David Katjang
Info 608
Final Reflection Paper
The interaction of users and computers is very complicated and can be difficult to understand. We as normal everyday users looking from the outside are not concerned with the science and art behind interaction design, but whether it works the way we want and anticipate it to. Using the Virtual Math Team (VMT) as a collaborative environment an entire quarter was spent learning, designing, discussing, and using interaction design. INFO 608, Human Computer Interaction, as a course has been very instrumental in the advancement of my knowledge in the field of Interaction design, collaboration and group cognition.
The beginning of the course there was some confusion, including receiving the wrong textbook from the bookstore. This set myself slightly back and caused me to play catch up in the readings later on. There was also some confusion as to what constituted week one, this was clarified with all members of the first group meeting by looking at the detailed due date in the syllabus. Getting these clarified and taken care of we proceeded on with the VMT system.
It took a short while to become accustomed to the VMT interface. The chat interface’s basic concepts were easily learned as it replicated other similar systems such as AIM or MSN messenger, thus showing the learnability of the system. The advanced referencing features of it took a little time to learn to use. Being the normal user that I am I neglected to look for a help or a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section. I was determined to figure things out for myself. Some of the features actually took others to help figuring out such as dereferencing an object. There were some frustrations with the using the textboxes in the VMT including parts were entire paragraphs were lost and not recoverable. This attested to some problems with Safety in the design of VMT. There should be some though to protecting the user from undesirable situation such as accidental deletion of data. The efficiency of the system once learned was good as were able to learn to work around some of the issues with safety (by copying to a word doc first). It proved to be a very effective tool in collaborating as group together. Learnability, safety, utility, memorability, efficiency, and effectiveness all make up usability goals criteria learned in the first chapter of the text, and applied to our initial evaluation of VMT (Sharp, Rogers and Preece).
Looking back at our design for the Koi resort for week one, there are probably many things we would go back and change. This would be an interesting project for one of the later weeks in future course. Just looking at our first design we would be able to make changes by applying a heuristic evaluation of our Koi resort device. To go back and apply what students have learned to their first design and see what they come up with and what realizations they make on what they learned in the weeks between.
The first group reading article was an intriguing critique of current school building and its arguments for knowledge building communities was a fascinating eye opener (Scardamalia and Bereiter). The classical directed learning methods used in most schools today are outdated and dysfunctional. Its main viewpoint is repeating methods through memorization and application. It only lightly focuses on group collaboration and cognition. This criticism is carried over and fleshed out in the second paper whose discussions on the differences between constructivism and behaviorist theory I can see in the class rooms I grew up in. The behavior theory seemed to dominate mandatory school levels (K-12) in which one method of training can be applied by all students. The classroom was built for this type of learning with all students facing the teacher who provides the methods for them. This type of learning was excellent in the past where repetitious factory or farm work was the norm. Learning one method and applying it over and over was how people worked back then. Times have changed drastically as we live in a more dynamic and ever changing environment that spans the globe.
Constructivism theory holds that students tackle problems in their environment with “conceptual frameworks” (Stahl, Sumner and Owen, Share Globally, Adapt Locally: Software Assistance to Locate and Tailor Curriculum Posted to the Internet). In lower level college courses behaviorist theory seems to prevail as classes are large and it is easier for teaching staff to provide one method of learning. As classes become more specialized in upper levels they become smaller and I could see more and more constructivism type learning going on. This was in the form of group project work that included a set goal at the end and the capability for students to adapt what they were learning to achieve an objective. Moving this on down to the lower levels to include the required educational stages will require a large change in the way educators view their work. It will also take large amounts of resources as it is increasingly difficult to provide a constructivism approach to education in larger groups. Constructivism has many more advantages and has proven itself a better form of learning than behaviorism especially in today’s society, its main disadvantage though is its lack of scalability.
The social network aspect of Web 2.0 was a fascinating subject. Having experienced this first hand with sites such as YouTube and MySpace, I did not even realize there was a view of the web as a platform to harness a collective intelligence (O'Reilly). Using Tim O’Reilly’s original definition we can see how it pertains to the web of today and how it can be related to collaboration environments such as VMT.
The history behind VMT was discussed in great detail during the course of the quarter. From a relatively crude use of off the shelf chat software VMT has evolved into a collaborative environment that greatly helped us to achieve group cognition within our sessions. Though originally designed for math students solving a “problem of the week”, many of the necessary tools for any kind of group teamwork can be leveraged on other users (Stahl). As with any system in a development lifecycle VMT is evolving the addition of tabbed browsing windows in the latter part of the quarter was a boon for groups. Now we were able to expand our white board space over multiple pages. Previously we were forced to delete previous finished parts to make room for new work. This prevented us from maintaining persistent workspace which is one of the key mechanisms tying the workspace and chat environments (Stahl and Mühlpfordt).
We were more than happy throughout the quarter to provide feedback on the VMT interface. At some points it may have seemed to be excessive complaining, but each feedback also contained ideas on how to “fix” the issue. An interesting note is that in an online environment it was easier to voice your opinion on the issues dealing with the workspace. In a classroom environment students are less likely to be as vocal when expressing their opinions on the environment. For example though the chairs and desks were very small in most college classes I attended there were little said from students about this and other issues with that crop up in a public university. Due to the faceless nature of the Internet it provides an environment where students are more likely to speak up which is in fact a very positive attribute.
