Fumitoshi Kato

Digital Genealogies: Understanding Social Mobile Media LINE in the Role of Japanese Families:

This article explores the emergence of the dominant mobile social media platform in Japan, LINE. In particular, the article focuses upon its usage to maintain familial ties, especially between matriarchal connections. Drawing upon ethnographic work with 12 families over 3 years, this article seeks to provide a detailed and nuanced sense of how social mobile media is deployed intergenerationally.

How We Think and Talk About Facilitation

Over the past few years, the notion of ‘facilitation’ has been increasingly gaining attention and acceptance in Japan, especially in the context of education and training. Today, Japanese educators think and talk about facilitation, even if it is not yet clear what facilitation is. Interestingly enough, the term facilitation does not exist in the Japanese language. Even so, the term fa-shi-ri-tei-shon somehow seems important to use, and by ‘importing’ and using it, we feel more comfortable talking about certain aspects of our communication processes. Without it we may not feel able to say anything about these aspects of communication processes. Conceiving of the act of facilitation as utilizing a set of tools enables research and writing on facilitation to examine its outcomes or effectiveness rather than being limited to considerations of it as a process. This article introduces and applies the idea of social construction of technology in order to examine the notion of facilitation.

Facilitation in Communication: Toward a Study of an Educational Gaming Simulation

In an educational gaming simulation session, a facilitator enacts multiple roles of “coach,”“guide,”“educator,”“trainer,” and “supervisor” who attempts to manage the given educational setting toward a certain educational purpose. By exploring the characteristics of one facilitator’s moves, we may be able to extend knowledge about some aspects of the nature of professional practices. It then leads to our understanding of the “practice context” (Schon 1983, 1987, 1991) of a facilitation process. The idea of the practice context acknowledges that part of our knowledge, understanding, and expertise to cope with the given situation are tacit and implicit in our patterns of action. This chapter reports on preliminary findings of a set of interview sessions with a facilitator after an educational gaming simulation session. It aims to offer further understanding of the communicative nature of professional practices as they are embedded in our action. Through the process of facilitation, the facilitator accumulates and personalizes experiences as a facilitator, and then generalizes such experiences into a private “theory” which may be applicable to subsequent opportunities to facilitate gaming simulations. Guided by the facilitator’s own theory of practice, the facilitator selects and combines communication strategies in order to control the situation as the process unfolds. Based on a set of long interviews with a facilitator, some characteristics of the facilitation process are discussed in the context of a constitutive view of communication.

What children and youth told about their home city in digital stories in ‘C my city!’

Children and youth have become an important stakeholder group in urban/city planning and tourism. While there are many practices of youth participation in planning in various countries, a policy of involving pupils and students as so-called ‘volunteer (tourist) guides’ is promoted in recent years in Japan. Previous studies have shown that there are many positive effects created from children being tourist guides. We developed this idea and conducted a project called ‘C my city!’ in Finland in order to facilitate children and youth to introduce their home city through digital storytelling. In the pilot project, 38 digital stories were made by the participants and the stories were embedded on a web-based map. Through analysis of the articulated words in the stories, we investigated how they introduced their home city. Furthermore, we discussed possibilities of applying this method in cross-curricular settings in school.

UbiComp 2006 Workshops, Part 1

This article presents summaries of four of the UbiComp 2006 Workshops: Interactive Media Systems for Seniors, Exurban Noir, Personalized Context Modeling and Management for UbiComp Applications, and System Support for Future Mobile Computing Applications. The other summaries will appear in the April-June 2007 issue.

How Do We Talk in Table Cooking?: Overlaps and Silence Appearing in Embodied Interaction

Cooking and eating on a table is known as a Japanese dining style. As we cook “monja-yaki” on a table, how do we communicate with others? This paper indicates that cooking acts cause utterances to overlap and generate silence more frequently than when not cooking. The order of overlaps in table cooking is shown in two aspects: (1) accidental overlaps are not always repaired in cooking, and (2) co-telling of how to cook sometimes allows utterances to overlap. Besides, while cooking, there occur some kinds of sequence organization with bodily actions: (1) adjacency pairs are organized not only by language but also bodily actions, and (2) even if adjacency pairs are not sufficiently organized with language, bodily actions could complement the absence or insufficiency. Such orders of sequence organization of actions may make silence occur more frequently. Repeated occurrences of overlaps and silence in cooking may result from embodied interaction.