Huber, M. T., & Morreale, S. P. (2008). Situating the scholarship of teaching and learning: A cross-disciplinary conversation.

Key ideas

Description of how SoTL is bound in the disciplines, and the “trading zone” where researchers met and exchange ideas, tools, and vocabulary

Disciplinary specificity

This language, which we are choosing to call a discipline's “style,” comprises, at its core, what Joseph Schwab so elegantly distin­guished as substantive and syntactic structures: the “conceptions that guide inquiry” and the “pathways of enquiry [scholars] use, what they mean by verified knowledge and how they go about this verification” (1964: 25, 21).

Scholars build on the tools and analytics frameworks of their disciplines to research teaching

• it is what they have available, how they think
• it's a way of gaining legitimacy for the research within the field
• it's a way of communicating more effectively with others in the same field
• it's (sometimes) the most appropriate methods to investigate teaching in that specific field

The challenge is communicating across disciplines, sharing findings, etc.

Experts and practitioners

There is a gap between educational researchers who want to understand basic issues, such as the nature of mathematical thinking, and the interests of teaching faculty, who want to know what works.

Trading zone

This story is, of course, about the strength of disciplinary styles in shaping the scholarship of teaching and learning. But it is also a story about the emergence of a “trading zone” among the disciplines, where scholars are busy simplifying, translating, telling, and persuading “foreigners” to hear their stories and try their wares.

In this zone, one finds scholars of teaching and learn­ing seeking advice, collaborations, references, methods, and col­leagues to fill in whatever their own disciplinary communities can­ not or will not provide. Their goals are to do better by their stu­dents, and they are willing (within limits) to enter the trading zone and buy, beg, borrow, or steal the tools they need to do the job.

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Shulman, L. S. (2002). Foreword. Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Eds. Mary Taylor Huber and Sherwyn P. Morreale. Washington: American Assn. of Higher Educ.

Key ideas

Shulman talks about his research on medical expertise, and how it revealed the importance of the specific, which later led to work on pedagogical content knowledge.

General vs specific

His work on medical diagnosis revealed very few general approaches, each field was very different. Later in teaching he found the same thing.

General methods did exist. But the same teacher who taught one subject well did not necessarily have the capacity to teach another well. Indeed, there were dramatic sub­ject-specific differences in the pedagogical substance and method

He came up with the concept of Pedagogical content knowledge. Became important in K12, and eventually in higher education.

Disciplines have contrasting substance and syntax (to use Joseph Schwab's valuable distinction) - ways of organizing themselves and of defining the rules for making arguments and claims that others will warrant. They have different ways of talking about themselves and about the problems, topics, and issues that constitute their subject matters.

Since teaching and learning a subject are themselves ways of talking about and “doing” the discipline, those consistencies should follow.

More generally, if domain specificity is likely to be the hallmark of inquiry, learning, and teaching in a discipline, it also follows that we should expect the discussion and investigation of teaching and learning in that discipline itself to be domain specific

Disciplinary differences

Method

• approaches and techniques employed in teaching
• strategies and tactics employed in investigation

Classically, both senses of method were the same - they converged. Your research method was how you organized your evidence into a powerful and persuasive argument, which was also your teaching method. Method described your form of argument, and it was clearly domain specific.

"Meta-methods"

What methods can we use to investigate the efficacy and characters of the methods employed to teach and learn?

Metaphor

• What are the key concepts, principles ideas that animate your work
• What are its problems, topics issues
• What is it really about

Metaphor refers to those tools we employ to clarify and con­nect the substance of our ideas. Here we find, in all fields, the cen­tral roles played by that family of representations we call analo­gies, metaphors, and similes, as well as narratives and examples. The role of these devices is to connect matters we already under­ stand to others we understand less well.

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Hutchings, P. (2000). Introduction: Approaching the scholarship of teaching and learning. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Key ideas

Short intro to a book of CASTL teaching fellows cases. Touches upon definition of SoTL, different kinds of enquiries, and methods. Also relationship between SoTL and educational researchers.

Difference between normal scholarship and scholarship of teaching - perspective on problems

One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship or research within the academy is what a difference it makes to have a “problem” in one versus the other. In scholarship and research, having a “problem” is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves.

But in one’s teaching, a “problem” is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation.

Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching is all about. How might we make the problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse? How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated

Taxonomy of questions

What works

How it often starts. Question shared by many faculty, administrators, etc.

What is

describing what an approach looks like

• could look at dynamics of class discussion around a difficult topic
• efforts to document the varieties of prior knowledge and understanding students bring to a particular topic or aspect of the discipline

Visions of the possible

Conceptual framework for shaping thought about practice

new models and conceptual frame- works generate new questions that can, in turn, enrich the scholarship of teaching and learning and extend its boundaries

How a history professor deals with educational research methods

Mills Kelly, for instance, talks about methods in what is essentially a homecoming story. Early in his work, he tells us, he found himself casting about, trying to figure out how to do this thing called, somewhat dauntingly, “the scholarship of teaching and learning.” Behaving like a good historian, he went to the library and began reading about the use of multimedia in the teaching and learning of his field; what he found was a body of educational research (mostly not focused on history or, indeed, on any particular discipline) employing “a methodology that I knew nothing about—a new language, a use of control groups, a scientific approach.” It was not familiar or comfortable ground: “I’m not an educational researcher by training. I’m an historian.”

