Wendy A. Schafer

M-Education: bridging the gap of mobile and desktop computing

Mobile education or M-Education is a new conceptual paradigm in the use of mobile and wireless technologies for education. M-Education encourages distributed peer collaboration over wireless devices and desktop computers to create opportunities for discovery and education in the field and community. It is a project-oriented approach that will use a wireless virtual community to facilitate the learning activities of teachers, students, and peers through collaboration in a distributed environment. M-Education is significantly different from existing mobile learning systems in that it leverages its collaborative activities from an existing desktop-based online virtual community (MOOsburg), and thus offers a range of collaboration opportunities, such as synchronous and asynchronous interactions with peers, and viewing or changes to persistent data. In this paper, an innovative use of wireless and mobile technologies in education is explored as part of a scenario-based design process.

Supporting Community Emergency Management Planning through a Geocollaboration Software Architecture

Emergency management is more than just events occurring within an emergency situation. It encompasses a variety of persistent activities such as planning, training, assessment, and organizational change. We are studying emergency management planning practices in which geographic communities (towns and regions) prepare to respond efficiently to significant emergency events. Community emergency management planning is an extensive collaboration involving numerous stakeholders throughout the community and both reflecting and challenging the community’s structure and resources. Geocollaboration is one aspect of the effort. Emergency managers, public works directors, first responders, and local transportation managers need to exchange information relating to possible emergency event locations and their surrounding areas. They need to examine geospatial maps together and collaboratively develop emergency plans and procedures. Issues such as emergency vehicle traffic routes and staging areas for command posts, arriving media, and personal first responders’ vehicles must be agreed upon prior to an emergency event to ensure an efficient and effective response. This work presents a software architecture that facilitates the development of geocollaboration solutions. The architecture extends prior geocollaboration research and reuses existing geospatial information models. Emergency management planning is one application domain for the architecture. Geocollaboration tools can be developed that support community-wide emergency management planning and preparedness. This paper describes how the software architecture can be used for the geospatial, emergency management planning activities of one community.

A multiple view approach to support common ground in distributed and synchronous geo-collaboration

In this paper we investigate strategies to support knowledge sharing in distributed, synchronous collaboration. Our goal is to propose, justify, and assess a multiple view approach to support common ground in geo-collaboration within multi-role teams. We argue that a collaborative workspace, which includes multiple role-specific views coordinated with a team view, affords a clear separation between role-specific and shared data, enables the team to filter out role-specific details and share strategic knowledge, and allows serendipitous learning about knowledge and expertise within the team. We discuss some key issues that need to be addressed when designing multiple views as a collaborative visualization. We illustrate the design features of a geo-collaborative prototype that address these issues in the context of two collaborative scenarios. We finally describe a laboratory method for investigating how multi-role teams establish common ground while the amount of prior shared knowledge and the type of visualization are experimentally manipulated.

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.

Emergency Management Planning as Collaborative Community Work

Emergencies often have causes and effects that are global. However, emergencies are also inherently local: They occur in a particular place and point in time. While it is critical for governments and society to better organize emergency management top-down, it is also important to become more aware of local community-level values, planning, involvement, knowledge, and skill. Local communities plan collaboratively for potential emergencies of varying scales.Our discipline of Human-Computer Interaction studies the interaction between people and computers. Researchers in this field consider how information technology affects emergency management. They aim to improve emergency management through the design of useful and novel interfaces to technology. The purpose of our work was to take a broader perspective on emergency management and investigate the models and patterns of emergency-related work practices. In particular, we examined emergency management from a local community perspective. This focus on local communities partly stems from our prior research on community groups and their use of information technology. It is also motivated by the realization that emergencies are local events, which happen in communities.This paper reports on a study of one communitys emergency planning activities. Five aspects of community preparedness are discussed: collaborative efforts, local area details, local culture, geographic information, and emergency plans, and a case study provides concrete examples of each. Local community preparedness is complex and gives rise to many collaboration issues. Revealing this complexity, the paper offers some implications for community emergency management technology.

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.

Designing the Next Generation of Distributed, Geocollaborative Tools

Geocollaboration is a new field of research that investigates how technology can support human–human collaboration with geospatial information. This paper considers the design issues inherent in distributed geospatial software. It looks at providing a non-spatial communication channel, supporting real-time synchronous awareness, designing interaction techniques, establishing common ground, and using floor control and attention techniques. Using examples from existing geocollaboration tools and realistic geocollaboration scenarios, it demonstrates some of the design alternatives for geocollaboration. The paper concludes with a future research agenda describing the complexities in supporting longer-term geocollaboration activities.

Integrating 2D and 3D views for spatial collaboration

Spatial collaboration is a specialized form of collaboration where the discussion relates to a physical space. This work investigates how to support distributed spatial collaboration activities. It presents a novel prototype that integrates both two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. This collaborative software is examined in a qualitative study as a group virtually rearranges their lab furniture. The results describe the groups collaboration and their use of the combined representations. The findings highlight the usefulness of multiple representations and the need for additional features to support collaboration across representations.

Using interactive maps for navigation and collaboration

Interactive maps provide unique ways to support collaboration. They can be used to navigate virtual environments and support collaborative activities within these environments. This poster gives an example of map-based navigation and some guidelines for its use. Additional map applications are also suggested.

Map-based navigation in a graphical MOO

Traditional MUDs and MOOs lack support for global wareness and simple navigation. These problems can be addressed by the introduction of a map-based navigation tool. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of such a tool for MOOsburg, a graphical 2D MOO based on the town of Blacksburg, Virginia. The tool supports exploration and place-based tasks in the MOO. It also allows navigation of a large-scale map and encourages users to develop survey knowledge of the town. An evaluation revealed some initial usability problems with our prototype and suggested new design ideas that may better support users. Using these results, the lessons learned about map-based navigation are presented.