Understanding children's collaborative interactions in shared environments

  Traditional computer technology offers limited support for face-to-face, synchronous collaboration. Consequently, children who wish to collaborate while using computers must adapt their interactions to the single-user paradigm of most personal computers. Recent technological advances have enabled the development of co-located groupware systems offering support for concurrent, multi–user interactions around a shared display. These systems provide a unique collaboration environment in which users share both the physical and the virtual workspace. This paper examines how such technology impacts children's collaboration. Findings from this research show that when concurrent, multi–user interaction is supported on a shared display, children exhibit collaborative behaviour similar to their interactions during paper-based activities. The findings also suggest strengths and weaknesses of various mechanisms for supporting synchronous interactions that have implications for the design of computer systems to support children's face-to-face collaboration.     

Enhancing social communication of children with high-functioning autism through a co-located interface

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a 3-week intervention in which a co-located cooperation enforcing interface, called StoryTable, was used to facilitate collaboration and positive social interaction for six children, aged 8–10 years, with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The intervention focused on exposing pairs of children to an enforced collaboration paradigm while they narrated a story. Pre- and post-intervention tasks included a “low technology” version of the storytelling device and a non storytelling play situation using a free construction game. The outcome measure was a structured observation scale of social interaction. Results demonstrated progress in three areas of social behaviors. First, the participants were more likely to initiate positive social interaction with peers after the intervention. Second, the level of shared play of the children increased from the pre-test to the post-test and they all increased the level of collaboration following the intervention. Third, the children with ASD demonstrated lower frequencies of autistic behaviors while using the StoryTable in comparison to the free construction game activity. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the effectiveness of this intervention for higher functioning children with ASD.     

SpinRadar: a spontaneous service provision middleware for place-aware social interactions

With the advancements of mobile phones and the integration of multiple communication interfaces, online social interaction between users is no longer restricted to a specific place with connectivity to the Internet but can happen anywhere and at any time. This has promoted the development of mobile social applications to enable opportunistic interactions with co-located users. One of the challenging problems in such interactions is to discover interaction opportunities with nearby users. Existing works focus on properties related to mobile users in order to find similar users in the surrounding area; these works depend on predefined logic such as conditional statements to recommend spontaneous social interaction opportunities. However, the social implications of the place in which the interaction is taking place are an important factor for recommendations, as those implications provide hints about the most plausible types of interactions among co-located users. In this work, we present a middleware called SpinRadar which is designed to support spontaneous interactions between co-located users by taking into account the semantics of a place, which we call ‘placeness.’ Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme satisfies users much more than existing schemes.     

Multiple decoupled interaction: An interaction design approach for groupware interaction in co-located virtual environments

Interactive visualizations such as virtual environments and their associated input and interface techniques have traditionally focused on localized single-user interactions and have lacked co-present active collaboration mechanisms where two or more co-located users can share and actively cooperate and interact with the visual simulation. VR facilities such as CAVEs or PowerWalls, among many others, seem to promise such collaboration but due to the special requirements in terms of 3D input and output devices and the physical configuration and layout, they are generally designed to support an active controlling participant—the immersed user—and a passive viewing only audience. In this paper we explore the integration of different technologies, such as small handheld devices and wireless networks with VR/VEs in order to develop a technical and conceptual interaction approach that allows creation of a more ad hoc, interaction rich, multimodal and multi-device environment, where multiple users can access certain interactive capabilities of VE and support co-located collaboration.     

Supporting device discovery and spontaneous interaction with spatial references

The RELATE interaction model is designed to support spontaneous interaction of mobile users with devices and services in their environment. The model is based on spatial references that capture the spatial relationship of a user’s device with other co-located devices. Spatial references are obtained by relative position sensing and integrated in the mobile user interface to spatially visualize the arrangement of discovered devices, and to provide direct access for interaction across devices. In this paper we discuss two prototype systems demonstrating the utility of the model in collaborative and mobile settings, and present a study on usability of spatial list and map representations for device selection.     

Analyzing the understandability of Requirements Engineering languages for CSCW systems: A family of experiments

ContextA collaborative system is a special kind of software whose users can perform collaboration, communication and collaboration tasks. These systems usually have a high number of non-functional requirements, resulting from the users’ need of being aware of other users with whom to collaborate, that is, the workspace awareness.ObjectiveThis paper aims at evaluating two Requirements Engineering languages i^* and CSRML (an extension of i^*) in order to determine which is the most suitable one to specify requirements of collaborative systems, taking into account their special characteristics regarding collaboration and awareness.MethodWe performed a family of experiments comprising an original experiment and two replicas. They were performed by 30, 45 and 9 Computer Science students, respectively, from Spain and Argentina. These subjects filled in two understandability questionnaires once they analyzed the requirements models of two systems: an e-learning collaborative system and a conference review system with some collaborative aspects support. Both models were specified by using the evaluated languages.ResultsThe statistical analysis of the family of experiments showed that the understandability was higher for the models specified with CSRML than for those specified with i^*, especially for collaborative aspects. This result was also confirmed by the meta-analysis conducted.ConclusionsCSRML surpasses i^* when modeling collaborative systems requirements models due to the specific expressiveness introduced to represent collaboration between users and awareness and the new resorts to manage actors and roles.     

