Some students working on the table assignment. They have to build and test the usability of a new table that can support collaboration.
Monthly Archive for January, 2005
This work span in the interaction regulation theory, spotting some light in how feedback can be used to support collaborative learning and work. The author, propose a test environment, called COTRAS which offer the possibility to play with collaborative traffic regulation. The results shows that the metacognitive tool offered can reflec in a more complex and accurate planning.
This work distinguish for the detailed construction of the experimental setup, and the statistical analysis of the results.
This thesis presents a framework for supporting interaction regulation through computational means. Regulation of collaborative problem-solving includes aspects related to the task as well as to the interaction itself. Task related aspects consist of establishing a strategy, planning actions and evaluating progress. Interaction regulation on the other hand refers to the organization of collaboration through communication rules as well as division of labor. These rules and strategies might be established at the outset of the collective activity, but they also need to be monitored and adapted as the interaction evolves. On a moment to moment time scale, regulating collaborative interaction consists of deciding “who does what” in addition to “what to do”. We chose to describe these regulation processes as a negative feedback loop, a concept borrowed from control theory. Following this metaphor, interaction regulation is a four step process that starts with the collection of raw data about the participants’ behavior (e.g. verbal contributions, mouse clicks, messages). In the second step, raw data is aggregated into a set of psychologically and pedagogically meaningful indicators that constitute the current state of interaction (e.g. symmetry of participation, quality of knowledge sharing). In the third step, the current state is compared to a representation of a desired state (standard) of interaction. Then, if there is a discrepancy between these two states of interaction, remedial actions are proposed in the fourth step (e.g. encourage participation or ask participants to clarify their explanations). Computers may offer support for any or all of these four steps. Support for the first two steps might be provided by mirroring tools, which assist learners and teachers in the collection of data by providing them with graphical feedback about their interaction. Support for the second and third step might be provided by metacognitive tools, which assist learners’ or tutors’ diagnosis of the interaction through visualizations which also contain a normative aspect that represents the standards of productive interaction. Support for the fourth step might be provided by guiding systems, which propose remedial actions based on a computational assessment of the situation. Our experimental studies show that a representation of the desired state of interaction is critical for regulation. A mirroring tool did not substantively affect the behavior of subjects while a metacognitive tool led to increased participation in dialogue, including more precise planning. Subjects were able to use the standard provided by the metacognitive tool to judge the quality of their current interaction and to take remedial actions. Mirroring tools might still be effective means to provide feedback to a group of problem-solvers, given that the standards to judge interaction are defined through instructions or are part of the subjects’ mental model of productive interaction.
Recently I have been interested in Paul Virilio’s work about velocity, about criticizing technological progress and the globalisation. One of the idea that was striking me is that of the loss of perspective. Virilio says that because of the velocity at which we move and communicate we lack of the perspective that was proper of previous ages. Here the term perspective it is not just in the physical meaning but it is intended in a more broad sense: historical, anthropological, economical, etc.
‘Velocity’ is the key word of his thinking, the post-modernity treasure, and the modern society capital. Reality is no longer defined by time and space, but in a virtual world, in which technology allows the existence of the paradox of being everywhere at the same time and being nowhere at all. The loss of the site/city/nation in favour of globalisation implies also the loss of rights and of democracy that is contrary to the immediate and instantaneous nature of information. McLuhan’s global village is nothing but a ‘World Ghetto’.
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Some links on the qualitative data analysis I found:
[1] qualitative research resources;
[2] grounded theory;
[3] qualitative research page.
Teil, G. and Latour, B. (1995). The hume machine: can association networks do more than formal rules. Stanford Humanities Review, 4(2):47–65. Available from: http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/teil-latour.html.
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The philosopher / sociologist of science, Bruno Latour, in 1995, with
Geneviéve Teil, published an essay describing the ‘Hume-Condillac Machine’,
intended as a tool for ‘computer-aided sociology’, from which these remarks
are lifted: “… instead of then wondering how to treat this enormous mass of data [i.e., texts] by applying methods of automatic reasoning or of AI to the documentation obtained, we intend to follow the inverse strategy, and use techniques for treating documents in order to help researchers to artificially produce intelligence about the terrain they are analyzing.”, and “… Instead of taking the royal road, which consists of making computers intelligent so that they are as skillful as the finest sociologists and most intricate hermeneuticians — a road which very soon becomes impossibly steep — we will take the service escalator. We accept the elementary stupidity of computers and we fashion a sociology, a logic and an ontology that work at their level of stupidity … We adopt this strategy of weakness, which was attempted without success by Hume and Condillac for explaining the human mind, for dealing with computers whose non-human mind is sufficiently moronic to really resemble Condillac’s statue or Hume’s blank slate.”.
The start from the assumption that social researcher lacks of tools to analyse complex text and human interactions. Computers are good in making association and statistic. They are not good in finding hidden patterns in the complexity of human communication. They propose a way in between the qualitative studies and the quantitative beauty of science. They call this approach a quali-quantitative study. Their idea is based on the primal existence of networked relations between words and concepts. Building a grid of relations between words/concepts, they hope to stimulate and retrieve the hidden micro-theories interconnecting the concepts of the text.
Very complex, highly theoretical and worth to explore in details.
