Monthly Archive for September, 2003

Evolutionary game theory

Published on 9/29/2003 in Diary. Closed

Virtual Labs in Evolutionary Game Theory is a brilliant site that affords hands-on experience with the kind of “public goods” games that led me (and others, of course) to believe that we have much to learn about the dynamics of cooperation and collective action.

Tutorial on voluntary participation in public goods games. Most theoretical and experimental work on social dilemmas such as the free-rider problem,the tragedy of the commons or the prisoner’s dilemma has tacitly built on the fact that the interacting individuals are actually caught in the dilemma. In most real-life examples, however, individuals do have considerable freedom to choose their partners. To explore the dynamics of this system in both, well-mixed populations as well as populations with rigid spatial structures, we provide further virtual labs. They demonstrate the persistent rock-sissors-paper-type cycles of cooperators, defectors and so called loners in mixed populations. The same mechanism acts as the driving force for travelling waves and other fascinating spatio-temporal patterns in populations arranged on a lattice.

< http://www.univie.ac.at/virtuallabs/ >

Computer Modelling for Investigation and Education

Published on 9/19/2003 in Diary. Closed

During the past ten years, simulation modeling, especially as it helps people to understand complex systems, has become a mainstream use of computational technology. The widespread popularity of “edutainment” software like SimCity and Civilization gives a clear indication of the extent to which simulation games have permeated popular culture. As these and other games have found places in the classroom, researchers have tried to ascertain what and how students learn from these environments, and what implications this has for software and curriculum design.

Link to the site

Embodiment

Published on 9/19/2003 in Diary. Closed

If the body is the fundamental communication hardware, a simulator for a mind, what is its relationship to media made of steel, plastic, or silicon? Instead of pulsing blood, pulses of electrons and light animate these media. McLuhan long ago pointed out that modern communication interfaces attach themselves to the body. In the words of McLuhan, “media are extensions of the senses.”

Link to the site

MIT courseware Computer modelling

Published on 9/19/2003 in Diary. Closed

11.127 / 11.252 Computer Modeling for Investigation and Education, Spring 2003
What is a Simulation? What is a Game? What makes a Game educational? These are some of the questions explored in 11.127. (Photo courtesy of Eric Klopfer)

Concerning the Embodiment
If the body is the fundamental communication hardware, a simulator for a mind, what is its relationship to media made of steel, plastic, or silicon? Instead of pulsing blood, pulses of electrons and light animate these media. McLuhan long ago pointed out that modern communication interfaces attach themselves to the body. In the Ecco quawords of McLuhan, “media are extensions of the senses.”

See the grants by PALM for Educational projects

The Shibuya Crossing in Tokio

Published on 9/18/2003 in Diary. Closed

The Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, Japan has the highest mobile phone density in the world. On weekdays average 190,000 and on weekends average 250,000 people pass this crossing per day (Source: CCC, Tsutaya), around 1500 people traverse at each light change, while 80% of them carry a mobile phone.

partecipatory simulations

Published on 9/18/2003 in Diary. Closed

< https://www.helixcommunity.org/2003/grants/ >

1. Participatory simulations_
Role-playing activities have traditionally been used in social studies classrooms, but have infrequently been used in science and mathematics classrooms. Our use of the term participatory simulations is intended to refer to such role-playing activities used primarily in science and mathematics classrooms to explore how complex dynamic systems evolve over time. For example, each class member could play the role of a predator or prey in an ecology and engage in a class swide discussion of the resultant global population dynamics. A wide ranging set of sample content areas for participatory simulations include the spread of a disease, the flow of traffic in a grid, the distribution of goods in an inventory system, the diffusion of molecules through a membrane, or the emergence of an algebraic function from a set of points.

Discussed examples: participatory geometry; Disaster management; Location Team training; Ubiquitous games (i.e. physical Monopoly, SimCity).

