If anyone is still tuned in here, let me redirect you to my current web presence: http://www.multitalking.se.

All the best!
Therese

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.

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching a course in HUMlab on transcribing and analyzing video. The main focus of the course will be on Transana, and I will demonstrate how I’ve used this free software in my own transcription and analysis work and let the course participants try it out for themselves.

In Transana, as in most tools of this kind, transcription is done manually. I have been looking around for examples of software attempting to automatically transcribe sound files, but what I have found so far are tools used by one individual, training them to understand his or her speech. I suspect these existing tools would not be able to transcribe more complex interactions.

If anyone knows of tools with automatic transcription which might be able to handle more complex material, please let me know. Even if such tools would exist, of course one would have to go over the automatically generated transcripts in relation to the sound files manually anyway, both in order to check the transcription, and not least also in order to find the subtle nuances conveyed in extralinguistic cues. No matter how advanced technology might have become, I suspect the computer would not be able to detect these types of cues. Not yet anyway.

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!

For the fourth year in a row, I have today participated in Upptäcksfärden, a day during which Umeå University is invaded by school children of different ages. This year I did an updated version of the treasure hunt in “real” and “virtual” environments, and also had a chance to talk to the kids briefly about their experiences with online interaction. One boy strongly argued that it was easier to communicate online than in physical rooms, and whereas some said they thought it was possible to fall in love online, others thought it would be difficult. I really like these conversations, and each year I’m struck by how much these kids know about different online communities – it all seems very natural to them. Both kids and teachers were happy with the playful activities in the lab, and we, the instructors, very much enjoyed it too.

Jennie took some pictures during the day, which can be seen in the HUMlab blog.

For the seminar in HUMlab on virtuality that I gave last week, I did quite a bit of interesting reading. I wanted to find sources that question the virtual – real dichotomy, and there were two examples in the course literature of this. First, “‘This is not a game’: Immersive aesthetics and collective play” by Jane McGonigal deals with immersive gaming, in which the blurred line between virtuality and reality (or in this case maybe more game and reality) is discussed. Second, “The coming age of calm technology” by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown focusing on how technologies are increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives. Here, the concept of “calm technology” is introduced, a concept which is relevant in relation to my work on multi-tasking. Other useful sources for the seminar were the Terra Nova blog, and the Virtual worlds review.

As for the concept “virtual”, I know some people think that we should abandon it completely, since it has the connotations of denoting something which is less real. Personally, I think that we need to acknowledge that interaction in virtual environments is different and influenced by the affordances of the environment in question, but that is not to say that it’s less real. I quite like the way that Bruce Damer puts this in his book Avatars (p.xvii), so let me end this post with a quote: 

“One of the reasons I and many other people refer to this new medium as virtual worlds and not virtual reality is that the worlds we visit are virtual (they exist nowhere else but in cyberspace and in our minds) but we go there to meet and interact with real people. There is nothing virtual about the reality of your interactions and relationships with other people in these spaces. You can feel just as thrilled, offended, titillated, intrigued, or bewildered by your remote conversations in an avatar community as you do on the telephone.”

Tuesday next week I’ll be teaching a class in HUMlab on virtuality. I will introduce different examples of virtual environments and relevant research topics (for example identity, community, embodiment, communication, presence etc.), and initiate a discussion on the concept ‘virtual’. The students will also get to test some different platforms and engage in discussions online. One of the things I would like to bring up is the view that gender doesn’t matter in cyberspace, and counter this with the common request for information about ASL (Age/Sex/Location). Does anyone know of research dealing with this that I could refer to?

Stephanie has been working like crazy over the last week to prepare for moving the HUMlab blogs from Movable Type to Wordpress. Politely, she also suggested that this might be a good time for a template change (I’ve been using more or less the same template from the beginning) and she kindly volunteered to help me with this. Here’s the result now! I really like the new look of my blog, and especially the more personal banner. There are a few more things that need some tweaking (for example, some of my earlier posts have been drastically shortened), but so far, I’m very excited! Many thanks to Stephanie!

In the newsletter eLearning News there is a piece summarizing my thoughts concerning ICT and constructivist language learning, presented in my degree project for teacher’s education. There is an English version in the interaQtive blog. I’m glad to see that there is still some interest in the topics discussed in this not so recent paper!

Back from EUROCALL in Granada, I am now full of impressions from examples of the most recent advances in the area of Computer Assisted Language Learning. It was a real pleasure being involved in the EUROCALL 2006 blog, since we had a quite responsive crowd reading and commenting. Many of the discussions in the blog generated replies with good pointers which I will need to check out further. See, for example, posts and discussions concerning podcasting, multimodal challenges, moblogging and constructivist learning.

Since I was blogging, I tried to visit presentations on varied topics, but as always I ended up visiting quite a few within the CMC strand. The presentation by Breffni O’Rourke was especially useful in relation to my own research. He told us about his experiment with using eye-tracking equipment to get a better insight into where students focus their attention. In my multitasking pilot, I was only able to judge this by referring to highlighted window, and eye-tracking data would, as I noted in my article on the subject, be much more accurate. He made some good points about how output logs don’t give us all relevant information, and also showed how he could use the tracking to explain language learning behavior. This reminded me of the work of a previous colleague of mine, Eva Lindgren, who wrote her thesis on revisions in writing, using the method of keystroke logging.

I also tried to visit a few presentations on the topic of podcasting, since we’re looking into ways of incorporating this in our teaching at the department. Over lunch today I will get some more input regarding this, as I will be attending a lunch meeting arranged by the Center for Educational Technology on the topic. Should be interesting!