It was only later, when Mills read the work of another historian who had been studying the teaching and learning of history, that he realized the relevance of his own background—that the tools and dispositions of an historian might, that is, stand him in good stead in addressing questions about teaching and learning. His question about recursive reading, for instance, is an historian’s question about a process that Mills sees as essential to the doing of history. And his electronic course portfolio can be seen as a kind of chronicle of the course, an account of its unfolding over time, with links to relevant artifacts and evidence.

Other taxonomy

Craig Nelson, a biologist from Indiana Hutchings University and a 2000 Carnegie Scholar, recently developed a document (included on the CD-ROM) of “selected examples of several of the different genres of the scholarship of teaching and learning,” which he defines in large part by unit of analysis: reports on particular classes, reflections on many years of teaching experience, and summaries and analyses of sets of prior studies. Craig entitles his document “How Could I Do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?”

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Hatch, T. (2009). The scholarship of teaching and web‐based representations of teaching in the United States: definitions, histories, and new directions. Educational Action Research, 17(1), 63-78. Informa UK (Taylor & Francis). doi: 10.1080/09650790802667451.

Key ideas

briefly describes origin of term SoTL, two divergent understandings, also difference K12/higher education, and then talks about attempts at digital representation of teaching

Key questions

About SoTL

• definition (what counts as scholarship of SoTL)
• execution (how to facilitate representation, interpretation, analysis of teaching)

About how to represent and learn from teaching

• How can teaching be represented in ways that reflect the practioner’s perspective and respect the complexity of teaching?
• How can audiences, particularly novice teachers and others who have limited experience in teaching, learn from complex and sophisticated representations?

History of "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning"

Broad/narrow definition

Scholarship about teaching

Term covers all kinds of scholarship that takes teaching as a focus, including teacher inquiry as one strand. A relatively new form of scholarship in higher education.

Teacher-inquiry, self-study

Excludes a lot of literature, but ties in with practices that go much further back historically than SoTL, carried out in a similar way in K12 and higher education.

one can imagine the scholarship of teaching and learning as both a specific movement in higher education and a general description of a broad range of practitioner inquiries into teaching and learning at all levels of education

Term

Ernest Boyer, President of Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, colleagues with Eugene Rice and Mary Huber got credit for introducing the term Scholarship of Teaching. Boyer was firmly planted in higher ed, interested in the diverse roles and responsibilities of faculty, and expanding the notion of “scholarship”. Synonymous with “scholarly teaching” - teaching itself is a scholarly act that helps to communicate to students what the scholar has learned through what Boyer terms ‘the scholarship of discovery.’

Current president Lee Shulman, with Pat Hutchings and Mary Huber, use term differently. Shulman has more of a background in K12. To engage in the scholarship of teaching, teaching well is not sufficient. Blur lines between scholarship of discovery, and scholarship of teaching, suggesting rendering teaching public, amenable to critique and peer review, so others can build upon it. Want scholarship of teaching to bring teaching status and respect, build a knowledge-base of teaching that can advance the entire field, not just recognize and reward good teaching.

Projects

Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

• the establishment of the CASTL scholars program that gave a small number of faculty in higher education a fellowship to pursue the scholarship of teaching
• the launching of the CASTL Campus Program (in conjunction with the Association for the Advancement of Higher Education), which sought to develop a network of campuses that were committed to supporting the scholarship of teaching
• partnerships with scholarly societies such as the American Historical Association and the Mathematical Association of America
• later also launched Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for K-12 Teachers and Teacher Educators

International Society for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Established in 2004, creation of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Examples of activity

In higher education one can see the scholarship of teaching in the work of faculty

• involved in conducting classroom research (Cross and Steadman 1996)
• developing teaching portfolios or leading ‘pedagogical colloquia’ as part of hiring and evaluation processes (Shulman 1995)
• reflecting on their practice as part of faculty development initiatives (often supported by the work of the Centers for Teaching and Learning that have emerged on many US campuses)
• experimenting with new ways to document and demonstrate what their students are learning

Representing teaching and learning digitally

Knowledge Media Lab (Carnegie Foundation)

• established 1998, to help K12 and higher ed CASTL scholars to use multimedia and new technologies to carry out inquiries and present results to others

Examples of publishing attempts

• Dennis Jacobs, a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, drew on the traditional organization of scholarship in the sciences and shared his research on the use of cooperative learning methods in his introductory chemistry course by organizing materials into traditional sections for methods, findings, and discussion.
• Mills Kelly, an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University, took the form of an electronic course portfolio that he could use as part of his file for promotion and tenure.
• Heidi Lyne, a middle school teacher, offered viewers video and supporting materials from a documentary Lyne produced
• Websites for several other K–12 teachers followed an ‘inquiry’ format that provided examples of or reflections on different stages of teachers’ inquiries as well as the products of those inquiries.
  • a website documenting the inquiries of Sarah Capitelli – a first/second-grade teacher in a bilingual school in Oakland, California – offered video from an inquiry she undertook with her students, examples of narratives she produced over the previous few years, and her reflections on the inquiry process and the development of her thinking about English language instruction.

Class anatomy

These classroom-focused rather than inquiry-focused representations included the development of a format dubbed a ‘class anatomy’ (Shulman 1998) that could be used to document teaching in a variety of different contexts. Class anatomies were designed specifically to try to respect the complexity of teaching while helping viewers to both get an overall sense of a teacher’s work in one classroom and provide manageable entry points for investigating their teaching in greater depth

Challenges

• viewers need prior knowledge in a number of areas to make sense of and critique the teaching represented
  • of the specific contexts in which teachers worked
  • experience with subjects, topics and pedagogical approaches represented
  • knowledge of how to read or view these kinds of web-based representations of teachers' practice

Quest project

Inviting teacher educators to use web-based representations of teaching in their own courses.

