Vandaag

1. Vandaag • College 2 • Werkcollege • Samenvatting: Dix 14 • Toelichting: Opdracht 2

2. College 2: Communication, Tasks & Channels of communication Dr. Mari Carmen Puerta Melguizo

3. Overview: A bit about… • The communication process • Text-based communication • Tasks

4. Designing for collaboration and communication • Supporting people to • talk and socialise • work together • play and learn together… • We need to understand normal human communication • Various mechanisms and ‘rules’ we follow to hold a conversation • Social and Communication norms are mainly implicit • Success with new media often depends on whether users can use existing communication norms

5. Communication: some characteristics • Dynamic and transactional • Transaction between people • Meaning depends on context… • Multifunctional • Interactional or relationship-focused • Influence people’s behavior or attitudes, seduce people… • collaboration • Informational or content-focused • To seek information, to inform people… • Multimodal • Verbal • Non-verbal

6. Channels of communication Means by which the message is transmitted (Thurlow et al, 2005) Wood & Smith (2001) • immediate communication: process where messages are transmitted without the aid of technology • Human communication, social interaction… • mediated communication: process where communicators are separated by some technology • Computer mediated communication

7. Computer Mediated Communication channels • Text • Reading and writing • Image • Video communication • Sound • Voice communication • Multimodality • E.g. visual and video chat, webcams, virtual reality gaming…

8. Tasks • Gathering information in internet • making more information available to more people • some sources • mailing lists • Newsgroups • Online news sources • Electronic journals, books and reports • Reports by major international, government, and professional organizations • Commercial internet research sources • assessing information online • Group working • E.g. collaborative writing

9. Overview: A bit about… • The communication process • Channels of communication • Tasks

10. A bit about Human communication

11. Basic model of communication context sender receiver channel

12. Face-to-face communication • Studying the basic conversational structure and theories of conversation • Analyzing transcripts: how are participants coping with electronic communication? • To guide design decisions: understanding human conversation can help avoid problems in the design of CMC • Social mechanisms in face-to-face communication (Preece et al, 2002) • Conversational mechanisms • To facilitate the flow of talk • Coordination mechanisms • To allow people to interact, collaborate and work together • Schedules, rules and conventions, Shared external representations (E.g. shared calendars) • Awareness mechanisms • To find out what is happening, what others are doing and to let others to know what is happening • Peripheral awareness: keeping an eye on things happening in the periphery of vision • Overhearing and overseeing

13. Conversational mechanisms • Speaking and listening • Turn-taking: sequence of utterances • Body language • Eye contact and gaze • To convey interest and establish social presence, authority • Establishing the focus of conversation (e.g. Where does this screw go?)... • Personal space • When we converse we tend to stand our heads a constant distance apart • Depends on context, culture: problems in cross-cultural meetings… • Gestures and body language • We move our hands: e.g. Let’s move this one here deictic reference • Video connections may not be sufficient to allow others to read our movements • Several Groupware systems try to solve the problem: e.g. Group pointer • Back channels to signal to continue and following, confirmation and interruption • Nods, uh huh… • Text-based communication usually has not back channels • implicit and explicit cues • e.g. looking at watch, fidgeting with coat and bags • explicitly saying “Oh dear, must go, look at the time, I’m late… These clues are lost if there is not visual contact!!! Even with video conferencing there are problems!

14. Conversational analysis A transcript of a conversation A: do you fancy that film? B: the uh (500 ms) with the wizards at school - “Harry... whatsit”? A: Yeah, it starts at uh... (looks at watch - 1.2 s)... 8? B: Fine • Turn-taking: A-B • Utterance: speech within each turn • Adjacency pairs: answer-response, statement-agreement… • Can be classified according to their relation to the task in hand • Substantive: directly relevant to the development of the topic • Annotative: points of clarification, elaborations... • Procedural: talking about the process of collaboration and communication • Procedural technological: Utterances about the technology supporting the collaboration. Usually in response to a breakdown where the technology has intruded into the communication • Context: To disambiguate utterances • Internal context: dependence on earlier utterances • External context: dependence on the environment, topic and focus • Breakdown and repair • When someone says something that is misunderstood • Speaker will repeat with emphasis: A: “this one?” B: “no, I meant that one!” • Also use tokens: Eh? Huh? What? • Important to analyze them in order to see whether they are due to the electronic medium • They often reduce redundancy (a single channel) reducing the ability to recover from breakdowns