Leveraging social networks in the adoption of mobile technologies for collaboration

Mobile devices such as tablets, smart phones, and portable computers are connecting users in a myriad of contexts. Social networks can be a benefit for individuals in the knowledge acquisition process, and group dynamics disclosed by Social Network Analysis provides a good basis for studying how mobile collaboration is affected by social networks. This study focuses on two aspects of social network mechanism, namely eigenvector centrality and network reciprocity. The assumption is that social networks influence mobile technology use behaviors, and can be optimized to leverage mobile collaboration. A series of controlled field experiments involving 327 groups were conducted to evaluate the differences between two modes of mobile collaborative settings: individual non-collaborative vs. group collaborative. Results indicate that by leveraging social networks in a mobile platform, study participants were able to positively heighten their collaborative knowledge acquisition process through enhanced group interactions and enjoyment.     

An Open Road Evaluation of a Self-Driving Vehicle Human–Machine Interface Designed for Visually Impaired Users

ABSTRACT

Fully autonomous or “self-driving” vehicles are an emerging technology that may hold tremendous mobility potential for individuals who are visually impaired who have been previously disadvantaged by an inability to operate conventional motor vehicles. Prior studies however, have suggested that these consumers have significant concerns regarding the accessibility of this technology and their ability to effectively interact with it. We present the results of a quasi-naturalistic study, conducted on public roads with 20 visually impaired users, designed to test a self-driving vehicle human–machine interface. This prototype system, ATLAS, was designed in participatory workshops in collaboration with visually impaired persons with the intent of satisfying the experiential needs of blind and low vision users. Our results show that following interaction with the prototype, participants expressed an increased trust in self-driving vehicle technology, an increased belief in its likely usability, an increased desire to purchase it and a reduced fear of operational failures. These findings suggest that interaction with even a simulated self-driving vehicle may be sufficient to ameliorate feelings of distrust regarding the technology and that existing technologies, properly combined, are promising solutions in addressing the experiential needs of visually impaired persons in similar contexts.     

Co-located collaborative visual analytics around a tabletop display

Co-located collaboration can be extremely valuable during complex visual analytics tasks. We present an exploratory study of a system designed to support collaborative visual analysis tasks on a digital tabletop display. Fifteen participant pairs employed Cambiera, a visual analytics system, to solve a problem involving 240 digital documents. Our analysis, supported by observations, system logs, questionnaires, and interview data, explores how pairs approached the problem around the table. We contribute a unique, rich understanding of how users worked together around the table and identify eight types of collaboration styles that can be used to identify how closely people work together while problem solving. We show how the closeness of teams’ collaboration and communication influenced how they performed on the task overall. We further discuss the role of the tabletop for visual analytics tasks and derive design implications for future co-located collaborative tabletop problem solving systems.     

Mutual development in mass collaboration: Identifying interaction patterns in customer-initiated software product development

In this paper we investigate computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and innovation in a large-scale distributed setting. Get Satisfaction (GS), a social media platform for involving customers in product development activities, is our case study. In order to identify how end users contribute to product development, we researched the interactions between end users, champions, and professional developers in this online community as they jointly constructed a shared artifact (a web application). We collected publicly available platform interaction data over a six-month period (N = 229 users). The methods we employed are social network analysis (SNA) and interaction analysis (IA), which we combined in a mixed-methods design. At the network level, we identified key actors according to centrality measures. At the interaction level, we zoomed in on specific interactions. We propose a model of mass collaboration in terms of four interaction patterns: 1) gatekeeping, control of excessive information sharing, 2) bridge building, spreading information across groups in the network, 3) general development, allowing professional developers to create new software functionality and update existing software, and 4) user-user collaboration, facilitating non-centrally organized development activities, ranging from feature requests to local development. We discuss our findings and compare them with related research.     

eScience in the Social Cloud

Social networks offer great potential for fostering collaboration between individuals and amongst groups. This potential collaborative environment is not only applicable for recreation, but can also provide considerable value to diverse research communities. For this reason scientists are increasingly utilizing social networking concepts in projects to form groups, share information, publicize their work and communicate with their peers. This article describes two different approaches to supporting eScience, by providing scientific computing and collaboration within what we term the Social Cloud. In our first approach the social network is used as a collaborative overlay, in combination with the ad hoc creation of infrastructure composed of virtual machine clusters built from resources contributed, by the users, to the Social Cloud. Our second approach is based around the principle of volunteer computing, where the Social Cloud provides researchers with a platform to exploit social networks by reaching out to non technical users who would otherwise be unlikely to donate computational time for scientific and other research. In this article we specifically explore the motivations of users to contribute computational time and examine the various ways these motivations can be catered to through the use of incentives in existing social networks.     