Related links: (1) http://ccl.sesp.northwestern.edu/ps/ ;
(2) http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~vanessa/part-sims/ ;
(3) http://education.mit.edu/pda/
(4) http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Urban-Studies-and-Planning/11-127Computer-Modeling-for-Investigation-and-EducationSpring2003/CourseHome/index.htm
(5) http://www.palmgrants.sri.com/ideabank.html

2. Data-logging / Extended Notepad_
Using the mobile as an extended notepad to record data to be used into a virtual world and vice-versa from the virtual world to bring data out into the physical side for supporting human activities.

Discussed examples: remote machine repairing; class field trip.

3. Collaborative movement learning_
Our goal is to understand the richness of human movement coordination. We survey situations in which people develop and coordinate complex motions in order to enact fluid, graceful movements for aesthetic and functional results. We address movement in different contexts and at different spatial and temporal scales ñ from fine-motor to gross-motor, involving fingers and hands to whole-body movements, and from simpler to more complex, requiring shorter or longer periods of time to both learn and perform the actions. We focus on situations in which people and objects come together, and we create new movement-based objects and contexts for their use.

Discussed examples: support sport, dance, or every group interaction which requires spatial coordination.

participatory

Published on 9/17/2003 in Diary. Closed

Another possible application for participatory simulation that will justify the location element, may be an activity in which the participants have to learn how to displace themselves into the physical space (i.e. fire alarm simulation or emergency simulations).

Revised possible scenarios are: [Research Theme: Movement as Collaboration Design Element]
(1) participatory simulations: using physical location as input into a virtual world running on the computational devices of the participants. This can be used in a collective simulation and for learning through position games;

(2) data logging / extended notepad: using the mobile as an extended notepad to record data to be used into a virtual world and vice-versa from the virtual world to bring data out into the physical side for supporting something.

(3) group movement awareness: using location technology we can support sport, dance, or every group interaction which requires spatial coordination.

How does this differ form Nicolas’ research interest?:
This project aims to study the socio-cognitive roles of space in collaborative teams using mobile technologies. Spatial awareness is indeed a crux issue in CSCW/CSCL : space supports several collaborative processes like grounding, division of labor or coordination for instance. We would like to investigate the effects of geolocation from a cognitive point of view in the context of collaboration among small-scale teams. Furthermore, We wonder whether space would actually influence the collaborative process among peers involved in a joint activity. We plan to design a system that can support spatial awareness and test it on small-scale groups. Experimental studies will be conducted in order to study the cogntive impacts of those tools.

Meeting with Nicolas_
Nicolas framework is based on the Spatial Coordination of people during Joint Activities. Particularly he is interested in seeing what is the impact of Spatial Awareness on cognitive activities involved in Joint Activities. Concerning my proposal we can describe mobility as local (micro-mobility) or geographical (macro-mobility). We need to define examples of joint activities taken from the real world like Dance or Synchronised Swim (micromobility), or team coordination in a macro level. What is coordination?

Meeting with Pierre_

How a cockpit remember its speed

Published on 9/16/2003 in Diary and References. Closed

How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds
\cite{Hutchins95}

Cognitive science normally takes the individual as unit of analysis. This study takes as primary unit of analysis a distributed, socio-technical system. The following analysis of memory tasks will show that the cognitive properties of such distributed system can differ dramatically from the cognitive properties of the individuals who inhabit them. What is new in this approach is the study of the way representations forms in the participant to the cognitive system and how these representations span through the system. The author shows that the same framework of the classical cognitive psychology can be applied to the cognitive system as a whole. The author then describe the cockpit system and in particular the task of remembering the speeds, from three different point of view: (a) a procedural description; (b) a cognitive description outside the pilots; (c) and finally a cognitive description inside the pilots. The author states that collaborative learning is completely different from individual learning because the cognitive processes are mixed. The function of the speed bug the engineers had in mind whilst designing the system was just a memory reinforcements for the pilots. The cognitive analysis revealed that the speed bugs translate and make redundant that information into a visual alignment esteem. This activity became, in fact, a combination of recognition, recall, pattern matching, cross modalities consistency checks, construction, and reconstruction. Technological devices introduced into the cockpit affect the flow of information.