15. Grounding: Constructing shared understanding Human conversation is inherently ambiguous and relies on context and shared understanding to disambiguate utterances • Speakers try to obtain a common ground: process of grounding • Negotiating the meaning of words • Constructing sharing interpretation of the world which is sufficient for the task • Common ground is dynamic and partial, and thus any utterance may have a different meaning for the speaker and the listener • We try our utterances are • Relevant to the topic • Helpful and unambiguous to the listener • We try to establish that what has been said was understood • Negative evidence • Positive evidence: acknowledges, relevant next turn, continued attention

16. Factors that affect the grounding process (Clark & Brennan, 1991) • Grounding changes with communication purpose • Grounding references: • Focus of the conversation are objects and their identities • Interest is to establish referential identity • Techniques • Alternative descriptions • Indicative gestures • Referential installments • Trial references • Grounding verbatim content • Remembering verbal information (e.g. Telephone number) • Techniques • Verbatim displays • Installments and chunking • Spelling • Grounding changes with the medium • Constrains on grounding • Co-presence, visibility, audibility, contemporarily, simultaneity, sequentiality, reviewality, revisability... • Costs of grounding • Formulation costs, production costs, delay costs...

17. Speech act theory • Pragmatic theory to explain how language is used by people every day to achieve their goals and intentions • Used as a technique for conversational analysis • Speech Acts: • “Locutionary act: speech act of generating sounds that are linked together by grammatical conventions so as to say something meaningful. • Among speakers of English, for example, ‘It is raining’ performs the locutionary act of saying that it is raining, as ‘Grablistrod zetagflx dapu’ would not.” • “Illocutionary act: speech act of doing something (offering advice, giving an order…) • “Perlocutionary act: speech act with an effect on those who hear the utterance • By telling a ghost story late at night, for example, one may accomplish the cruel perlocutionary act of frightening a child.” • Speech Acts by function • representatives: aim to describe a state of affairs in the world and can be judged true or false e.g. ‘It is raining’ • directives: attempts to get the hearer to do something e.g., ‘please make the tea’ • commisives: commit the speaker to doing something, e.g., ‘I promise to… ’ • expressives: whereby a speaker expresses a mental state, e.g., ‘thank you!’ • declarations: attempt to change the world by “representing it as having been changed”e.g. as declaring war or christening

18. Conversation types • Types of generic conversation • For action • They are the central coordinating structure for human organizations (Winograd, 1988): collaboration & coordination • For clarification • For possibilities • For orientation: shared understanding • The structure of conversations can be formally described • Describe possible sequences of dialogue acts and their interplay in progressive dialogue states • They can be represented using state diagrams

19. Conversation for action There you are Do you have a pencil? sure Thank you! A: decline A: request B: promise B: assert A: declare 1 2 3 4 5 States of conversation Speech acts Completion nodes WF86, pg.64 -The basic "Conversation for Action"

20. Coordinator • Structured email system designed according to speech act theory • Conversation for action structure • For interoffice communication about commitments, scheduling… • " People in an organization issue utterances, by speaking or writing, to develop the conversations required in the organizational network." • Commitments are tracked. Conflict notification and reminders provided • Provides a method for filtering and visualizing status of current ongoing conversations

21. Coordinator: implementation Converse Menu • User specifies which linguistic action each message serves • Request, Offer, Commit, Promise, Counter-offer, Decline… • User specifies a time frame where appropriate • Respond-by date, Complete-by date, alert date… • Messages can be filled with default text • "I promise to do your request • Time-frames allow the Coordinator to track potential breakdowns and integration with personal calendar • Conversations can be retrieved by either status (conversational state) and/or time-frame Menu generated for responding to a request

22. Coordinator • By teaching people to recognize speech acts, communication improves • They can simplify their dealings with others, reduce time and effort spent in conversations that do not result in action, and generally manage actions in a less panicked, confused atmosphere • Is at least a good tool for training communication skills • In 1986, a six month study was done with Pacific Bell • no one used the system!!! • Many subjects claimed that the system was fine, but that there was too much structure, and not enough flexibility. • The system has been redesigned to allow more flexibility, but has not yet been widely accepted.

