Last year in Florence   (I think it was) Stu Card asked:

“Are we even talking about the same thing?”   I’m still not sure

Experiential Sensemaking

Informational Sensemaking

Coherence, Engagement, and Usefulness as Sensemaking Criteria in Participatory Media Practice

Al Selvin * ** Simon Buckingham

Shum * * Knowledge Media Institute

Open University Milton Keynes, UK MK7 6AA

** Verizon Information Technology White Plains, NY USA 10604

Sensemaking Workshop, ACM CHI 2009 Conference, Boston

This talk describes…

  How the concepts of coherence, engagement, and usefulness…

  …can contribute to an understanding of practitioner sensemaking…

  …in the context of participatory media practice

Current PhD research at the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University UK (advisor: Simon Buckingham Shum)

Practitioner sensemaking

  A doctor gives a healthy patient their annual physical exam, and suddenly comes across a lump

  A guitarist in the middle of a jazz improvisation hears the drummer change to an unusual beat

An anomaly is encountered in the course of events, requiring action (often improvised) in response

  A teacher stands in front of a class, lecturing on a math problem, when a student asks an unexpected question

Participatory media Involving participants in the creation of media artifacts

Participatory media practitioner

  The person(s) orchestrating the participatory event, responsible for its success

  Concerned with the quality of the representation and the participants’ relationship to it

  Varying levels of intervention; not necessarily the ones with their hands on the equipment

Participatory hypermedia

Collaborative, real-time shaping of a hypermedia artifact

A framework for participatory hypermedia practice

Specific focus

  Practitioner moves and choices in participatory hypermedia sessions

  How these contribute to the ways in which participants engage with the media artifacts

  Special emphasis on the character of the real-time shaping of the representation

  Not focusing on whether the tool/approach “works”   Rather, what’s the human experience of trying to

make them work for participants

Setting

Workshops held at NASA Ames And Rutgers University in 2007

Participants and practitioners had varying levels of experience with the tools

Setting

Format for the workshops

  Small groups given a common task   Working from a prepared set of images,

construct a collaborative representational task for the large group

  Each group given 1 hour to plan a 15 minute session

  Large group sessions   Typically, one person would act as mapper

and one as facilitator   Each group took a different direction

Analytical tools

Shaping form

CEU analysis

Narrative description

Grid analysis

Framing analysis

Analytical tools

Shaping form

CEU analysis

Narrative description

Grid analysis

Framing analysis

Characterizing the representational character of the whole session

What kind of shaping took place?

Analytical tools

Shaping form

CEU analysis

Narrative description

Grid analysis

Framing analysis

Mapping the coherence, engagement, and usefulness dimensions of each timeslot to build up a signature for the session

Aids in identifying sensemaking episodes

Analytical tools

Shaping form

CEU analysis

Narrative description

Grid analysis

Framing analysis

Rich description of sensemaking episode

Analytical tools

Shaping form

CEU analysis

Narrative description

Grid analysis

Framing analysis

Characterizing the practitioner actions during the episode in aesthetic, ethical, and experiential terms (informed by theoretical framework)

Increasing theoretical sensitivity

The CEU criteria

  Coherence   keeping the hypermedia representation and participant

interactions understandable, clear, evocative, and organized

  Engagement   the relationship of participants to the artifact   looking at it, talking about it, referring to it, and involved in its

construction or reshaping

  Usefulness   the extent to which the representation appears to be adding

value for the participants and helping to fulfill the goals of the session

Absolute and relative timing (bottom two rows are timings from video recordings)

Narrative descriptions of the activities in each 30 second timeslot

Screenshots when display had changed significantly

Coherence descriptions for each timeslot Engagement descriptions Usefulness descriptions

CEU ratings for each timeslot Coherence

Engagement Usefulness

CEU grid

Comparing CEU across sessions

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ames Group 1 C E U

Ames Group 2 C E U 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ames Group 3 C E U

Ames Group 4 C E U 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Rutgers Group 1 C E U

Rutgers Group 2 C E U 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Low Medium High

Numeric rating Color

Numeric rating Color

Numeric rating Color

1 2 3

Ames Rutgers Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 1 Group 2

Coherence 2.2 1.5 2.3 2.7 3.0 2.9 Engagement 2.7 2.0 2.6 2.9 2.9 2.9 Usefulness 2.0 1.4 2.2 2.8 2.8 3.0 Overall 2.3 1.7 2.4 2.8 2.9 3.0

Good places to look for discontinuities & sensemaking moments

Good places to look at how (relative) equilibrium was fostered and maintained

What does this get us?   Insights into how shaping of participatory media

artifacts takes place, and the character of practitioner sensemaking in situ

  Working towards a methodology for characterizing the ethical dimensions of (participatory) media practice

  Development of practitioner education and improved software support

Making a complex phenomenon visible and fostering reflective practice

kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hyperdiscourse

compendium.open.ac.uk/institute knowledgeart.blogspot.com

This research is part of…