My friends and colleagues from Oslo, Kathryn Hermansen and Ninian Millar, have recently launched a resource page for creating dialogue in the online classroom, including, for example, useful ideas concerning how to create nearness among distance students and information about different tools. They have also linked a blog to their site in order to encourage dialogue among the readers. Do check this out!
Here is a link to the archived version of my seminar stream from Tuesday.
Let me take this opportunity to make a clarification as well:
In a reply to one of the questions after the presentation, I refer to a workplace study by Gonzalez and Mark and I state that their findings suggest that their informants spend over 10 minutes on each task before switching. Actually, what I was thinking of was their claim that each informant spends an average of 11 minutes and 28 seconds in each “working sphere” before moving on to the next. The figures concerning how much time is spent with each device or paper before switching are lower, 2 minutes and 11 seconds, but still nowhere close to the 26 seconds which my informant on average spent in each window before switching. However, my informant does claim that her multitasking here is more similar to her behaviour at home than how she would normally behave at work.
Other articles I refer to in the presentation include these:
Rubenstein, Meyer, Evans (2001)
Rose and Hunton (2006)
Baron (2006)
Isaacs et al. (2002)
Dresner (2005)
Some of these I have already commented on earlier (for example here and here), and the others I plan to discuss further here in the blog sometime in the future.
Oh, and one more thing… One of the students with whom I discussed multitasking and learning after the seminar has initated a discussion on the topic in her blog. Interesting (and in Swedish)…
Today’s seminar went quite well, and I got some good feedback afterwards. I also know that at least 5 people were following the live stream, and even more will be able to watch and comment once the seminar has been archived (link will be posted here later), so I hope to receive some more feedback also from these people.
One of the discussions after the seminar related to the effects of multitasking on learning. Two of the participants came up to me and we had a chat about what this behaviour might lead to in the long run. I pointed out that my research is not about judging how multitasking affects productivity and learning, which explains my perhaps somewhat uncritical position in the presentation. However, I do think we should take studies like this one seriously and consider how we might best foster deep level learning in a context filled with interruptions, and how we can motivate students to take on bigger tasks which do not offer external stimuli all the time. For example, we should be able to demand from our students that they read full-length books, and not only excerpts.
Nevertheless, I also think we need to accept the fact that this is the reality which surrounds many of our students today… Maybe we could try to find ways of making use of their ability to multitask in class? One example which I came to think of during our discussion concerns the use of multimodal interfaces, which for instance can be used in distance learning, where you have access to video, audio, shared text chat, shared whiteboard etc. These platforms have some important advantages in educational settings, in that, for example, they allow students to contribute to discussions via the mode with which they feel most comfortable, thus supporting more equal participation patterns than if only using one mode. Being used to multitasking will certainly be an advantage when working with these types of tools, since it will make it easier to keep track of all the different simultaneous activities.
In about 15 minutes I will speak about conversational multitasking in HUMlab. You can access the live stream from here, and participate in a real-time chat here. Hope to see you around!
Via Nancy White I found this wiki page developed by Howard Rheingold with colleagues, listing different backchannel resources. Quite an interesting read! For my specific purposes, especially the resources concerning continuous partial attention are useful. According to Linda Stone, there is a difference between this phenomenon and multitasking.
The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. […] To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.
Quote from http://continuouspartialattention.jot.com/WikiHome.
Stone has a good point when arguing that there is a shift in motivating forces, but I don’t really see why we still couldn’t refer to both phenomena as multitasking. Especially when considering that multitasking is often used to refer to juggling between different activities rather than simultaneous processing proper.
In my seminar on Tuesday, I will briefly touch on the topic of how my research might be used to inform interaction design. I have found quite a few workplace studies using a similar approach to mine, including considerations for design and thus illustrating how ethnography can be used as a design tool.
One example of ethnography informing design can be found in this study by Victor Gonzalez and Gloria Mark from 2004, where 14 people were observed during three days each in order to gain an understanding of the different activities they engaged in while working. Here, the reporting of results is complemented by a section with implications for design, which follows quite naturally from the findings. One of the aspects in focus in the study was the strategies people used for maintaining continuity when switching among activities, and the researchers found that many relied on different artefacts, such as post-its, planners or piles of printed email. The authors then use their new knowledge to suggest improvements in these types of tools.
For some more thoughts on the role of ethnography in design, see my recent post in the HUMlab blog.
In preparation for my seminar in HUMlab on Tuesday on “Conversational implications of multitasking” I find myself in the middle of my own multitasking madness. While preparing the general setup of the seminar, I also read related literature (very interesting – will return to this in later posts), correct student assignments for our web based course, constantly check email, search for other relevant articles on the topic, plan my future study, (try to) draw an interface sketch based on my design suggestions etc. And on top of it all, I can’t keep myself from blogging…
Most of the literature that I have found on the topic of multitasking so far comes to the conclusion that it is counter-productive. It would be interesting to find research or discussions arguing the opposite, so if you have some suggestions, please let me know!
Anyone interested in the topic is more than welcome to join the seminar on Tuesday, November 21 at 1.15 pm CET, either in HUMlab or online. You can read my abstract in the extended entry.
It appears as if the timing is right for my research on conversational multitasking:
That seamless integration of communication whether it be text message or email or IM or voice, that’s what we are getting excited about right now. The ability to cross these communications channels, we know that is going to be fundamentally important. We call it infopresence – the merging of web presence and telepresence. It is the single most important thing that is going to happen in the telecommunications field in the next 12 months.
Quote from an interview with Mahesh Paolini-Subramania, CTO of Aptela, in VoIP News. The interview also includes some “new” definitions concerning presence, which are worth having a look at.
(Via the PRESENCE-list)
Via the PRESENCE-list, I’ve found the blog of John Udell at InfoWorld, who writes about a number of timely topics. What I find most interesting are Udell’s discussions about telepresence in 3D and video conferencing. For example, he reports from a meeting in Second Life in which he took part (and even includes a screen cast from the event – interesting to look at, but the ethical implications of such a distribution would keep me from doing the same thing – unless, of course, those taking part in the event have given their consent to have the meeting recorded and distributed – or do you simply have to count on this, since there is a built in recording function in the program?). Here, he mentions how he felt that the discussion in the meeting didn’t feel productive because of the lack of “a synchronous voice channel, real identities, and sufficient emotional bandwidth”, and claims that we’ll have to search thoroughly to find the non-gratuitous uses of 3D for social interaction.
Another piece concerns simulation and embodiment in virtual environments, and whether embodiment adds any values from a communications perspective. I would certainly argue that it does, not least when it comes to conversational management, but oftentimes the pre-programmed communicative expressions of avatars could be adapted to better fit a regular communicative situation. Here, Udell also refers to a column he’s written, where he reminds us of the power of low bandwidth media, pointing out that minimalist modes such as “e-mail, chat, blogs, and wikis” still capture our attention to a great extent. He claims that the key is that social interaction can take place in any mode. This is a very good point, I think, as it shows how media richness is not necessarily the key to efficiency in communications media. Rather, different media are more or less well suited in different contexts, and different combinations of modes have different affordances.
The piece reported on in the PRESENCE-list was this one, discussing /the lack of/ “emotionally effective telepresence” in video conferencing, and whether there is a “minimum framerate threshold”. In a comment to this post, Don Park refers to an interesting solution, “cinematic videoconferencing”, where the technology is able to zoom in on changed facial expressions among participants to ensure that these subtle cues are not missed.
All in all – a thought-provoking blog which I will have to keep an eye on.
