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March 21, 2008

Swift Trust

I have been reading some papers and learned a new concept called "swift trust" and its importance on the success of a temporary team to achieve its goals.I was wondering if anyone heard this term before or read an intersting paper about it related to wiki.

 


February 19, 2008

Social Network Analysis Question

I am interested in looking at my anchored discussion research from social network perspective. I was wondering if anyone has conducted a social network analysis in a collaborative learning environment. Social network analysis basically says that the cohesion of a collaborative group, group members' roles, and power relations influence the outcome of learning. So my idea is to investigate whether anchored discussion could influence these elements for a better collaborative learning environment.


September 26, 2007

Social software as embodied autism

Summary of:

Boyd, Danah; "Autistic Social Software", The Best Software Writing I, Apress (2005) pp. 35-45.

Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student in Judith Donath's Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.  Her argument should be familiar: it's the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, detailing why current design methodology does not work.  Seems like an indictment of positivist design of social software.

The author claims that the way that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is designed to be used models how autistic people or people with Asperger's Syndrome are taught to engage in social interactions: programmatically. "Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world" (p. 3). Current social software codifies social interaction in much the same way, but this does not fit anyone's actual needs, and in fact people will typically try to find ways around the built in social interaction rituals (p. 4-5), if they do not abandon the product altogether.

The paper suggests that designers should design social software around how people actually interact (using a user-driven iterative design methodology (p. 6)) instead of rigidly modeling poorly understood behaviors and offering the resultant product to people to use.

 


Social software as embodied autism

Summary of:

Boyd, Danah; "Autistic Social Software", The Best Software Writing I, Apress (2005) pp. 35-45.

Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student in Judith Donath's Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.  Her argument should be familiar: it's the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, detailing why current design methodology does not work.  Seems like an indictment of positivist design of social software.

The author claims that the way that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is designed to be used models how autistic people or people with Asperger's Syndrome are taught to engage in social interactions: programmatically. "Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world" (p. 3). Current social software codifies social interaction in much the same way, but this does not fit anyone's actual needs, and in fact people will typically try to find ways around the built in social interaction rituals (p. 4-5), if they do not abandon the product altogether.

The paper suggests that designers should design social software around how people actually interact (using a user-driven iterative design methodology (p. 6)) instead of rigidly modeling poorly understood behaviors and offering the resultant product to people to use.

 


September 19, 2007

Bi-weekly status report

I've been doing a couple of things over the last two weeks:

  • Ripping apart my lit review "E-mail as shared context in virtual organizations," re-reading my sources (making sure that I paraphrased and quoted correctly, and seeing if I need to go back to earlier sources), and looking for newer work.  I'm looking for some theoretical foundations, and I'm looking to strengthen the flow.
  • Simultaneously, I'm looking to cut the length of the review in half so that I can use it (or parts of it) as the first part of the work product for IS360.  It's 20 pages now, and I need it to be 7-9.
  • Thinking about how I can do a first study/experiment based on what I'm learning.  I'm interested in seeing how visualizations of knowledge extracted from e-mail archives does or does not make members of a virtual team more effective communicators or collaborators.  I've been thinking about using the mailing list archives of open source projects as a test case: generate some static (at first) visualizations from those archives, recruit some people to act in the role of potential new members of the project, and hand them some specific tasks to perform.  Give some people the visualizations + mailing list archives, and make others use the raw mailing list archives, and see what the difference in task performance between the two populations is.
  • Learning who the big people (the "100 important people in the field") in e-mail, collaboration via e-mail, and e-mail visualization and analysis are.  Thus far: Fernanda Viegas, Marc Smith, Martin Wattenberg, Nicolas Duchenaut.


Bi-weekly status report

I've been doing a couple of things over the last two weeks:

  • Ripping apart my lit review "E-mail as shared context in virtual organizations," re-reading my sources (making sure that I paraphrased and quoted correctly, and seeing if I need to go back to earlier sources), and looking for newer work.  I'm looking for some theoretical foundations, and I'm looking to strengthen the flow.
  • Simultaneously, I'm looking to cut the length of the review in half so that I can use it (or parts of it) as the first part of the work product for IS360.  It's 20 pages now, and I need it to be 7-9.
  • Thinking about how I can do a first study/experiment based on what I'm learning.  I'm interested in seeing how visualizations of knowledge extracted from e-mail archives does or does not make members of a virtual team more effective communicators or collaborators.  I've been thinking about using the mailing list archives of open source projects as a test case: generate some static (at first) visualizations from those archives, recruit some people to act in the role of potential new members of the project, and hand them some specific tasks to perform.  Give some people the visualizations + mailing list archives, and make others use the raw mailing list archives, and see what the difference in task performance between the two populations is.
  • Learning who the big people (the "100 important people in the field") in e-mail, collaboration via e-mail, and e-mail visualization and analysis are.  Thus far: Fernanda Viegas, Marc Smith, Martin Wattenberg, Nicolas Duchenaut.