The teacher educators documented their use of these representations in their own websites that brought together curriculum materials and videos from their classes, their reflections, and, in some cases, student work and reflections – see Inside Teaching (2008), an online exhibition that brings together many of these sites.

Higher education projects

CASTL scholars have established their own projects

• Bill Cerbin, a Psychology Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse, has gone on to establish a project modeled on Japanese Lesson Study, in which the faculty develop websites that document their teaching of a particular ‘lesson’ or class and their reflections on it.
• Dan Bernstein, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, led a ‘peer-review project’ that engaged faculty from a number of institutions in preparing and reviewing electronic course portfolios.
• Randy Bass, a Professor of American Studies at Georgetown, launched the Visible Knowledge Project, designed to engage faculty across disciplines and institutions to produce electronic ‘posters’ that enable them to share data and collaborate in conducting research into their own practice.
• Toru Iiyoshi, the Knowledge Media Lab of the Carnegie Foundation went on to develop a tool that faculty anywhere can use to develop websites that document their teaching and share them with others on their own campuses or in their own groups or with anyone who has an Internet connection.
• Lesson Study Project, located at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.

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Amanda Parris

student, educator, artist

Lost Lyrics: Started with visiting global youth conferences in Venezuela and Brazil, very encouraged by spirit of “doing things”, even though local communities had no money. Wanted to do something in the spirit of the “hip-hop culture” (of making something out of what other people thinks is nothing).

Working with an organization created an after-school program, curriculum was determined together with the students - they would be very frank in telling whether something was interesting or not. Turned out to be too political for that organization, ended up continuing the work independently. Believe that there is a lot of richness in those communities, diaspora culture, history etc.

Experimenting with Twitter hashtags. Example of a presentation on blackness - discussing etymology of the word, historical ads and depictions, movements that have attempted to reclaim the notion of blacknesses, love using music videos. Many things that cannot easily be communicated in an academic article.

Obsessed with documenting, cognizant of the fact that a lost of our histories were lost because other people were using our histories. We're not so good at using the raw media, we're sitting on a lot of footage. But our kids are part of that documentation process - teachers have cameras, students have cameras - what is it like to be in front of the camera, behind the camera, what are the responsibilities that follow, etc. Promotional video

Bea Meglio

TDSB teacher

Media was almost lost in the dark 90's in Ontario, strong lobby of grasroots media educators that enabled a pretty comprehensive media program. Media studies expectations from kindergarten to grade 12. A system of professional development to support teachers.

A few years ago, the focus changed from consumption to creators. Today, production tools are very accessible, social media has exploded. Sharing.

We shape our tools, and those tools shape us.

The sharing has led us to challenge conceptions of who we are, concepts of privacy, relationships with each other, relationships with corporations. Media studies is about thinking critically, about asking questions.

Asking questions.

• Why can't I turn my head when Honey Bo Bo is on
• Why don't anyone on TV look like me
• Or why do everyone on TV look like me

Teaching media/taking media courses in itself is an act of social justice - media studies is social justice.

Michael Hoechsmann

Associate professor at Lakehead University

Project: Youth Digital Media Ecologies in Canada Mapping youth media production context in three Canadian cities

Database of organizations that work on youth literacy, digital media. Map it, what media, what forms of outcome as well as who produce them?

The idea of a “scene”, like a music scene, what is the media scene? A conglomeration through which people and capital flows. We want to say that it is capacity building and empowerment, but it's very hard to show that this is the fact. Need longitudinal research to show this, but the organizations are too busy with day-to-day survival, running programs, and fundraising.

Historic centre of the city is where projects are clustered. Cities with urban poverty at the edges, but organizations tend to be clustered around the historical centre (should also map schools, and other institutions). Enables us to start asking questions. There is a nervousness around assessment schemes, and what it means for youth media organizations, but there is also a curiosity… What does happen to youth that have been involved in a youth project… What is the life impact of a youth media project?

Social capital, related to the resources required, and the kind of resource sharing that might exist.

History, tracking the establishment of organizations over time. We researched about 60 organizations, only one of them existed before 1990, 42% established 1990-2000.

Tries to map to what extent the organizations collaborate. 25% of organizations share all their resources, 48% share staff members, 44% share funding, 67% share partnered development. The kind of media produced: 7% interactive games, 59% narrative fiction, etc.

One finding: journalism has diminished in its role, creative storytelling has taken its place (early impression).

It's a sector that can move much more quickly than schools.

The project should be done by May, and all the cities (including Toronto) will be there.

Sameena Eidoo

PhD from OISE, researches Muslim youth, citizenship and belonging

Collected the life stories of 18 young activists - what were the critical learning experiences that they had inside and outside of school. Read the story to Aisha, and asked her what she wanted me to do with it, she asked me to keep sharing it.

A story about the fatal shooting of her brother by Toronto Police, and her struggle to fight for justice.

The idea of counterstory, from critical race methodology:

A method of telling the stories of the people whose experiences are not often told, ie. those on the margins of society. Also a tool to expose the majoritarian stories of racial privilege.

All of the youth in my study understood what racism was, because they had negative racist experiences in school, but very few had transformative learning experiences in school.

Using an annual basketball competition to commemorate victims of police brutality, bringing youth together to play peacefully, but also to educate.