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Doctorant meeting

Constructionist approach and Behavioural learning theory are on two different sides of the learning paradigm. Eventually they moved into instruction design which is based on the concept of tutoring or teacher assisted learning.
Social cognition, on the other hand is taking into account the group or the interaction among peers as the right framework (emergent communities) for CSCL. Again, SC is quite open framework. CSCL scripts move back from this openness to instruction design placing the learning process in a sort of scaffolding environment. Socio-constructivist approach is in between the constructionist and the social cognition theory (Learning by collaborating on problem solving). Theory apply at different scales. Experimental group methods do not work always in all context: we do not want to go into ethnographic methods or sociological methods because it relays on less valuable paradigm. One of the Good method is the one by Yrjo Engestrom (\cite{Engestrom93}). In measuring learning we need to find context in which things can be counted. Cognitive learning can be a way to get into the cognitive individual learning. Collaborative learning can be, at the end, assimilated to individual learning. We can use some phenomena and mechanism we observe for a singular individual to a group. Group characteristic can be original expression of the group learning but at the end they must be described as simple chunks pertaining to individual learning. A group can be described as distributed collaborative system (P. Dillenbourg): what does it mean? Social psychology can be used to describe group phenomena. What is a culture of a small group (private laughing)?
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Reggio children

Published on 9/13/2003 in Links. Closed

Reggio Children S.r.l
Registered office:
Via G. Da Castello, 12
42100 Reggio Emilia – Italy

Operative offices:
Piazza della Vittoria, 6
42100 Reggio Emilia – Italy
tel. +39 0522 455416
fax +39 0522 455621
email: info@reggiochildren.it

< http://zerosei.comune.re.it/inter/rc_publications.htm >
< http://pzweb.harvard.edu/Research/MLV.htm >

Making Learning Visible.
Children as Individual and Group Learners

What is a learning group? To what extent is individual learning reinforced and enhanced or, on the contrary, stifled and inhibited, in a learning group? Does group learning actually exist? Can a group construct its own way of learning? To what extent can documentation foster new ways of learning? What is the relationship between documentation and assessment? These are some of the questions that have been examined in this research project carried out jointly by teachers and pedagogistas from the Municipal Infant-toddler Centers and Preschools of Reggio Emilia and researchers from Project Zero and Reggio Children from 1997 to 1999. Text in English. 2001, 368 pages euro 34,00 .
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1st summary

Published on 9/12/2003 in Diary. Closed

The current status of research in finding connections between location and learning brought me to develop an idea that the reason that you can go mobile with this new technology has not been explored at all. All the application for mobile learning try to represent the same kind of services or application that you can find in a networked computer environment. first of all is not clear to me why you would like to give each person computational device even in a classroom environment. What are the advantage of this upgrade, what are the cognitive benefits children can have when dealing with a networked environment sharing something or working together on something.

Essentially is not clear to me what does it mean collaboration: it is a mutual modelling or script which involves the reciprocal explanation and reciprocal teaching learning function? it is an organisational strategy by which people self regulate dividing the tasks in cognitive block that can analysed further or is it a kind of mutual exploration, by which people participate collectively in the exploration process producing in turn perturbation into the system and analysing the arising effect. …

What i want to understand is the kind of learning solution i can imagine for mobile learning. why do we have to define something new if we are not introducing something revolutionary? Why do we have to use a new technology if we do not see any reason for that?

In dealing with mobile learning and CSCL I envisioned the following scenarios:
(1) participatory simulations: using physical location as input into a virtual world running on the computational devices of the participants. This can be used in a collective simulation and for learning through position games; (2) data logging / extended notepad: using the mobile as an extended notepad to record data to be used into a virtual world and vice-versa from the virtual world to bring data out into the physical side for supporting something.

Is participatory simulations the input is from the physical world to affect the simulation inside the virtual world. We can envision something working on the other way but the application i can see so far are only for assembling purposes (i.e. the virtual tells you where to find something and you go there).

