I have now posted the article I presented at HICSS on my “Papers” page. You should be able to access all articles from the conference from the IEEE digital library.

Back to work again… I’m reading Kaptelinin and Nardi’s Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, and am trying to figure out how this approach fits (or doesn’t fit) in my theoretical framework. Considering that both the concept of affordances and Activity Theory focus on situated action and attempt to cut across the subject – object dichotomy, there seems to be some correspondence between the approaches.

The authors also explicitly compare the two and argue that there are many similarities between Activity Theory and Gibson’s notion of affordances, where affordances are not separated from perception, experiences and culture (as they are in some more recent accounts). A difference concerns the fact that affordances only deal with action possibilities on the operational level, but the authors point out that the notion could be expanded to include also other levels of human activity.

More food for thought is provided in the discussions concerning what is referred to as the “antitheoretical” stance of ethnomethodology. I definitely need to read and think more about this.

Polyglot Conspiracy has tagged me to do a meme to reveal some facts about the person behind this blog. I always hesitate to participate in these things, finding it difficult enough to balance between work-related and personal in my regular posts, but since it’s mainly been work lately, I thought I would treat you to some juicy facts:

1. When it comes to board games, I can be an extremely bad loser and an even worse winner. Unfortunately, these are qualities that I share with my husband.
2. My favourite night of the week is Tuesday, since then I get to sing bass (!) in my wonderful Barbershop choir. (Only 2 hours to go!).
3. I find packing to be one of the most stressful activities imaginable, and can be a real pain to those around me the day before I go somewhere (and yes, packing is always postponed for as long as possible, which might have something to do with it). I have recurring nightmares on this topic. (Wonder what Freud would have to say about this?)
4. At a much too young age to even be driving snow mobiles I accidentally crashed one into our neighbours’ fence. Much to the excitement of the two guys my age that lived there, I might add. This tragic event haunted me throughout my school years.
5. I “get bele”, as you would say in some Pidgins and Creoles… Can hardly wait until May

So there you go. I won’t tag, but feel free to put yourself out there if you want to!

My presentation in the PC Minitrack was in a section on Conversation at Work, where all papers dealt with multitasking in one way or another. For example, Peter Scupelli presented an experimental study where it was investigated how interactional behaviour changed when using a modified version of IM with more awareness cues added (PVIM). What they found was that increased awareness of other participants’ task-related activities made work processes more effective in that participants more easily could focus on the task. The question of awareness is a relevant issue also in my research. For example, the design considerations that my study has resulted in suggest that the individual involved in conversational multitasking should have the opportunity to set the level of intrusiveness for different types of communicative alerts, and, importantly, the other interlocutors should be made aware of his/her chosen settings. This would give them an indication as to how soon a reply could be expected.

Another presentation dealing with awareness strategies was given by Tony Bergstrom and focused on the “conversational clock“. This is an innovative solution where participants in face-to-face conversation can see their participation visualized in real-time in the shape of a clock on the table in front of them. This presentation caused much discussion concerning practical applications. As the results showed, people preferred looking at each other over staring at the table in front of them… Further, it was discussed what the effects might be of receiving this type of information. Will it make participants more hesitant to speak and conversations more stilted?

From a language learning perspective, I have found the visualizations provided by the FlashMeeting videoconferencing platform quite intriguing. They clearly show participation rates, and who is contributing the most in the different modes. I have considered showing the visualizations to the students to make them aware of this – active participation is after all a prerequisite for language learning – but so far I have hesitated to do so. Maybe I should give it a try?

One thing which was striking in the presentations of the Persistent Conversations minitrack at HICSS was the wide variety of types of materials analyzed. For example, some presentations dealt with oral conversations, others with IM or blogs, and yet others with images. This led to some constructive discussions on definitions, theories and methodologies. Stephanie Woerner, in her presentation on conversations in IM, defined a conversation as a sequence of messages in which no two messages are separated by more than 5 minutes” (Isaacs et al. “The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace”). In asynchronous media, this is of course far from true, but pauses in conversation may be longer than this also when using synchronous media such as IM. If I had used this definition in my analysis of conversational multitasking, some of the replies would have appeared too late to count as part of the conversation, whereas an analysis of their content reveals that they certainly should be included.

On a similar note, I think that we might have to re-evaluate the notion of conversational coherence. An often cited source at the conference was Susan Herrings article on “Interactional Coherence in CMC“. Here, it is stated that the two main obstacles with text-based chat reported in the research on CMC are lack of simultaneous feedback and disrupted turn adjacency. I am not so sure that either of these is really considered a problem if you ask people who have some experience with text chat; they know about the conventions that apply and how to deal with the fact that CMC is not like f2f interaction. However, if working with technologies that depend on sequentially structured turn-taking, such as audio software, this is all the more relevant. Also, Herring actually notes that the incoherence in text-based CMC might be one of the reasons why it is so popular – this component of her article was not referred to at the conference, though.

(Some of the papers mentioned here can be accessed from http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC_History.html.)

I’m now back from the HICSS conference and will try to summarize some of my impressions in the next couple of posts. This conference covers a wide span of topics, ranging from E-Government and Digital Economy to Knowledge Management. The minitrack in which I presented myself, “Persistent Conversation”, provided many interesting presentations, and I would like to mention a few here. Fernanda Viegas won the best paper award for her presentation on Wikipedia, where she and her colleagues have looked at the development of Wikipedia over the last few years with a special focus on whether anarchistic or collaborative strategies seem to be steering the development. They found that the collaborative features seem to prevail, and analyzed the “Talk” pages associated with each Wikipedia entry as an example of this. Another presentation which I found very interesting was Johann Sarmiento’s, in which collaborative learning in the VMT concert chat system was discussed (this was the system we discussed during the workshop too). Here, the notion of “bridging” was introduced to refer to the strategies that students employed to create coherence between the different modes of the platform as well as between different episodes of interaction.

The track dealing with “Collaboration Systems” also fit well with my research. Here I found relevant presentations in minitracks such as “Virtual work, teams and organizations”, “Advances in teaching and learning technologies” and “Cross-cultural issues in collaboration technology”. For instance, Daphne Dekker presented results from a study where informants were asked to exemplify effective and ineffective strategies used in virtual team work. The behaviours they found were divided into 11 categories, such as “active participation” and “pro-social behaviour”, and can be used to increase effectiveness in online collaboration.

I also attended some presentations in the “Virtual Communities” minitrack, where the topic of building trust online was discussed. For example, Cristen Torrey and colleagues had conducted a study of online coordination of aid to the victims of the Katrina hurricane, and found that small blog communities developed trust more rapidly than large forums, but also did not last as long.

More examples of presentations will follow in the next few posts here as well as in the HUMlab blog.