Understanding social collaboration between actors and technology in an automated and digitised deep mining environment

The purpose of this article is to develop knowledge and learning on the best way to automate organisational activities in deep mines that could lead to the creation of harmony between the human, technical and the social system, towards increased productivity. The findings showed that though the introduction of high-level technological tools in the work environment disrupted the social relations developed over time amongst the employees in most situations, the technological tools themselves became substitute social collaborative partners to the employees. It is concluded that, in developing a digitised mining production system, knowledge of the social collaboration between the humans (miners) and the technology they use for their work must be developed. By implication, knowledge of the human's subject-oriented and object-oriented activities should be considered as an important integral resource for developing a better technological, organisational and human interactive subsystem when designing the intelligent automation and digitisation systems for deep mines.

Statement of Relevance: This study focused on understanding the social collaboration between humans and the technologies they use to work in underground mines. The learning provides an added knowledge in designing technologies and work organisations that could better enhance the human–technology interactive and collaborative system in the automation and digitisation of underground mines.     

Exploring practices in collaborative innovation: Unpacking dynamics,relations, and enactment in in‐between spaces

In the field of innovation management, the study of collaborative innovation has focused primarily on the type of networks to support innovation, the modularity of the product's architecture required to engage actors in collaboration, the strategies for patenting and knowledge appropriation, and the public policies likely to stimulate collaborative innovation. But given that many efforts to collaborate collapse and fail to generate the desired innovative value, previous research needs to be complemented with perspectives on what individuals and collectives actually do when creating collaborative innovation as they engage in “in‐between spaces”, spaces between actors created by and simultaneously creating social interaction, to understand the practices that both form and constitute the collaboration. Through such studies, new knowledge can be created building on detailed insights about what ensues as different actors engage in interaction to innovate together and contribute to identifying levers to build collaborative spaces that indeed foster innovation. With this special section, we wish to encourage innovation management scholars to rethink their approach to collaborative innovation research by complementing macro‐level insights with an exploration of the micro‐foundations of collaborative innovation to gain a more nuanced understanding of collaborative dynamics, relations and enactment.     

Interactive tree comparison for co-located collaborative information visualization

In many domains increased collaboration has lead to more innovation by fostering the sharing of knowledge, skills, and ideas. Shared analysis of information visualizations does not only lead to increased information processing power, but team members can also share, negotiate, and discuss their views and interpretations on a dataset and contribute unique perspectives on a given problem. Designing technologies to support collaboration around information visualizations poses special challenges and relatively few systems have been designed. We focus on supporting small groups collaborating around information visualizations in a co-located setting, using a shared interactive tabletop display. We introduce an analysis of challenges and requirements for the design of co-located collaborative information visualization systems. We then present a new system that facilitates hierarchical data comparison tasks for this type of collaborative work. Our system supports multi-user input, shared and individual views on the hierarchical data visualization, flexible use of representations, and flexible workspace organization to facilitate group work around visualizations.     

Collaborative virtual sculpting with haptic feedback

This paper introduces a haptic virtual environment in which two users can collaboratively sculpt a virtual clay model, working from different physical locations connected by the internet. They view their virtual sculpting tools and the clay model in 3D, feel the tool’s pressure on the clay as they work, and have their hands co-located with the view of the tool and model. Since the sculptors have independent views of the same logical environment, they can work at different zoom levels, and be in different coordinate systems, even spinning ones, at the same time. This provides them with the capability to explore new styles of collaborative creativity, working off each other’s initiative where appropriate. The system was designed to allow unrestrained, asynchronous behaviour by the collaborating sculptors. The paper describes the hardware as well as the algorithms behind the deformability of the clay surface and the communications model enabling the distance collaboration. It gives an explanation of the simple conflict resolution mechanism that haptic feedback facilitates and also reports on the results of a qualitative study into the creativity benefits of such a collaborative system.     