The issue of schools that are patrolled by police (usually in racialized communities), often creates fear.

Discussion

Entrypoints - how do you engage youth that is not necessarily predisposed to social justice (Bari)

• Lost Lyrics accepts anyone who wants to join, earlier we were more passionate about being defined as an advocacy organization. Most of our students are 11 years old, so most people don't have strong political ideas, but we want them to be open to learning. In addition, there isn't one way to be an activist, or one particular future, the concept of “selling out”. Rather: what kind of people are we sending back into the world. If you're a hair dresser, do you understand the social history of hair, the cultural meaning of hair in the African community, where your hair products come from, etc.
• Braxton (Lost Lyrics student): opened up my mind, before I had a lot of experiences before, but no way of engage with it, no words. Lost Lyrics was my foundation for learning. This is a safe space, no right way or wrong way, open your mind.
• Michael: Audience - if you are producing media and it's going to go somewhere else, someone else will listen to it. Young people to young people can be very frivolous, but youth to adult audience, teacherly, young people say back what adults want them to say. Politically correct, etc. Hybrid audience, young people with their peers and adults - result: people got really serious, elevated their game to serious social issues of the day. Experience with Young People's Press.

Young people's idea of news. Expectations placed on you from outside, and that you place on yourself, are they manageable? (Avery)

• Amanda: When we began, we didn't have a clear plan, different from many other organiztions. We first entered the community, no expectation, stumbled into the creation of a program. Very free. Did some of the right things and some of the wrong things. Identified some of the key stakeholders (students, their families). Held village cypher(?) - concept from hip-hop, everyone is giving energy and participating in exchange. Brought together key stakeholders, later started inviting funders. Students, parents, some teachers. Share with them what we'd been doing, ask them for critical feedback. They were very direct in telling us what we should be doing. Amazing, but also a lot of pressure. Students staid for years, got very invested in it. “You should be a school, you should be global, etc”.
• Avery: How do you negotiate expectations in relationship to the school system?
• Amanda: Gaining legitimacy, largest challenge - often “belittled” in being “the hip-hop program”, the “culturally relevant program” - assumption that you can do your work in 45 minutes, come in once, and it'll all be done. Wanting to get the resources of working with schools (income), but limitations. Idea of gaining some level of accreditation with the school system, how much freedom would we have to give up.
• Braxton: We use media every day in class, students are so engaged, we love to learn - being able to learn through your culture is amazing. Students are driving the curriculum, and media is a good gateway to that.

How do we “mainstream” media studies - integrating it into all classes (Saskia)

• Bea: In K-6, there is no time to cover (negative) → media literacy becomes very cross-curricular (positive).

Sameena, what do you see as entry points that can enable transformative learning experiences (Saskia)

• The justice component is the critical component, can't be forgotten. Some things need to stay on the outside, and as educators we need to know about what's available, so that we can connect students to opportunities, but something about institutionalizing practice makes me nervous.
• Focusing on activists tends to focus on all the bad things in the world - but there's a reason why we're focusing on this, because we want change. How do we understand media as part of a larger system, in connection with school, with police… Why does public schools even want to be transformative, they are maintaining a system. Examining your own personal biases, what are you afraid that the students are going to hear about?

How to approach topics of racialization, feel like I'm putting my students of color in the spotlight. Because I didn't grow up as a person of color, I don't have access to that experience, but I want to address it in an authentic way?

• Amanda: I think everyone is racialized, we have to recognize that - even white people. Recognize that your social location might have been racialized in an invisible way is very powerful. Shakespeare wasn't your experience either, but you can teach it - so just do the work. There is a wide realm of work in critical race theory which people think is too complex for a K-6 group, but I totally disagree - it can be remixed and presented. There is an incredible amount of resources available, gifts, memes… Don't pretend to know anything if you don't, it's OK to say that you don't know. We can learn together, vulnerable and humble position, really appreciated by students.

Your best sales people are teachers, there are some amazing teachers out there (Lesley)

What can we do and what can't we, what's radical and what's possible? Easy as teachers to become “ghettoized”, don't tell anyone what you're doing, don't run it through the principal, keep it off the radar. Principals are very sensitive to criticism, want stability and safety. Outside organizations have a lot more flexibility. Very difficult for a media stuies teacher to teach well, and not have the students become radicalized. If you are teaching social justice, don't make the school the target, it's a bit safer. (Neil)

• Amanda: It's where you have to be strategic.

Bergstrom, T., Harris, A., & Karahalios, K. (2011). Encouraging initiative in the classroom with anonymous feedback. Human-Computer Interaction–INTERACT 2011, 627–642. Springer. Retrieved from http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/papers/pdfs/bergstrom-interact2011.pdf.

Key ideas

Literature review

Lecturer speaks for more than 80% of the time, five students out of 40 dominate any classroom discussion.

Why is participation important?

Participation serves to

• let teacher better assess level of knowledge, attention etc of students, and adapt teaching
• utilize useful prior knowledge/insights of students (examples, cases, additional information etc)
• let students engage in constructivist learning

Constructivist learning

Students need to be actively engaged in their learning [1, 21].

Lecturers awareness of classroom comprehension

Skewed by students' social pressures and few speaking opportunities

• students try to present a positive image of themselves to their peers
• avoid volunteering info due to [22]
  • evaluation anxiety
  • fear of being judged by others for making a mistake
  • or being the focus of attention
• those who speak generally self-confident or understand the material

Backchannel

• Face-to-face: yeah, uh, head nods, facial expressions, clapping, booing

Audience Response Systems

Multiple Choice

Often based on multiple choice or true/false. Often used when lecturer asks explicit MC questions [10, 19].

