Introduction

1. Introduction IMD09120: Collaborative Media Brian Davison 2011/12

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

3. 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

4. People • Social behaviour is an essential human characteristic • It is biologically based • Individuals have differences which affect social situations • Social situations influence individual behaviour http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/27/endangered.languages

5. 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

6. PACT Planning, decision-making, problem-solving, team-working, developing, trading, negotiating, co-authoring, discussing, critiquing, providing mutual support, maintaining a community • People • Activities • Contexts • Technology 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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?

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

11. 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

12. Module structure • Lectures • Theoretical concepts • Practicals • Statistics • Prototype building • Tutorials • Group exercises • Discussions • Assessment preparation

13. Assessment 2 components: • Week 9: Critical assessment of an existing collaborative system and proposed redesign • Week14: Prototype of your redesign and evaluation using the instrument provided • Note the timing: One week each

14. A little history 1971: Email 1973: Plato Notes 1978: CBBS 1984: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 1985: The WELL 1988: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 1989: Lotus Notes 1990: Mosaic Web browser 1990: LambdaMOO 1996: ICQ chat 1997: Blogs 1997: SixDegrees 2003: MySpace 2003: Second Life 2006: Facebook

15. PLATO • Education was one of the first beneficiaries of collaborative systems

16. 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 ITsystems

17. 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

18. The place-time matrix After Applegate, 1991

19. Technology • There are two predominant metaphors • Shared information spaces • Sites • Navigation • Pages • Go to... • Save... • Conferencing • Conversation • Thread • Participate

20. Short break

21. Main themes • The social psychology of cooperation • Computer Mediated Communications (CMC) • Statistical evaluation

22. Social psychology Sociology Social psychology Cognitive 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

23. Studying cooperation • Anthropological and naturalistic animal studies (especially in primatology) • Experimental and social psychological • Mathematical • Explicit CSCW studies

24. The Prisoner’s Dilemma

25. A General Form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Strategies: • Cooperate • Defect Payoffs

26. Individual variation • Personality preferences are one type of variation • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator E I • Extravert • Sensing • Thinking • Judging Focus • Introvert • Intuitive • Feeling • Perceiving S N Perception T F Judgement P J Strategy

27. Myers-Briggs types

28. Effects and biases • Identified behaviours that are more or less predictable • eg Spotlight effect

29. 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

30. Hindsight bias • I knew it all along... • That’s just common sense... • It’s obvious... http://www.sigmaxi.org/resources/merchandise/harris.descriptions.shtml

31. 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

32. 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

33. 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

34. Samples and populations General public Students UG students Napier UG students SoC UG students IMD students Year 3 IMD students Is a high-cue environment more effective than low-cue for small group decision making? You

35. Distributions • Central tendency • Mean • Median • Mode Number of scores • Spread • Variance • Standard deviation Agreed measure of effectiveness

36. Comparing distributions ? } Number of scores Low-cue High-cue Agreed measure of effectiveness

37. 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.

38. 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

39. 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.

40. What’s next? • Statistics tutorial • Personality typing • Next week: • Social psychology • Statistics practical exercises • Group exercises – what is your Myers-Briggs type?