cues that we take for granted in face-to-face communication simply do not exist in online communications: these include spatial orientation, body posture, hand gesture, glancing, and facial expression. Furthermore, users typically have a very limited awareness of others. • There is evidence of crude simulation of body language in today’s text-based CMC environments: for example, emotional icons are used extensively in chat rooms and newsgroup messages to give users the ability to express emotion. • As with body orientation, the direction of a person’s gaze displays a spatial focus of attention: it is used for initiating, maintaining, and ending a conversation.

26. Limitations in Online Environments • It is also used extensively in group conversations, which require non-verbal turn-taking cues. The social subtleties of gaze and eye contact require a strong degree of presence within an environment for them to work effectively.

27. Affordances of communication media (Kraut et al. 2002 ) • Different media/technologies provide different affordance or resources that shape communication.

28. Existing Known Collaborative Virtual Environments http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/courses/579-cve/cves.html