An approach for supporting distributed user interface orchestration over the Web

Currently, a lot of the tasks engaged by users over the Web involve dealing with multiple Web sites. Moreover, whilst Web navigation was considered as a lonely activity in the past, a large proportion of users are nowadays engaged in collaborative activities over the Web. In this paper we argue that these two aspects of collaboration and tasks spanning over multiple Web sites call for a level of coordination that require Distributed User Interfaces (DUI). In this context, DUIs would play a major role by helping multiple users to coordinate their activities whilst working collaboratively to complete tasks at different Web sites. For that, we propose in this paper an approach to create distributed user interfaces featuring procedures that are aimed to orchestrate user tasks over multiple Web sites. Our approach supports flexible process modeling by allowing users to combine manual tasks and automated tasks from a repertoire of patterns of tasks performed over the Web. In our approach, whilst manual tasks can be regarded as simple instructions that tell users how to perform a task over a Web site, automated tasks correspond to tools built under the concept of Web augmentation (as it augments the repertoire of tasks users can perform over the Web) called Web augmenters. Both manual and automated tasks are usually supported by specific DOM elements available in different Web sites. Thus, by combining tasks and DOM elements distributed in diverse Web sites our approach supports the creation of procedures that allows seamless users interaction with diverse Web site. Moreover, such an approach is aimed at supporting the collaboration between users sharing procedures. The approach is duly illustrated by a case study describing a collaborative trip planning over the Web.     

See-through techniques for referential awareness in collaborative virtual reality

Multi-user virtual reality systems enable natural collaboration in shared virtual worlds. Users can talk to each other, gesture and point into the virtual scenery as if it were real. As in reality, referring to objects by pointing results often in a situation whereon objects are occluded from the other users' viewpoints. While in reality this problem can only be solved by adapting the viewing position, specialized individual views of the shared virtual scene enable various other solutions. As one such solution we propose show-through techniques to make sure that the objects one is pointing to can always be seen by others. We first study the impact of such augmented viewing techniques on the spatial understanding of the scene, the rapidity of mutual information exchange as well as the proxemic behavior of users. To this end we conducted a user study in a co-located stereoscopic multi-user setup. Our study revealed advantages for show-through techniques in terms of comfort, user acceptance and compliance to social protocols while spatial understanding and mutual information exchange is retained. Motivated by these results we further analyze whether show-through techniques may also be beneficial in distributed virtual environments. We investigated a distributed setup for two users, each participant having its own display screen and a minimalist avatar representation for each participant. In such a configuration there is a lack of mutual awareness, which hinders the understanding of each other's pointing gestures and decreases the relevance of social protocols in terms of proxemic behavior. Nevertheless, we found that show-through techniques can improve collaborative interaction tasks even in such situations.     

Group awareness tools: It’s what you do with it that matters

This study examined the effect of using a group awareness tool on online collaboration. Furthermore, we examined whether the effect of using a group awareness tool on online collaboration is mediated by group awareness (i.e., students’ awareness of their group members’ levels of participation). To answer these questions, we determined how often and how long 107 secondary education students used the Participation-tool (PT), a group awareness tool designed to visualize group members’ relative contribution to the online collaborative process. Our analyses show that duration of PT use (how long students displayed the tool on their screens) significantly predicted group members’ participation in the online dialogue, their participation when writing collaborative texts, equality of participation within the group, and coordination and regulation of activities in the relational space (i.e., discussing the collaboration process with group members). No effect of using the PT on group performance was found. Mediation analyses showed that the effect of using the PT is only partially mediated by group awareness: an indirect effect of using the PT, via enhanced awareness of participation, on student participation during chat discussions and the collaborative writing process was found.     

Articulating collaboration in a learning community

A common computer-based collaborative learning approach is to simply introduce contemporary computermediated communication technology into the classroom to support prescribed learning activities. This approach assumes that all students collaborate in similar ways and that presentday technology is sufficient to accommodate all collaboration forms. This view is superficial and limiting. Students collaborate in different ways at different levels on different learning activities. A more detailed articulation of collaboration in learning is crucial to understanding and extending the pedagogical capabilities and usefulness of collaborative technologies. A model is presented for a more finely articulated form of analysis that enumerates types of collaborative learning activities and evaluates how these activities may be supported through different design options. The analysis is based on actual classroom scenarios and the collaboration requirements that emerge from them. The authors have successfully applied this analysis model in the design of a computer-based collaborative learning environment for science education.     

Examining the Effects of Passive WeChat Use in China

ABSTRACT

Passive usage of social network services (SNSs) refers to individuals’ browsing behavior and information consumption without active interaction with other SNS users. Using the data collected from 295 users of WeChat, the most popular SNS in China, the authors identify two types of passive use and test their different consequences. Confirmatory factor analysis in Study 1 shows passive WeChat use includes two subdimensions, namely, passive social and nonsocial use. Passive social use means browsing friends’ posts, whereas passive nonsocial use refers to browsing information on WeChat official accounts. The partial least squares structural equation modeling results in Study 2 suggest that both social and nonsocial use have positive effects on users’ social capital and online well-being, and further increase their continuance usage of SNSs. However, passive social use is also associated with users’ depressed mood, which in turn decreases their continuous usage intention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.