The learning perspective offered by participatory simulations over mobile are incredibly high: we can envision each participant as a containing a part of the solution, a social capital. Mixing together these capitals will enable the group to solve the puzzle. There is a share control in the sense that nobody is in charge of the system and everybody has to participate in order to get to the solution. The learning arises from the network through free exploration of the simulation.

Simulations used into participatory study or framework are appealing for exploring emergent phenomena like economical relations, decentralised mindset, social capital, social network maps, …

Participatory simulations do not solve completely the location problem. In fact the same simulations can be realised for a computer networked environment where people can input through the keyboard. the only reasons for having them mobile is that, in this way, people can embody their learning and heaving a better understanding.

If we think in term of fine-level movement and the movement as a design element itself, we can imagine the mobile as being a computational device able to sense and record our movements and use this information to a specific entertainment/learning purpose. We can envision collaborative usage of co-ordinated movements in a dance environment. for example, as per the MediaLab GiveawaySensors < www.media.mit.edu/resenv/GiveawaySensors/ >.

MeMe Tags
\cite{Borovoy98}

This paper presents this meme Tag technology, an electronically-enriched name tag that is able to share bits of information with other name tag in its proximity. the system is designed to share these Memes, which are quotes or sentences. This is supposed to increase the communication amonge the users. What is not defined by the paper is the autors’ meaning of collaboration. the interesting ideas is to share bits of personal informations with extrange, altough the potentiality of this new capability are not deeply explored by the authors. Interesting links with F. Davis (\cite{Davis92}), R. Dawkins (\cite{Dawkins76}), and J. Donath (\cite{Donath95}).

coll learning

Published on 9/11/2003 in Diary and References. Closed

What do you mean by ‘collaborative learning’? –continued
\cite{Dillenbourg99}

Collaboration concern 4 aspects: (1) A situation between people, (2) the interactions which take place between the group members, (3) some learning mechanisms; (d) effects of collaborative learning. Some introduced vocabulary comprehend: (a) symmetry/and asymmetry; (b) grounding; (c) induction; (d) mutual modelling; (e) horizontal division/vertical division. Part of the CSCL theory is about how people establish common goals or how them split tasks. The difference between cooperation and collaboration is that in cooperation partners split the work, solve the sub-tasks individually and then reassemble the partial results into the final output. In collaboration partners do the work ‘together’. The author also defines some criteria for defining a situation as collaborative: (a) interactivity is not defined by the frequency but by the extent to which these interactions influence the peers’ cognitive processes; (b) synchronous communication; (c) negotiability. Four processes are characterised as collaborative: (a) induction (pairs draw more abstract representations of the problem at hand); (b) cognitive load; (c) Self-explanation, (d) Conflict . The author ask the question: are there learning processes which are specific of the group? The effect of collaborative learning are often assessed by individual task performance measures.

Collaboration can be defined as (\cite{Roschelle95}): a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem.

There is reciprocal causality in most situations concerning collaborative learning:
-there is a bidirectional link between the situation and the interactions
-there is a bidirectional link between the interactions and the processes and between processes and effects

What do you mean by collaborativ elearning?

Published on 9/10/2003 in Diary and References. Closed

Positioning technologies in learning
\cite{Casas02}

In this paper a positioning system called UNIZAR is discussed with particular attention to learning applications. The system uses radio frequency and ultrasound technology to measure dintance from welll known position-beacons to the mobile object. Potential learning application discussed are the following: (a) gesticulations and kinetics as communication (movement patterns); (b) relationship between people (and within the group); (c) relationship between the objects, and among combination of those with their virtual representation; (d) relationship of the user with the environment. Three context are suggested: 1. The worktable; 2. Micromobility; 3. Hyperpresence.

Found 2 solutions for mobile positioning: CI+TA+NMR (Cell-Id, Timing Advance, Network Measurement Report);
GNSS. The accuracy in the first case seems to be around 50 mt.