23. Overview: A bit about… • The communication process • Text-mediated communication • Tasks

24. Text-basedcommunication • The major form of CMC is text based • Acts as a speech substitute in most groupware systems • Do the same conversational rules apply? • E.g. are there more breakdowns? • How do people repair them while using E-mail? Instant messaging? SMS text? • Types of text-based communication • Discrete: no explicit connection between messages • Linear: messages added in (usually) temporal order • Non-linear: messages linked as hypertext • Spatial: messages arranged in 2D

25. Some differences between face-to-face and text-based communication • Back channels • much of the coordination in face-to-face communication depends on them • Affective state • Emotion, tone of voice, body language, illocutionary force of the message • Emoticons

26. Some differences between face-to-face and text-based communication • Grounding process’ factors • Purpose of the communication • Channels of communication • Grounding constrains: remember some • Contemporarily: receiving the message immediately • Simultaneity: participants can send and receive at the same time • Sequence: utterances are ordered • The lack of grounding constraints in text-based communication makes it more difficult to obtain common ground and solve conflicts • Pace rate, turn-taking...

27. Overview: A bit about… • The communication process • Text-mediated communication • Tasks

28. Computer support for collaborative writing • The most successful tool to support complex tasks are those that fit in with the user’s normal pattern of work (Norman, 1986) • Task model of the collaborative writing process • Task issues: strategies used for partitioning and coordinating the work • Group issues: roles, interdependence, management of conflict… • Communication issues: structuring and effects of different media of communication • External representation issues: types (notes, drafts…) and constrains

29. Writing process • Open-ended task: no fixed goal • Under-constrained • Processes • Planning and organizing information • Translation: turning ideas into text • Reviewing: evaluating and editing • Users can have different writing strategies

30. Collaborative Writing process Even more complex!!! • Establish shared understanding of the task • Express, share and discuss ideas and attitudes towards the document to other members • Negotiate, solve conflicts… • Roles • Activities • Brainstorm, initial plan, write, control changes, editing... • Some are performed by more than one role • Writing strategies and Document control methods

31. Roles • Writer, consultant, editor, reviewer... • To develop software that allows participants to take on defined roles to make their tasks and responsibilities clearer • Substitutability and interdependence between group members • Assessment of contribution of each individual to the shared goals • Finding appropriate ways to divide the tasks • Satisfying members • Maximizing productivity • Changing of roles and relationships during task accomplishment • E.g. Author, co-author and commentator change during document creation • E.g. Quilt system takes role changing into account • Group structure and membership • New members have to adapt and ‘catch up’ previous knowledge • E.g. Argumentation tools help to record group history • Subgroups • Systems to let them work independently • And to share results • Management of conflict • Can be implicit in the emerging document (e.g. Inconsistencies between sections): system to extract automatically conflicts embedded in the document and present them to co-authors for discussion and resolution

32. Writing strategies and document control methods • Strategies for partitioning and coordination • Parallel working • Subtasks • Parts of the document • Parallel jobs: spelling, refs… • Collaborators work simultaneously • Sequential working • Division of tasks • Output from one stage is passed to the next writer • Reciprocal working • Work together

33. Some design requirements (Posner & Baeker, 1992) • Preserve collaborator identities and make roles explicit • Support communication among collaborators • Support writing activities and provide smooth transitions between activities • Provide access to relevant information • Make plans explicit • Provide version control mechanisms • Support concurrent and sequential document access • Support separate document segments • Support several writers • Support synchronous and asynchronous writing

34. Opdracht 2

35. Goal and task description • Analyzing Computer mediated dialogs using grounding techniques (Clark & Brennan, 1991) • Select two texts: • Text-based communication from asynchronous system • E.g. Bulleting boars, email... • At least 4 utterances (5-15 lines) • Interesting serious topic AND • Text-based communication from synchronous system • E.g. Chat • At least 10 utterances • Interesting serious topic • Analyze them according to the grounding techniques uses and evidences • What can you say about differences costs between the two types of systems? • Relating to Constrains on grounding and to Costs of grounding