Challenge for lecturer to anticipate key moments to query the audience, structure the lecture to accomodate this format.

If not implemented properly, can become automated “attendance taking and quiz” interface - resented by students.

Text-based

Two challenges:

• ease of interpretation (need for attention)
  • this often leaves the speaker out of the loop during the event
• danger of going off-topic

Course chatrooms [16, 23]:

• explain concepts to confused classmates, make help available, promote deeper learning
• can be tied with video recording for archival and retrieval [3]
  • allow people access to initial thoughts of the audience in an asynchronous manner

Existing platforms for open public dialog:

• IRC
• instant messaging
• Twitter
• Facebook [9, 16, 18]

Writing systems:

• Classroom Presenter [2], enable students to mark directly on current slide with stylus
  • Enables broad sampling of student understanding, active understanding
• Backchan.nl [6]
  • audience organize collective questions for speaker in conference/after talk, includes role of moderator to filter
• Conversation Votes [11]
  • participants annotated an abstract visualization of conversation with positive and negative votes to highlight agreement during conversation
  • in small groups, this anonymous feedback increased the level of participation from those less satisfied with previous conversations

Affective

Quickly communicate the “mood” of the audience (using custom balls) [4]

Axis of expressivity

Distinct categories of low and high expressivity emerge

• low expressivity limit what a student can communicate, but ensure feedback can be quickly interpreted
• high expressivity allow students vast communication capabilities, but require more focused attention for lecturer and students

Own: other axis

Always on vs controlled by the presenter

Social mirror

a realtime depiction of interaction meant to augment natural face-to-face environment

Captures ephemeral moments in conversation and brings them into the public view through visualization. In our previous work, social mirrors displayed abstract visualizations to depict participation in conversation.

The resulting display of conversational dominance, non-participation, and turn taking encouraged more balanced conversation [6].

In these social mirrors, one shared visualization of conversation was projected centrally for all participants to see.

Design

Considerations

Based on idea of social mirrors, but differences:

• many more participants
• architecture of space different from layout of small group interacting around a small table
• natural asymmetry lecturer-audience

Fragmented:

• use of individual interfaces for each participant
• shortened time component, as opposed to full history present

Process

Observing active, engaged classroom of 100+ students to see what students say. Lecturers were rated as among the best in the department. Noted all student responses to understand what students want to say during class.

Categories:

• questions (on topic)
• information (adding)
• agreement/disagreement (answering lecturer's q)
• slow down/redo (procedural)
• cannot hear/repeat (procedural)

Used categories from above to group similar responses, highlight important categories of questions.

Investigate imagery:

• Three researchers independently drew graphics they felt captured messages
• 5-15 images per message
• survey of 54 CS undergrads to test icon designs
• eliminated slow down/speak up, ended up with four categories

Initial prototypes borrowed design components from Conversation Clock and Conversation Votes [5, 6], incorporated feedback into a timeline that structured the activity. Good for archival, required much attention to understand during lecture.

Product: Fragmented Social Mirror

• Java applet accessed from computer/mobile device
• Large public display in front

Input used to capture only one comment, history of feedback on public display, limited to history of most recent comments (based on needs of lecturer).

Icons

Information, Question, Yes/Agree, No/Disagree. Info and Q can be augmented by 40 character message, yes/no allow them to answer questions quickly.

Messages on public display grouped by icon, icon group with most messages on top with larger icon.

Can only send one signal every 10 seconds to not flood.

Fading

Messages fade from black to grey, before disappearing. Message count next to icon.

Rationale

• Don't want lecturers overwhelmed
• If question goes unanswered and disappears, encourage students to ask again, or raise hand (see that others want to know the same thing)

Study

• Required second year course with 180 students, instructor not affiliated with research team
• Six course sessions: three without augmentation, three with FSM.
• Average of 100 students in attendance.
• Pre-survey and post-survey on participation
• Observe student participation.

Findings

Survey

Students not comfortable asking questions or clarification during class, more comfortable in smaller recitations.

Post-survey students felt it was easier to participate in the classroom. Recognized difficulty of maintaining order, maybe make semi-anonymous.

With FSM, classrom dialog was more involved, lecturer felt she was talking to rather than at people, students took more proactive role in directing conversation to points that were not clear.

Activity

Initial sessions very little participation.

Proactive using FSM, asking questions 11 times:

• ask questions
• keep professor from moving too quickly
• answer questions posed by professor
• most on-topic messages began with or contained a question for the professor interesting axis, question from professor to students, or from students to professor... or students->students?

Abuse

In backchan.nl, some users voted up questions for humor [11].

In FSM, there were many off-topic messages.

Challenges

• distracting off-topic messages
• relevant messages that bring in new information/topics - can cause planned material to not be covered

Future research

Does FSM encourage students who are already engaged to further surpass their peers, or genuinely help students who need a small boost to get involved? (Ie. who uses it?)

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Information: Students add their own connection to outside subjects.

Agreement/Disagreement: Answering a Lecturer’s question.

Slow Down/Redo: Students did not understand the lecturer.