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VTECH
2-6 rue du ch‚teau d’eau BP 55
78362 Montesson Cedex
TÈl : 01 30 09 88 00 – Fax : 01 30 09 87 80 ou Fax commercial : 01 30 09 87 82(Du lundi au vendredi)
vtech_conseil@vtech.com
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Recent technologies in mobile learning offer few perspectives into smart mob devices. No new feature are implemented nor suggested by researcher into this new field of study. The main feature of being mobile is the notion of location, or as Nicolas prefer to say, is the notion of place: knowing that I am at home is more meaningful than knowing my geographical position. Also the position concept can be related to the human features behind it. So, knowing a relative position may be more important than knowing my absolute position: I am closer to you than to the other person?

When talking about possible application for mobile learning I start thinking about using the feature of moving around as one of the major reasons for having mobile learning tools. So the scenarios I have envisioned so far are:
1. participatory simulations: I use the mobility to embody the simulation features and act with my group with the goal of reaching the goal of understanding the concepts behind the simulation.
2. data logging: I walk around with my mobile to gather data that can be used to build a simulation or an understanding of the world. In this case the collaborative aspects are less defined, because I can build the simulation for myself without the sharing with other people.

Other features offered by mobiles is that they can provide you information which cannot be available everywhere and that mobiles are pervasive into a person’s life so that they can follow you closely listening to what you are listening, seeing what you are seeing.
The field I want to put together are: Mobile learning, CSCL, Location-awareness.

What do you mean by ‘collaborative learning’?
\cite{Dillenbourg99}

The authors did not agree on a single definition of `collaborative learning’. However they propose this definition: it is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. In this definition all the elements can be interpreted in different ways: (a) “two or more” may be interpreted as a pair, a small group (3-5 subjects), a class (20-30 subjects), a community etc.; (b) “learn something” may be interpreted as “follow a course”, study some kind of material, perform learning activities such problem solving etc.; (c) “together” may be interpreted as a face-to-face, computer mediated, synchronous or not, frequent in time or not.
Under these different aspect of CSCL we encounter firstly a variety of scales: from the number of people in the group to the amount of time spent during the interactions, the methodological approaches may be completely different.
One of the question raised by Schwartz (\cite{Schwartz95}) is that: “The question is not how individuals become members in a larger cognitive community as they do in apprenticeship studies. Rather, the question is how a cognitive community could emerge in the first place.” The author highlight how in the comparison between dialogue with oneself and dialogue with a peer, the main difficulty is not to be able to identify similarities but instead to establish what exactly differs between the two process. In this sense the group can be viewed as a unit and a unit as a group, coming back to the change of scales.
Learning has also multiple meanings: (a) any collaborative activity within an educational context; (b) activity is a joint problem solving, and learning is expected to occur as a side effect of problem solving, measured by the elicitation of new knowledge or by the improvement of problem solving performance; (c) collaborative learning is a development, cultural or biological process which occurs over years.
Collaborative is a pedagogical method or a psychological process? The pedagogical sense prescribes that the collaboration will improve efficiency, the psychological sense describe it as the mechanism which caused learning.
The author argue that collaborative learning is neither a mechanism, nor a method: (1) collaborative learning is not one single mechanism (groups perform activities which trigger some learning mechanisms [induction, deduction, compilation,...]). In addition, the interaction among subjects generates extra cognitive mechanisms [knowledge elicitation, internalisation, reduced cognitive load, ...]. (2) Collaborative learning is not a method because of the low predictability of specific types of the interactions: the collaborative situation is a kind of social contract.

Scales on Common Ground

Published on 9/9/2003 in References. Closed

During the night I thought about a sort of Monopoly done with real buildings in which real economics equations are explored.