CommentPress

Looking through my bookmarks from a month or so ago, I remembered that I had seen an interesting approach to enabling colloborative authoring (really collaborative editing, as in what editors do as opposed to writers) from the people at the Institute for the Future of the Book.  I remembered that Kate and Evren have been interested in collaborative authoring, so I post it here.

CommentPress is a WordPress theme that allows readers to add comments to each paragraph of a document.  Comments made on a paragraph appear in a column to the right of the body of the text, aligned with the paragraph, so that the reader can read the document and see the comments relatively in situ. The makers of CommentPress intend authors to post long works (articles or books) in sections to a CommentPress site, and then to invite people to comment much as an editor would, paragraph by paragraph in the context of the text.  Alternatively, the author can invite comenters to give very targeted comments, and then readers to read the text less like the post and response of blogging and somewhat more like a conversation, or a text with related and well-situated sidebars.

As a collaborative editing paradigm, I think it would be interesting to compare how effective this is compared with the Wikipedia :Talk pages (see also [1]), with which comments are closely associated with the text being written, but are not visible  while one is reading the text.

[1] Viegas, FB; Wattenberg, M; Kriss, J; van Ham, F; "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia", System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, (2007) pp. 78-78.


CommentPress

Looking through my bookmarks from a month or so ago, I remembered that I had seen an interesting approach to enabling colloborative authoring (really collaborative editing, as in what editors do as opposed to writers) from the people at the Institute for the Future of the Book.  I remembered that Kate and Evren have been interested in collaborative authoring, so I post it here.

CommentPress is a WordPress theme that allows readers to add comments to each paragraph of a document.  Comments made on a paragraph appear in a column to the right of the body of the text, aligned with the paragraph, so that the reader can read the document and see the comments relatively in situ. The makers of CommentPress intend authors to post long works (articles or books) in sections to a CommentPress site, and then to invite people to comment much as an editor would, paragraph by paragraph in the context of the text.  Alternatively, the author can invite comenters to give very targeted comments, and then readers to read the text less like the post and response of blogging and somewhat more like a conversation, or a text with related and well-situated sidebars.

As a collaborative editing paradigm, I think it would be interesting to compare how effective this is compared with the Wikipedia :Talk pages (see also [1]), with which comments are closely associated with the text being written, but are not visible  while one is reading the text.

[1] Viegas, FB; Wattenberg, M; Kriss, J; van Ham, F; "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia", System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, (2007) pp. 78-78.


September 06, 2007



September 05, 2007

Phase III started..

Well... SISATSpace Phased II has ended and Phase III has started with a bang, with the Welcome New Community member Week on SISATSpace...


Phase III started..

Well... SISATSpace Phased II has ended and Phase III has started with a bang, with the Welcome New Community member Week on SISATSpace...


Claremont Conversation Help Desk

Since the last meeting i was able to create a new community for new users: http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/helpdesk/.

i also uploaded a number of screencasts...


Claremont Conversation Help Desk

Since the last meeting i was able to create a new community for new users: http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/helpdesk/.

i also uploaded a number of screencasts...


People: Edward Tufte

Information visualization will probably be a core component of my research, and so I'm getting to know the big names in the field and their work. Edward Tufte's ("Tufte" is pronounced tuff-tee, not tooft) work has been a resource to me for several years. He is a primal force in information visualization, and his beautiful books are referenced commonly in papers which propose or use visualization tools or techniques. Prof. Tufte (he is professor emeritus at Yale University) has made a mission of educating people on how to honestly, clearly, and effectively present information. He is also famous his strong opinions on PowerPoint, starting with his analysis of a briefing slide uncovered during the space shuttle Columbia explosion investigation. Tufte's analysis shows how the poor information carrying capability of PowerPoint played a part in failing to prevent the disaster. [ Read More about this on my website ... ]


People: Edward Tufte

Information visualization will probably be a core component of my research, and so I'm getting to know the big names in the field and their work. Edward Tufte's ("Tufte" is pronounced tuff-tee, not tooft) work has been a resource to me for several years. He is a primal force in information visualization, and his beautiful books are referenced commonly in papers which propose or use visualization tools or techniques. Prof. Tufte (he is professor emeritus at Yale University) has made a mission of educating people on how to honestly, clearly, and effectively present information. He is also famous his strong opinions on PowerPoint, starting with his analysis of a briefing slide uncovered during the space shuttle Columbia explosion investigation. Tufte's analysis shows how the poor information carrying capability of PowerPoint played a part in failing to prevent the disaster. [ Read More about this on my website ... ]