The abstract of the connected PhD thesis, which I still have to localise, follows:
Geneviève TEIL
Candide, un outil de sociologie assistée par ordinateur pour l’analyse quali-quantitative de gros corpus de textes – ENSMP – 1991
Le texte est au centre de bon nombre d’activités humaines, celle de l’administration par exemple. L’analyse sociologique de texte ne doit pas se contenter de restituer les technologies d’écriture, de lecture, de diffusion et de collecte de textes; elle doit aussi s’attacher à décrire le contenu des textes. Cettedescription doit également rendre compte des multiples lectures, parfois contradictoires, qui sont faites. Ce faisant, l’analyse sociologique de texte se heurte à une importante difficulté que le logiciel CANDIDE se propose de pallier : le volume des textes à étudier. Ce programme ne peut s’appuyer sur aucun ensemble de connaissances a priori, un dictionnaire préétabli ou une grammaireexhaustive qui, s’il n’était partagé de tous les lecteurs, risquerait d’orienter sa lecture. De son point de vue, le texte est un dispositif associant des mots dont ilreprésente le réseau d’association. Nous décrivons son fonctionnement ainsi que diverses analyses de réseau (linguistiques, socio-economiques…). La comparaison de deux lectures d’un même corpus, faites par une équipe d’experts d’une part, par CANDIDE d’une autre, montre la parfaite concordance des deux lectures pour les gros corpus et les spécificités de chacune pour les petits ensembles de textes. Enfin, nous passons en revue des utilisations de cet outil, de l’analyse bibliographique à la veille technologique et a l’analyse de questionnaires ouverts.
Spent some time pocking around to find good tools for qualitative analysis in OSX. The winner is: HyperRESEARCH. At the end, it is the most stable, and up-to-date. The bad part is that is a commercial product, although they offer a free teaching version for teaching purpose.
The other candidates were:
TAMS: The TAMS (Text Analysis Markup System) Analyzer is an open source qualitative analysis system for OS X and GNUstep (Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.). Screenshots, documentation, binaries and sourcecode available.
jATLAS: ATLAS (Architecture and Tools for Linguistic Analysis Systems) is issued from an initiative involving NIST, LDC and MITRE. ATLAS addresses an array of applications needs spanning corpus construction, evaluation infrastructure, and multi-modal visualization. The ATLAS framework provides an architecture targeted at facilitating the development of linguistic applications. The principal goal of ATLAS is to provide an abstraction over the diversity of linguistic annotations. The abstraction, which expands on Bird and Liberman’s Annotation Graphs (see the history below), is able to represent complex annotations on signals of arbitrary dimensionality.
Anvil is also a free video annotation tool. It offers frame-accurate, hierarchical multi-layered annotation driven by user-defined annotation schemes. The intuitive annotation board shows color-coded elements on multiple tracks in time-alignment. Special features are cross-level links, non-temporal objects and a project tool for managing multiple annotations. Originally developed for Gesture Research, Anvil has also proved suitable for research in Human-Computer Interaction, Linguistics, and many other fields. As it is dependent on Java Multimedia Framework is a bit picky in the supported codecs.
I worked today on a formalisation of the co-referenced actions coding schema. I used the three levels model introduced yesterday to mark how such actions are generated. I made some simple assumption on how to disambiguate between similar cases and how to order them:
[1] Actions weight more than words. In other words, commitment is expressed by actions more than with words. Agreeing at verbal level does not imply agreement at knowledge level.
[2] Actions planned and executed by different agents weights more than the same actions planned and performed by the same agent.
[3] Grounding at knowledge level would require completing the three phases: Plan, Commitment, Feedback.
I was looking today for a good tool to code some of the raw data we have got from the students work on the COTRAS platform. Patrick suggested ATLASti and MacSHAPA for the mac. After a while I passed by this product: HyperRESEARCH, that seems to do the job.
HyperRESEARCH™ enables you to code and retrieve, build theories, and conduct analyses of your data. Now with advanced multimedia capabilities, HyperRESEARCH allows you to work with text, graphics, audio, and video sources — making it an invaluable research analysis tool.
My supervisor explain what is a script in CSCL, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning.
[link]
Today, I started generalising a possible coding schema for operationalise the co-referenced actions. It is based on the idea that to be co-referenced, two persons have to go through three stages in a sequential order: [P] Plan (the user states his/her intentions or ideas); [C] Commitment (the user act to some aspects to the task); [F] Feedback (the user comment on a planned or committed action).
def. [P] -> [C] -> [F]
I found a nice picture on the CIIP report on the architecture for schools. The interesting stuff is that interactivity can be stimulated also using the proper division of the space. This may be an interesting link to follow for the preparation of our workshop CAIF (Collaborative Artifacts Interactive Furniture).
Nice link from Giles on how to spot the location of the GSM antennas in the UK. Apparently, the database, maintained by the telecommunication authority, contains the location of the GSM antennas places on the UK ground.
The ‘Sitefinder’ Mobile Phone Base Station Database is a national database of mobile phone base stations and their emissions. The database is managed by the Office Of Communications.
I need to define an operational coding schema for co-referenced actions. Some of the initial schema we found is as follow:
Schema 1_ A: Refers to Action
B: Acknowledge A
A: Perform Action
Schema 2_ A: Refers to Action
B: Perform Action
Schema 3_ A: Refer to Action
A: Perform Action
B: Acknowledge A
Schema 4_ A: Refer to Action
B: Perform Action
A: Acknowledge B
Schema 5_ A: Perform Action
B: Acknowledge A
These schema may compute in a CRA (co-referenced action index) that can be related in some way to the Shared Understanding. One simple way to relate this may be to look at performances. A more complex view can be a complex combination of Redundancy, Amount of Speak, Division of Role, Time Delay.
I have to look at pragmatics to define possible coding schema for extracting co-referenced, co-intentionality, and perspective taking index. All this parameters reflect on how people feel the process of the communication, their meta-representation of the ongoing communicative process. Three problems need to be faced:
1- how to assess in real-time the representation of the problem of the person without influencing his/her representation of the whole process (Heisemberg Indetermination’s Principle).
2- how to relate a single representation to the global representation of the ongoing communication ( A -> B = A <- B ?).
3- How people can work spatially, communicate and commit to other’s statements? Can we invent a task that make this more operational?
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