Shifting Scales on Common Ground: Developing Personal Expressions and Public Opinions
\cite{Ananny03}

The author defines “public spheres” as environments, rooms, either virtual or physical, filled with people experimenting with ideas, practising arguments and learning from each other by trading perspectives through narrative. The authors aim is to develop public spheres which explicitly support the development of public perspectives through a plurality of voices and expressive modalities. They do this through a Constructivist approach and design methods of learning by doing (\cite{Papert80}). there is a three-part focus on who participates in the public spheres, what kind of tools and techniques people use to practise civic discourse and how public opinion emerge from smaller-scale conversation. The resulting object to think with is TexTales a large-scale photographic installation to which people can send SMS text captions from mobile phones. The author argue that the kind of skills practised while constructing narratives are akin to those involved in constructing public opinion. He sees two central tensions in this: (1) who authors and hears the stories, namely finding a balance between narratives created for personal scales and versus collective scales; (2) the nature of the narratives themselves, namely finding a balance between stories that are highly contextual versus stories that have broad appeal. The author argues that citizen authors need to be aware of both the power and limitations of creating narratives that are highly personal and context specific. He refers to Grinter and Eldridge (\cite{Grinter01}), showing how texting among teenagers can be an evolving medium that is economically viable and that consist of a unique short-form “language”. Then the author describe the development of the project TexTalesand the correspondent analysis of the narratives.

Regarding the ownership of the message, maybe a way to enhance this ownership is to colour the caption with a colour correspondent to the sender id.
Other ideas:
1. use the frequency of the postings to a certain pic to determine its position on the screen (this should be equivalent to a kind of rating)
2. using specific field in the txt body to censor or approve a caption (i.e. [bk] = block, or [ag] = agreed). this should reflect in some kind a visual feedback.
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†la collaborazione e nel confronto per tirare fuori la regola da solo si puo fare ma occorre tempo e fatica insieme e piu facile

Roberta says: (11:32:36)
†††d altra parte la coll. e questa redere meglio e prima in un compito che puo essere fatton anche individualmente˘
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Basically, constructivism views that knowledge is not ‘about’ the world, but rather ‘constitutive’ of the world ( Sherman, 1995 ). Knowledge is not a fixed object, it is constructed by an individual through her own experience of that object. Constructivist approach to learning emphasizes authentic, challenging projects that include students, teachers and experts in the learning community. Its goal is to create learning communities that are more closely related to the collaborative practice of the real world. In an authentic environment, learners assume the responsibilities of their own learning, they have to develop metacognitive abilities to monitor and direct their own learning and performance. When people work collaboratively in an authentic activity, they bring their own framework and perspectives to the activity. They can see a problem from different perspectives, and are able to negotiate and generate meanings and solution through shared understanding. The constructivist paradigm has led us to understand how learning can be facilitated through certain types of engaging, constructive activities. This model of learning emphasizes meaning-making through active participation in socially, culturally, historically, and politically situated contexts. A crucial element of active participation is dialog in shared experiences, through which situated collaborative activities, such as modeling, discourse and decision making, are necessary to support the negotiation and creation of meaning and understanding.
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Star Activities -> Participatory Simulations: Using Computational Objects to Learn about Dynamic Systems.
When a group is learning collaboratively about emergent phenomena, the group understanding is also emerging. Is there a relation between the emergence of the two?
Participatory Simulation using Mobiles: an example of self-organising collaborative group?
The two reason I could find for justifying the mobile are:
1. Using the mobile a person can embody a certain learning situation whereas using a desktop is not possible.
2. The mobile can “sense” the user physical environment much more than previously possible.

social network analysis

Published on 9/8/2003 in Diary. Closed

BRAINSTORMING
Patrick Jermann worked for his PhD thesis on the social network analysis with the specific question of How does a group regulate. I need to find a very specified question being close to the CSCL field. For example we can envision Dynamic scripts which can adapt on-the-fly to group dynamics and facilitate the collaborative learning. I need to find a very specific matching of location and activity: why collaborating on a certain topics on the mobile can add a new dimension at the interaction? I need to find an activity that can be performed on the mobile without hardware upgrades and which has an added value with the location. The context add multiple dimension into the communication. I need to select some of these dimensions and define a practical context in which these can be helped by mobile technology. We can also envision other 2 dimensions: (1) a reputation system which regulates the ad-hocracy of the network; (2) multiple inputs to the map creation: interaction, task specific information, special information (i.e. solved task; mental abilities (quantitative/qualitative)).
The project I am going to redesign should include three dimensions: (a) mobile technologies; (b) Collaborative Learning; (c) location-awareness. What is collaborative learning? What differentiate collaborative learning from individual learning? Why mobile? (pervasive learning?) Which dimension is brought by position? What does it change in learning when you know WHERE you are? What are the learning activities a person usually does in group? What are the activities which requires to understand things related to location information?

