Introduction

IMD09120: Collaborative Media

Brian Davison 2011/12

Contents

• General introduction – main themes• Module overview• A little history• Short break• Social psychology• Statistical evaluation• Summary: Grudin’s 8 challenges

Introduction

• What are computers for?– Doing difficult maths– Communication

• Email: invented in 1971 - accounted for 75% of Internet traffic by 1973– Hobbes Internet timeline

• The main themes of this module are– Social psychology of cooperation– Computer Mediated Communications (CMC)– The evaluation of social systems using statistical methods

People

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/27/endangered.languages

• Social behaviour is an essential human characteristic• It is biologically based• Individuals have differences which affect social situations• Social situations influence individual behaviour

Technology

• Provides a medium for communication

• Can facilitate or be a barrier

• Can distract from the social behaviour itself

• Can generate new phenomena

www.officemuseum.com/communications_equipment.htm

PACT

• People

• Activities

• Contexts

• Technology

Planning, decision-making, problem-solving, team-working, developing, trading, negotiating, co-authoring,

discussing, critiquing, providing mutual support, maintaining a community

As a job, for fun, as part of a community, as a friend, as a

professional, as a parent, in an office, outdoors, at home, while travelling, in a

foreign country, in a competition

Is Collaborative Media all about HCI?• No

• HCI is about the individual’s communication with the system across the user interface

• CM is about the communications behaviour between people using the system as a channel

• The design of the interface is important, but not the main focus

Is CM all about social networking?

• No

• Social networking is an obvious example of a social phenomenon

• Not clear that collaboration is the central focus

Evaluation

• Not the same as testing

• Testing: Does it work?

• Evaluation: How well does it work?

Does it have the intended effect?

Which option is better?

Evaluation problems

• No hard and fast facts• Must be based on collected data• Often relies on pooled opinion• Statistical methods deal with variation

Statistics in this module

• Basic concepts• Different types of test• How to interpret statistical results• How to define an experiment• How to draw conclusions from the results

• Minimum maths• Maximum use of Excel functions

Module structure

• Lectures– Theoretical concepts

• Practicals– Statistics– Prototype building

• Tutorials– Group exercises– Discussions– Assessment preparation

Assessment

2 components:

1. Week 9: Critical assessment of an existing collaborative system and proposed redesign

2. Week14: Prototype of your redesign and evaluation using the instrument provided

• Note the timing: One week each

A little history1971: Email1973: Plato Notes1978: CBBS1984: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)1985: The WELL1988: Internet Relay Chat (IRC)1989: Lotus Notes1990: Mosaic Web browser1990: LambdaMOO1996: ICQ chat1997: Blogs1997: SixDegrees2003: MySpace2003: Second Life2006: Facebook

PLATO

• Education was one of the first beneficiaries of collaborative systems

Definition of CSCW“ … the design of computer-based technologies with explicit concern for the socially organised practices of their intended users.” (Suchman, 1989)

the study of work in situ which involves people

working cooperatively (i.e. not in parallel)

towards some common end or goal

using networked IT systems

Some basic vocabulary• Time

– Synchronous: working together at the same time

– Asynchronous: working together at different times

• Space– Co-located or face to face (f2f ): in the same physical space

– Remote: in different places

The place-time matrix

TimePlace Same Different

SameMeeting support

Design toolsEmail

Post-it notes

DifferentTeleconferencing

VideoconferencingInstant messaging

LettersEmail

Discussion forums

After Applegate, 1991

Technology

• There are two predominant metaphors– Shared information spaces

• Sites• Navigation• Pages• Go to...• Save...

– Conferencing• Conversation• Thread• Participate

Short break

Main themes

• The social psychology of cooperation

• Computer Mediated Communications (CMC)

• Statistical evaluation

Social psychology

SociologyCognitive

psychologySocial

psychology

Social thinking: How we perceive ourselves and others, our judgements,

beliefs and attitudes

Social influence: Cultural and social

pressures that affect our behaviour

Social relations: Prejudice, aggression,

attraction, helping, group identity

Studying cooperation

• Anthropological and naturalistic animal studies (especially in primatology)

• Experimental and social psychological• Mathematical• Explicit CSCW studies

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

A General Form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Strategies:• Cooperate• Defect

Payoffs

You

C D

MeC (3, 3) (0, 5)

D (5, 0) (1, 1)

Individual variation

• Personality preferences are one type of variation• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Extravert

Sensing

Thinking

Judging

Introvert

Intuitive

Feeling

Perceiving

Focus

Perception

Judgement

Strategy

E

S

T

J

I

N

F

P

Myers-Briggs types

ISTJ ISFJ INFJ INTJ

ISTP ISFP INFP INTP

ESTP ESFP ENFP ENTP

ESTJ ESFJ ENFJ ENTJ

Effects and biases

• Identified behaviours that are more or less predictable

• eg Spotlight effect

Common sense?

• Paul Lazarsfeld (1949) studied American WWII soldiers:– Better-educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems

ie – Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses

– Southern soldiers coped better in hot climates that Northerners

ie – Southerners were more accustomed to hot weather

– White privates were more eager for promotion than black privates

ie – Years of oppression had damaged achievement motivation

– Southern blacks preferred Southern to Northern white officers

ie – Southern officers were more accustomed to interacting with them

Hindsight bias

• I knew it all along...• That’s just common sense...• It’s obvious...

http://www.sigmaxi.org/resources/merchandise/harris.descriptions.shtml

Theory formulation

• You must try to discover the rule that connects the three numbers below.

• To work it out, you may propose different sets of three numbers, and I will tell you whether they obey the rule.

12 24 48

Confirmation bias

• The tendency to seek confirmatory evidence for one’s own belief

• This is natural – everyone does it

• This is one reason we need statistics

Statistics

• Allow us to draw objective conclusions based on the mathematical characteristics of populations and samples

• Population: whole group we are interested in

• Sample: a small number drawn from the population for testing

Samples and populations

General public

Students

UG students

Napier UG students

SoC UG students

IMD students

Year 3 IMD studentsYou

Is a high-cue environment more effective than low-cue for small

group decision making?

Distributions

Agreed measure of effectiveness

Number of scores

Central tendencyMean MedianMode

SpreadVarianceStandard deviation

Comparing distributions

Agreed measure of effectiveness

Number of scores

High-cueLow-cue

}?

Eight challenges for developers

• Jonathan Grudin wrote a seminal paper in 1994 on what the key issues are in designing for groupware

1. Disparity in work and benefit

2. Critical mass and the prisoner’s dilemma problems

3. Disruption of social processes

4. Exception handling

5. Unobstrusive accessibility

6. Difficulty of evaluation

7. Failure of intuition

8. The adoption process.

Six

Difficulty of evaluation– The almost insurmountable obstacles to meaningful, generalisable

analysis and evaluation of groupware prevent us from learning from experience

– Group applications necessarily must be evaluated from multiple perspectives

Seven

Failure of intuition– Intuition in product development environments is especially poor

for multi-user applications, resulting in bad management decisions and an error prone design process.

What’s next?

• Statistics tutorial• Personality typing

• Next week:– Social psychology– Statistics practical exercises– Group exercises – what is your Myers-Briggs type?