Cannot Hear/Repeat: Students did not hear the lecturer. p. 4

Our list was very similar to feedback available in other work to mark up a presentation slide [20]. We began to investigate this set of six messages for our prototypes. These six messages would serve as categories with the ability for students to include a short text message for explanation. The message categories serve as a means to p. 4

identify and group similar responses and highlight important categories like questions. In parallel with our interface design, we investigated imagery for each of these six categories of messages (described in the next section). Due to this process, “Slow Down/Redo” and “Cannot Hear/Repeat” were eliminated. Suitable icons could not be found and they easily be replaced by an “Information” message with appropriate text. p. 5

Many of our initial interface prototypes borrowed design components from the Conversation Clock and Conversation Votes [5, 6], they incorporated the feedback into a timeline that structured the activity throughout the session. In some cases, we included indications of speaker. Much like a standard instant messenger, the full history of messages could be read through at any time. These interfaces showed potential for the review of archival classroom data, but did not serve our purpose of encouraging classroom interaction. These prototypes, tested amongst our own group, required too much attention to adequately understand. p. 5

After refining the initial prototypes, we settled on a simple interface students could use without pulling their attention too far from the lecturer. Thus the input of the FSM was used only for capturing one comment. The history of feedback was only seen on the public display and limited that history to the most recent comments. Additionally, the needs of the lecturer necessitated this type of design. The lecturer needed to be able to read feedback from the hundreds in the audience while still being able to teach effectively. In past studies, a social mirror was primarily viewed by the listeners (and not the speaker) in conversation because they had more free attention [5]. In this design, the captured feedback of conversation is significantly pared down, so that the lecturer can receive the benefits from the social mirror with minimal attention. Therefore, current comments/questions are displayed so as not to overwhelm the viewers with a long history. p. 5

The FSM interface passes information through icons. These graphics serve to simplify the message so that the lecturer might easily understand the classroom without reading too much content. Based on informal observation of classroom sessions and prior work [20], we designed icons based on the messages earlier: “I have a question,” “I have information/an answer,” “Yes/agree,” “No/disagree,” “Speak Up,” “Slow Down.” Three researchers independently drew any graphic that they felt reasonably captured these messages. We combined them into sets for each category, with a total of 5–15 images for each message. p. 5

We conducted a survey of Computer Science undergraduates to test our icon designs. A total of 54 Computer Science undergraduates completed our survey. Their feedback identified 17 icons that convey the intended message. Figure 1 shows all 17 icons. None of the icons for “Slow Down” conveyed an adequate message to the student. We eliminated this message, as well as the “Speak Up” messages in favor of a simpler 4-icon interface. Students can use the Information and Question messages with additional text to signal “Slow Down” and “Speak Up.” p. 5

There are two FSM interfaces — the student’s client interface for a computer or handheld device (Figure 2) and a larger public screen for the lecturer and audience (Figure 3). The public display is situated in the front of the room, though the lecturer sees the public display on a personal screen. The four different preselected icons categorize student responses in the student interface. The icons represent: Information, Questions, yes/agree, no/disagree. Of the four categories or signals, the Information and Question signals can be augmented by a 40-character message. The short messages allow students to clarify their questions or possible answers when there is no opportunity to speak while the yes/no buttons allows students to answer simple questions quickly. p. 7

All messages on the public display are grouped by their associated icon to increase legibility for the speaker. The speaker can look up and see many questions that need to be addressed or they can glance over answers that p. 7

students provided via the display. p. 8

The icon group with the most messages moves to the top of the screen with a larger icon. The most recent message of this icon appears at the top of that icon in white text set against the black background. As a message ages, it fades to grey before finally disappearing after a pre-configured time. For icons with multiple messages, a count is displayed to the left of the icon. p. 8

Messages on the public display are limited to recent messages. Only the most recent minute of activity is visible; each message fades in brightness over the minute before disappearing from view. The rationale for this design was two fold: (1) we did not want the lecturers to be confused or overwhelmed by reading old questions from a prior part of the lecture and (2) if a question goes unanswered and disappears, this removal may encourage a student to verbalize the question in class or to repost it. One of our main goals is to encourage more class interaction. If a student can “see” that they are not alone in their confusion, they may be less apprehensive to speak out and ask a question. p. 8

Once a student sends a signal via posting an icon, they are blocked from sending additional signals for a brief period (10 seconds in our pilot) to discourage excessive social chatter and monopolization of the channel. While there is some room for abuse as with the backchan.nl system, where some users voted up questions for humor [11], the public availability of the channel is ultimately at the discretion of the lecturer. p. 8

We conducted a pilot study to investigate the FSM in the classroom. We began by observing the participation levels before the introduction of the FSM and again with the FSM in place. For this, we observed a required second year course with roughly 180 registered students at the beginning of the semester. The instructor was not affiliated with our research team. We observed a total of six course sessions: three initially without any augmentation, and three with the addition of the FSM. During observation, an average of 100.0 students were in attendance, though there were p. 8

Prior to testing the FSM in class, we sent a pre-survey and described the use of the FSM. The survey inquired about the student's comfort level while participating in class versus their smaller discussion sections. Feedback from the survey confirmed that students are not comfortable asking questions or asking for clarification during class, though they are more comfortable asking in their smaller recitation sections. Similarly, they recognize that they do not participate or ask questions during class (Figure 5). p. 10

Our initial observations showed little interaction between audience and lecturer over the course of three 50-minute sessions. The only activity from the audience was in response to questions posed by the lecturer. For example, students were asked “n is divisible by what?” and “What is the cardinality of set Q?” in reference to a proof. The class averaged about four responses per class. The students initiated zero interactions themselves, five of the twelve responses were general indefinite murmurs from the class, and two responses involved raising hands. Various sets of 1–3 unidentified students spoke up to answer the remaining six questions. p. 10

