Philip L. Isenhour

Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity

People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one anothers intentions, actions and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent and complex activities. We analysed awareness breakdowns in use of our Virtual School system--stemming from problems related to the collaborative situation, group, task and tool support--to motivate the concept of activity awareness. Activity awareness builds on prior conceptions of social and action awareness, but emphasizes the importance of activity context factors like planning and coordination. This work suggests design strategies for notification systems to better support collaborative activity.

Knowledge management support for teachers

Business organizations worldwide are implementing techniques and technologies to better manage their knowledge. Their objective is to improve the quality of the contributions people make to their organizations by helping them to make sense of the context within which the organization exists; to take responsibility, cooperate, and share what they know and learn; and to effectively challenge, negotiate, and learn from others. We consider how the concepts, tools, and techniques of organizational knowledge management can be applied to the professional practices and development of teachers. We describe a framework for knowledge management support for teachers where the sharing of concrete knowledge scaffolds the attainment of more abstract levels of knowledge sharing. We describe the development of a knowledge management support system emphasizing long-term participatory design relationships between technologists and teachers, regional cooperation among teachers in adjacent school divisions, the integration of communication and practice, synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and multiple metaphors for organizing knowledge resources and activities.

Classroom BRIDGE: using collaborative public and desktop timelines to support activity awareness

Classroom BRIDGE supports activity awareness by facilitating planning and goal revision in collaborative, project-based middle school science. It integrates large-screen and desktop views of project times to support incidental creation of awareness information through routine document transactions, integrated presentation of awareness information as part of workspace views, and public access to subgroup activity. It demonstrates and develops an object replication approach to integrating synchronous and asynchronous distributed work for a platform incorporating both desktop and large-screen devices. This paper describes an implementation of these concepts with preliminary evaluation data, using timeline-based user interfaces.

NET GAINS IN POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: Secondary effects of Internet on community

Broad and diverse civic participation is essential to a democratic society. Studies of opinion leadership show that politically active citizens report that Internet information and communication helped increase civic involvement by enabling them to keep up more easily with news, interact with fellow citizens or engage in collective action. Yet information about less active citizens remains scant. Does the Internet influence the politically passive majority of citizens to become more involved in political talk or other forms of participation? Do they report that the Internet has been helpful in increasing their involvement in political issues, interactions with other citizens, or with local government? These kinds of impacts that follow the primary effect of gaining access to information are considered secondary effects of the Internet upon political participation (Sproull & Kiesler 1991). This article presents quantitative and qualitative findings from a case study of local political participation from the Blacksburg, Virginia region, within the context of a mature community computer network (the Blacksburg Electronic Village). Not only do politically active, but some politically passive citizens also report increased Internet use to communicate with other citizens and with fellow members of local groups about local or national issues. Further, in addition to politically active citizens, some politically passive citizens report that web logs (blogs) have fostered greater online exchange with other citizens through ad hoc political talk and knowledge sharing. These research findings help us to understand the secondary effects of the Internet on political participation in local communities.

Designing our town

MOOsburg is a community-oriented multi-user domain. It was created to enrich the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) by providing real-time, situated interaction and a place-based model for community information. Three versions of MOOsburg have been developed: a classic text-based MOO, a MOO extended to drive a Web-browser, and a Java-based system. The most recent version of MOOsburg is fundamentally different from classic MOOs, supporting distributed system development and management and a direct manipulation approach to navigation. We are currently developing a variety of community-oriented applications, including a virtual science fair and a dispersed natural history museum.

When opinion leaders blog: new forms of citizen interaction

Web logs (i.e., blogs) provide enhanced opportunities to extend capabilities of traditional electronic mail and discussion lists, especially in the hands of opinion leaders; such tools offer greater social interaction and informal discussion, and opportunities for conversational content production. Because blogging tools are simple, available, and free, users can easily communicate with others in their social networks, their geographic communities and the interested public. Blogs represent self-organizing social systems that can help many persons to: 1) interact collaboratively, 2) learn from each other by exchanging ideas and information, and 3) solve collective problems. For opinion leaders -- that small percentage of the population that is socially and politically active -- blogs represent another channel to disseminate ideas and garner feedback from members of their social network. The present research offers findings from a random household survey of citizens of Blacksburg and Montgomery County, Virginia about citizens interests and attitudes towards local government, discussion of political issues, and their Internet use. We find that opinion leaders who engage in some form of blogging (read or write) are more likely to be male, extroverted and educated than bloggers who are not politically active. They score higher than other bloggers on measures of offline and online political interests and activities, community collective efficacy, and the size and heterogeneity of their political discussion networks. As such, their use of blogs may serve as a growing new communication channel to exercise their informal influence.

MOOsburg: multi-user domain support for a community network

MOOsburg is a community‐oriented multi‐user domain. It was created to enrich the Blacksburg Electronic Village by providing real‐time, situated, interaction, and a place‐based information model for community information. We are experimenting with an implementation fundamentally different from classic multi‐user domains object‐oriented (MOOs), supporting distributed system development and management, and a direct manipulation approach to navigation. To guide the development of MOOsburg, we are focusing on a set of community‐oriented applications, including a virtual science fair.

Information Technology in Support of Public Deliberation

Increased citizen-to-citizen discussion and deliberation is an important potential of digital government initiatives. This paper presents findings from a longitudinal study of such outcomes using household survey data, focus groups and one-on-one interviews from a mature community network - the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) in Blacksburg, Virginia, and surrounding Montgomery County. It addresses the questions of who is using computer networking for civic participation, what impact the Internet has on their involvement with other people and local community, and the design problems that citizens experience with local e-government initiatives. A pattern of Internet use is emerging in which local formal and ad hoc groups of interested citizens distribute information on issues of interest among themselves and use online tools to raise awareness and educate, and under some circumstances to deliberate on public policy. Modified tools are suggested to facilitate deliberation and to integrate citizen feedback more effectively into local government decision-making.

Collaborative Critical Incident Development

We have been using critical incidents to research the design and evaluation of computer-mediated collaborative and communication technologies for use in K-12 education. A variety of methods have generated a number of critical incidents identified during classroom evaluations. To enhance our analysis and understanding of these incidents, we developed a Web-based forum called the collaborative critical incident tool (CCIT). Users (teachers) and researchers collaboratively post, rate incident criticality, and elaborate on critical incidents through sustained dialog, contributing to the understanding of underlying conditions, causes, and implications. In this paper we describe the tool and its impact on evaluation.

Data Logging: Higher-Level Capturing and Multi-Level Abstracting of User Activities

Data logging has been a standard, but under utilized, software evaluation technique for single-user systems. Large volumes of objective data can be collected automatically and unobtrusively. This data, however, is usually in the form of low-level system events, making it difficult to analyze and interpret meaningfully. In this paper we extend traditional logging approaches to collaborative multi-user (groupware) systems. We also show how data captured at a higher level of abstraction can characterize user-system interaction more meaningfully. Lastly, we show how higher-level data abstracted from logging can be more effectively combined with data from other usability methods.