Collaborative means a group of people. If those people are dealing with things related to location means that they are dispersed through a certain amount of space, usually the city. They acquire the location plus a certain information and they use this information to elaborate part of the task. Then they can share this bit of information with the remaining part of the group, assembling, constructing a piece of knowledge.

Position is related to a form of learning in the real domain. We can make a correlation between the physical position and the position into a virtual domain. We can envision social games with learning goals or either we can propose some notion of the learning theory that can be explored only through position of through learning. Eventually we can develop a framework for position games.

—centralised mindset. Exploring cellular automata through using mobile technologies. each participant may develop a script for gathering and analyse the outcomes sharing with the groups.—

BODY SYNTONICS

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It’s Alive Mobile Games AB
Scheelagatan 24, 5th floor
SE-112 28 Stockholm, Sweden

Phone: +46-8-650-5355
Fax: +46-8-650-4840

info@itsalive.com
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SMS as Location-Based Awareness Tool

Published on 9/7/2003 in References. Closed

Nicolas Nova, SMS as Location-Based Awareness Tool: field study proposal

\cite{Nova03}

This poposal explains why location-aware devices, like mobile phones, providing spatial information, may contribute to the contruction of the mental model of one’s partner. The information mobiles can provide, does not only include where the partner is but also who is co-located nearby and which objects are closely related in that position. the questions this field study aims to provide are the following:
1. how people build a representation of the location of their partner within a group.
2. In this information about space meaningful for gorup members?
The proposal reports on the study of Grinter and Eldridge (see \cite{Grinter03}), about particularities of SMS communication; Ito and Okabe (see \cite{Ito03}), about technological situations involving texts. Common patterns emerging during SMS usage are:
1. mobile text chat: to fil ‘communication void’
2. ambient virtual co-presence: maintaining ongoing background presence of the others
3. augmented flesh meet: texting creates a technology enhanced physically co-located gathering
The empirical methodology of this study aim to ask a gorup of users to build a table of their SMS exchange during the week, aiming to analise them afterwards.

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I lead a research project at CRAFT called ìGroup Mobî. The project investigates how new technologies, particularly mobiles technologies, learning relationships and forms of game theories can support individuals in forming social networks as they express their personality and develop relationships by solving puzzles. Specifically, my goal is to better understand how people starts forming a sense of belongings, develop a sense of trust, initiate a collaboration with peers in an informal context, and how technology can support them.

In developing this project, I have become increasingly interested in how human relations develop through a psychodynamic framework. What are the hidden processes, which brings a person to become the leader of a small group and how people convey their role in the group following conformists paths of aggregations.

Teenager groups are pervasively enabled to new forms of communication, which evolves rapidly into new forms of human interaction, which, in one hand, are brand new and require intensive studies and, on the other hand, may reveal new features of human groups. In addition, new technologies, particularly mobiles, offer a way to track and record human communication for deeper analysis. My goal is to understand how these new forms of conversation into new media can be used to represent social network activity. These acquired data can be used to represent social network maps. These representations, then, can be offered back to the single participants into the network giving them a feedback of their role and personality.

I am currently engaged in collaborative projects with some local cultural centres in Lausanne and Torino to investigate these issues. My hope is to strengthen my contribution and personal knowledge through the PhD programme.

I need a deeper understanding of several issues to develop these research projects further. I would like to understand better: how a sense of group is formed in general; how people develop trust and eager to collaborate; how people emerge as leader or outsider; how people consent to conformism; how their perception and decision can be influenced after knowing what is their role (using the feedback provided by the social map).
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