We tested the FSM in three class sessions and found the students were proactive in using the system. In the classroom, the lecturer used a central projection screen to work through problems by hand while a smaller screen displayed the public display to the right of the larger screen (Figure 6). At the lecture podium, the lecturer also had a copy of the public display available during the class activity. p. 10

With the system in place, Students initiated dialog with the lecturer by asking questions 11 times, compared to zero without the system. When on topic, students used the Fragmented Social Mirror to ask questions of the professor, keep the professor from moving on too quickly, and to answer any questions the professor posed. Figure 7 summarizes the participation in each of the 6 classes. Most of the on-topic dialogs either began with or contained a question for the instructor. They lead to discussions with the instructor and information to enrich the class. However, there p. 10

were also many off-topic messages. These messages were irrelevant to the class topic and were used to draw the attention of other classmates away from the lecture material for their own entertainment. p. 11

Example FSM Dialogs p. 11

In this first example, students requested information that the professor was not trying to teach but established an interesting aside on history related to the lesson: p. 11

Possibility of getting off topic - stuff that is interesting but wasn't planned to be covering. Problem if lecture is planned very tight - going off topic means planned topics must "fall out" p. 11

However, with the addition of initiating comments, there was also an increase in comments solely intended to draw attention away from lecture. These messages often had nothing to do with the lecture or a question tended to come in bursts in order to overwhelm the public display for a short time. As an example of such a burst: p. 12

The lecturer was inclined to read them, see that they were not relevant and either laugh, if it were funny, or state “I don’t know what this means.” However, the increase of messages also meant that the lecturer was more likely to miss relevant exchanges where a student was asking for help: p. 13

We had only planned to gather initial observations to refine the system in these first sessions; however, the instructor was excited to see the students participating and invited us to return with the system for further studies. After the lectures, she indicated that it's always been hard to get this many students to say anything, even with encouragement. The simplicity of the display was also deemed useful, as she could read the questions with a glance. Additionally, the asynchronous nature allowed students to ask their questions while she was still explaining — thus allowing her to work the question into that explanation or come back to it later. Student feedback indicated the device was useful as they “didn't have to try to get the professors attention” by raising a hand from the back of the lecture. p. 13

Students also saw the benefit of the interface, and felt it was easier to participate in the classroom (Figure 8). However, they recognized the difficulty of maintaining order in the anonymous display and provided suggestions to keep the interface on topic. One such suggestion was to make the display semi-anonymous; implement a publicly anonymous interface that retains the identity on the lecturer's display. In this way the instructor could call out any abuse of the display, while protecting the identity of any others who were uncomfortable commenting in front of the class. A similar suggestion would simply log the identities for review after class. p. 13

In the sessions with the FSM, the classroom dialog was more involved. The lecturer felt like she was talking to people rather than at people while the students took a more proactive role in directing conversation to points that were not understandable. With 100 students, evaluation anxiety limits the individuals willing to speak - however we have shown that anonymous feedback can break the barrier and include more students. p. 14

The Fragmented Social Mirror indicates that the use of text based anonymous feedback has potential for promoting engagement in the classroom. A long term study could investigate the effects on learning outcomes: does the FSM encourage students who are already engaged in class to further surpass their peers, or does it genuinely help students who just need a small boost to get involved? p. 16

7 References p. 16

2. Anderson, R., Anderson, R., Davis, P., Linnell, N., Prince, C., Razmov, V., and Videon, F. Classroom Presenter: Enhancing Interactive Education with Digital Ink. Computer. 40(9):56-61. 2007. p. 16

3. Baecker, R., Fono, D., Lillian, B., and Collins, C. Webcasting made interactive: persistent chat for text dialogue during and and about learning events. Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Human interface: Part II. 2007. p. 16

5. Bergstrom, T. and Karahalios, K. Seeing More: Visualizing Audio Cues. Proceedings of Interact. 2007. p. 16

6. Bergstrom, T. and Karahalios, K. Vote and Be Heard: Adding Back-Channel Cues to Social Mirrors. Proceedings of Interact. 2009. p. 16

9. Ebner, M. and Reinhardt, W. Social networking in scientific conferences - Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community. In Proceedings of the 5th EduMedia Conference. 2009. p. 16

10. Fitch, J. L. Student feedback in the college classroom: A technology solution. Educational Technology Research and Development. 52(1):71-77. 2004. p. 16

11. Harry, D., Green, J., and Donath, J. Backchan.nl: integrating backchannels in physical space. Proc. of CHI. 2009. p. 16

13. Karahalios, K. and Bergstrom, T. Social Mirrors as Social Signals: Transforming Audio into Graphics. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. 29(5):22-32. 2009. p. 16

14. Kay, R. H. and LeSage, A. Examining the benefits and challenges of using audience response systems: A review of the literature. Comput. Educ. 53(3):819-827. 2009. p. 16

15. Krauss, R. M., Garlock, C. M., Bricker, P. D., and McMahon, L. E. The role of audible and visible back-channel responses in interpersonal communication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 35(7):523-529. 1977. p. 16

16. McCarthy, J. F. and boyd, d. m. Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces: experiences at an academic conference CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. 1641-1644. 2005. p. 16

18. Shamma, D. A., Kennedy, L., and Churchill, E. F. Tweet the debates: understanding community annotation of uncollected sources WSM '09: Proceedings of the first SIGMM workshop on Social media. 3-10. 2009. p. 17