Choosing a research topic

Throughout my twenty-ish years in academics (as an undergraduate and master's student at UVa; as staff at Caltech; and as a Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University), I've learned much about choosing topics of study through talking with researchers, observing the choices graduate students have made and the outcomes that resulted, and through reading books like The Craft of Research . Now that I'm facing having to write papers and a dissertation of my own, I wanted to distill what I've learned into guidelines and write them down as reminders so that I don't lead myself astray over the coming years. [ Read More about this on my website... ]


Choosing a research topic

Throughout my twenty-ish years in academics (as an undergraduate and master's student at UVa; as staff at Caltech; and as a Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University), I've learned much about choosing topics of study through talking with researchers, observing the choices graduate students have made and the outcomes that resulted, and through reading books like The Craft of Research . Now that I'm facing having to write papers and a dissertation of my own, I wanted to distill what I've learned into guidelines and write them down as reminders so that I don't lead myself astray over the coming years. [ Read More about this on my website... ]


September 04, 2007

Neat Site & Paper

http://www.eigenfactor.org/map/index.html

 

Shows links between different disciplines, along with the top 10 journals in each field.  Useful for looking thru reference discipline top journals for ideas / references / common models.

 

And another neat article (esp. for Peter) 

Miura, A., & Yamashita, K. (2007). Psychological and social influences on blog writing: An online survey of blog authors in Japan. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), article 15. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/miura.html

We conducted a questionnaire survey of personal blog authors (N=1,434) and examined two hypothesized models using structural equation modeling to clarify the psychological and social process associated with why authors continue to write their blogs. Two final models with good fit were obtained. It was confirmed that being satisfied with benefits to self, relationships with others, and skill in handling information had significant positive effects on the intention to continue blog writing. The psychological traits of private self-consciousness, reassurance-seeking, and information need were hypothesized to be effective in establishing consciousness of the benefits; these also had significant positive effects. In contrast, only positive feedback had a significant influence on satisfaction related to information handling skill, whereas both negative and positive feedback had significant influences on satisfaction related to information handling skill. This suggests that communication with readers who gave positive feedback strongly encouraged blog authors to continue writing. Similarities and differences between the two models and recommendations for further theoretical development are discussed.

 


September 02, 2007

First Post!

Okay, this is not exactly my first post ever.  However, I figure that on a lab update topic, I will try to slip in something.

 

I am currently working on two things.  First, I am cleaning up a paper on the results from last year's transdisciplinary experiment.  At the moment, I am working off-line as I scratched and write on a paper printout.  I am also going to look into structural equation modeling as an alternative to regression.  Second, I am putting together my ideas about a dissertation.

 

Both of these files have been uploaded to the file gallery, and I am always open to comments.  The dissertation proposal is only two pages (hint, hint).

1. Paper - Sorry, this was too big.  I'll find another way to post it. 

2. Diss -- http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd4wmkz7_24sk2cg4 


August 23, 2007

My first lit review: "E-mail as provider of shared context in virtual organizations"

Dear Labmates:

I mentioned my literature review last night at the SL2 meeting.  It's my first one, and I would love some help with it, in terms of anything.  I would like to hear about anything that: is unclear; exhibits weak logic; needs more justification, analysis or explanation; is not relevant; whether you think I should decrease or expand scope.  Also especially anything that I forgot.  Even grammatical corrections.

Prof. Ryan and Prof. Olfman suggested that I post it to the lab and get feedback from those who want to give it.  I've posted it in the working papers section of our SL2 file repository here on claremontconversations.org: http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/sl2/files/73/601/lit+review.pdf

Here it is  as a word document: http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/sl2/files/73/602/lit+review.doc

I appreciate any feedback you all can give me!


Writing Projects

Thanks to Kate for putting together the page...

If anyone has trouble getting into the community, please let Brian or I know.

-Nathan 


August 25, 2006

One Weekend, One Day

The SL Squared team has 1 weekend and 1 day left to finish up touches on ClaremontConversation.org.

There is still some work to be done including touch-ups on the user interface in addition to the completion of the pre-test research questionnaire.

Needless to say our research team is both anxious and excited.

Next week SL Squared will release Elgg across the T-Courses (with a few rouge installations in classes across the School of Information Systems and Technology). Getting T-Course members acclimated to Elgg (and online learning as a whole) is a primary concern. For many students the notion of online 'anything' can be quite intimidating and our job (in addition to the many intricacies involved in running the site and researching it's progress) will be to assist T-Course faculty, teaching assistants and students to the features of Elgg and to also address in any problems they may have.

As a group we feel that the introduction of Elgg will foster collaboration taking the T-Course to newer levels. We also hope that students begin to adopt and adapt to alternate methods of learning and those who are not so familiar to online learning see the Elgg software as a valuable research for personal and collaborative learning.

As of now, the fingers are crossed.


July 30, 2006

Meeting Notes with Wendy and Laurie

I put my notes online for the meeting with Wendy, Jed, and Laurie.  You'll have to be logged into access them, as they're marked private to this community.