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.

A while back, my supervisor pointed me towards a post in Infocult on 3D vs. Video, relating to my research on communication in these types of environments as well as to previous posts here on the topic. Finally, I have now gotten around to check it out. In this post, Bryan refers to a list in the Oddcast blog giving the top 10 reasons why avatars are better than video representations, and presents some counter arguments. While I agree that there are some advantages with avatars over video (mainly relating to the relative anonymity of the avatars and the strong sense of co-presence in 3D), one of the claims on the list I would like to challenge is the first one:

1. Avatars are interactive. Video is a one way street–a broadcast medium. You can program an avatar to respond to different mouse clicks, for example, or control it in real time, like in Second Life. Try doing that with video.

To me, this is a question of what you use video for – video conferencing, for example, is very much about interaction and not about broadcasting at all. And not having to use mouse clicks, but instead being able to directly respond and give feedback via body language, could rather be seen as an advantage here… One thing I sometimes get annoyed with when using video, though, is that I can’t control the visual input on my screen in the same way as I can in a 3D environment. (I recall having mentioned this frustration earlier here in the blog… Ah, yes, here it is… ).

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.

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.

Over at Polyglot Conspiracy, Squires has commented on a recent article in Columbus Dispatch (link to article unfortunately appears to be broken) where it was argued that people communicating online don’t find this type of interaction less authentic than face-to-face interaction. As Squires points out, this comes as no surprise to some of us. The article also discussed how some feel much more at ease communicating via text than face-to-face, which is not very surprising either. My experience from working with voice-enabled 3D interaction is quite similar. Some of our students have reported on normally being shy, but have stepped up and taken on a very active role in the online discussions, where they have been able to hide behind the masks that the avatars provide.

Squires then raises a highly relevant question: does this ease of interaction online make it easier to communicate also offline? This is a tricky question, but at least when it comes to language learning, I think much is gained. By taking a more active part in the language learning situation, you get to practice speaking in the target language more than you would in a traditional classroom, and hopefully you should also feel more comfortable speaking it in other contexts as well.

Doctoral students working with multimodal interaction and embodiment will be interested to learn about the recently initiated Nordic network PlaceME (well, considering the long list of members, it appears as if a lot of people have learnt about it already…). On the website you will find facts about the network, but also reading tips and information about planned workshops where successful applicants receive grants covering travel expenses and full accomodation. I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops!

(Thanks to Elina and Leena in the MAILL project who informed me about the network at EUROCALL).