The paper, Groupware Goes to School: Adapting BSCW to the Classroom (G. Stahl, Groupware Goes to School: Adapting BSCW to the Classroom) brought a new collaborative environment to light, Synergeia. The most fascinating factor of Synergeia was its extensive support of asynchronous communication. Internet courses provide a virtual space for users to work and collaborate. These users can be geographically separated by thousands of miles which bring in a negative factor, time zone differences. Attending classes from literally the other side of the country had some difficulties in coordination. Having a very supportive crew and manager I was able to leave work early to attend classes within a reasonable time for the other students, the majority of whom lived on the east coast. A strong asynchronous learning environment has the advantage of dissipating the differences in time that geographic separation brings. On the other hand synchronous learning spaces also have distinct advantages over an asynchronous tool to the dismay of the geographically challenged.
There are several advantages to using a synchronous learning tool such as chats and workspaces. Instant clarification when referencing objects in a separate interaction space can reduce confusion during collaboration. The instant feedback associated with synchronous tools can decrease the time it takes between initial greeting, introducing subject matter, and actually attaining group cognition to build on ideas and information. Advanced forms of synchronous tools such as video chat are not yet adapted by the mainstream. Their main disadvantage is the high bandwidth use of video which can create poor quality images that can cause frustration (Sharp, Rogers and Preece). Video chat is just one distant view of what collaborative environments may hold. Other views include 3D avatars, holographic images, and smart agents. All of these are different views of what Web 3.0 and beyond may look like.
My mid-term paper dealt with the evolution of VMT in incremental steps. One of the issues touched upon that is very important in any design is security. Safety in interaction design is a fundamental part of any design. Today’s world it’s even more important to regard safety in security. News headlines are strewn with stories of companies losing personal data. Protecting the user from unsafe events such as losing personal data is important as many designs use an underlying median such as the internet for communicating, collaborating, and other features. I touched on this when I first noticed that we were connecting to and using the VMT with the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) in which any data sent from us to the system and vice versa is in clear text over the Internet. The Internet itself was not designed with the personal user in mind when it started out as a U.S. Defense project. With the underlying median as insecure as a building with open doors it is up to each system to secure itself similar to individual offices in the building locking its doors and verifying who comes and goes. The interfaces are the portal or door in which the users come into the system. It is critical that when designing this interface that security is paramount. This awareness of the safety provided with security should go from the beginning of the system lifecycle and incorporate the front interface through the programming middle and on to the back end data systems. In doing so not only with the interface protect the user but anywhere on the system the user can be assured that his data is safe from prying eyes.
VMT has been built from the ground up for math students and has evolved from its simple beginnings. One fallback of the system that we addressed in our final group design was the shortfall in support for awareness. Awareness includes the perception of what is happening, where others are, and what they are doing (Sharp, Rogers and Preece). There was increased lack of awareness as to the state of other users. We could see they were online but did not know if they were available or if they were busy doing something else. One item that proved useful was the ability to see someone editing an item in the white board; the only problem was there is a slight delay before we see that. There were several instances where one user accidentally overwrote what another was writing. We as human being naturally adapted to this by first typing what we were going to write into a separate word document prior to posting in the VMT. The problem of awareness was also present in the chat as we occasionally found ourselves waiting for a response from another user who was not at their keyboard at the moment. Each of us is not only in the collaborative environment but also in our own physical environment that is not transparent across this electronic median in a natural way. One way we suggest to alleviate this and provide transparency of awareness is through the use of an online status mechanism. Similar those seen in common commercial chat tools, this would provide awareness in the form of status settings to include online, offline, and away from keyboard. Thus students will be able to more efficiently communicate and work by only waiting for a response when they are better aware that the requested is prepared to respond.
Chatting in a group collaborative environment took on research aspect as we looked at and dissected the communication that went on during chats. Looking at the back and forth conversations in terms of adjacency pairs was a new twist on viewing chats. Adjacency pairs are a set of conveyances between two people that represent the smallest element of significance (G. Stahl, Analyzing and Designing the Group Cognition Experience). Looking at our chats we can see our adjacency pairs in regards to questions and responses between individual students. Each pair builds on top of other pairs and is the primary underlying interactions that create group cognition. Stahl refers to a “math proposal adjacency pair” as being a problem solving proposal followed by a response. Within our groups in our interaction design class do we have a similar entity? One way would be to generalize a “group proposal adjacency pair” this can easily describe the small units that occur when one student proposes an answer to one of the questions in discussion and the responses to the proposal. Thus we work backward from the specialized “math proposal” to a more general “group proposal”. Analyzing how we move forward from one matter to another through the use of adjacency pairs it seems as though we spiral off and up. Sometimes these pairs seem to give birth to other pairs and go off into different tangents. A visual representation of how this is working would be a wonderful tool in learning more about adjacency pairs and how they affect group cognition.