19. Stowell, J. R. and Nelson, J. M. Benefits of Electronic Audience Response Systems on Student Participation, Learning, and Emotion. Teaching of Psychology. 34(4):253-258. 2007. p. 17

20. VanDeGrift, T., Wolfman, S. A., Yasuhara, K., and Anderson, R. J. Promoting Interaction in Large Classes with a Computer-Mediated Feedback System. University of Washington, Computer Science and Engineering. 2002. p. 17

21. von Glasersfeld, E. Cognition, Construction of Knowledge, and Teaching. History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching. 80(1):121-140. 1989. p. 17

22. Weaver, R. R. and Qi, J. Classroom Organization and Participation: College Students' Perceptions. The Journal of Higher Education. 76(5):570-601. 2005. p. 17

23. Yardi, S. Whispers in the Classroom. In Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, T. McPherson,Ed 2008. p. 17

Images

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Citation	Masli, M., & Terveen, L. (2012). Evaluating compliance-without-pressure techniques for increasing participation in online communities. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Retrieved from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5121943/peerlearning/masli_evaluating-complicance-without-pressure-online-communities_chi-2012.pdf.	Sidewiki
BibDesk		PDF

Key ideas

Discussion on P2PU

Trying out two ways of encouraging users to contribute to a community: “foot-in-the-door” (FITD) and “low-ball” (LB). Low-ball elicited more work than foot-in-the-door. Worked as one-time intervention, not to create lasting increase in engagement

Literature review

Compliance without pressure

Developed by social psychology and marketing researchers, other techniques:

• door-in-the-face
  • Cialdini, R., et al. Reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing compliance: The door-in-the-face technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31, 2 (1975), 206.
• that’s-notall
  • Burger, J. Increasing compliance by improving the deal: The that’s-not-all technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 2 (1986), 277.
• bait-and-switch

Social production communities

Loosely-connected users work together to produce information and artifacts of value.

Online difference

Most research has been conducted offline. Effect is often better in public settings with higher visibility, this might play out differently online, with more anonymity - are online social production communities public or private spaces (people work from their homes).

Also, e-mail is not as personal as face-to-face or phone, and e-mail overload may lead to people ignoring incoming messages.

Research setting

Cyclopath, geographic wiki offering route-finding for cyclists in Minneapolis. Ask users to contribute tags to map.

Intervention

Short e-mail with different text to three groups, FITD, LB, and control group.

Outcome variables

• Response (yes or no, and number)
• Quantity of work (number of tag-applications, number of new tags)

Foot-in-the-door (FITD)

Once a person performs a small request, he/she is more likely to perform a subsequent, larger demand.

Why does it work?

Bem's self-perception theory: when a person is induced to comply with a smaller request, he/she is more likely to comply with a subsequent, larger request because of perceiving himself/herself as the type of person that does such tasks

Alternative: psychological reactance, conformity to existing social norms including reciprocity and cognitive dissonance

Freedman, J., and Fraser, S. Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4, 2 (1966), 195–202.

Low-ball (LB)

Once a person commits to a request, he/she is more likely to perform it at a later stage, even if its cost is increased.

Why does it work?

commitment: people generally tend to stick to their commitments when acting in public view

Cialdini, R., et al. Low-ball procedure for producing compliance: Commitment then cost. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, 5 (1978), 463–476.

Findings

LB significantly increased quantity of work subjects put in, FITD was not as successful.

When subsequently asked to do more work, FITD participants did less work than others.

Discussion

Reciprocity, cyclopath did not return the favors asked.

Reactance to excessive requesting (either annoyance that they were being badgered, or feeling that they had already done their share)

Anchoring - this is the amount of work I should be doing (ie. minimal)

Links here

• Idea log Friday June 08, 2012

ABSTRACT Social psychology offers several theories of potential use for designing techniques to increase user contributions to online communities. Some of these techniques follow the “compliance without pressure” approach, where users are led to comply with a request without being subjected to any obvious external pressure. We evaluated two such techniques – foot-in-the-door and low-ball – in the context of Cyclopath, a geographic wiki. We found that while both techniques succeeded, low-ball elicited more work than foot-in-the-door. We discuss design and research implications of applying these (and other such techniques) in online communities. p. 1

While these techniques have been evaluated extensively in several offline contexts, there has been very little evaluation in the world of computer-mediated communication [16, 17], and none in online social production communities. p. 1

We evaluated FITD and LB techniques in the context of Cyclopath1, an online geographic wiki that offers route-finding services for cyclists in the metropolitan area of MinneapolisSt. Paul, Minnesota, USA. We carried out a work campaign in which we requested Cyclopath users to contribute information to the map in the form of tags with the goal of improving the map for the next cycling season. We conducted a field study and a follow-up survey and found that LB succeeded in eliciting more contributions than the control condition, while FITD had limited success. p. 1

Social production communities [2, 14] let loosely-connected users work together to produce information and artifacts of value [10]. p. 1

• Foot-in-the-door (FITD): Once a person performs a small request, he/she is more likely to perform a subsequent, larger demand [12]. p. 1

Anonymity on the Internet. Psychological phenomena like cognitive dissonance, considered one of the factors behind the FITD and LB effects, as well as the LB effect itself have been shown to be more effective in public situations [5, 32], where visibility is higher (and consequently, anonymity is lower). However, since obtaining an identity on the Internet is cheap [13], online communications have a higher degree of anonymity than offline situations. Hence, it is not clear if online social production communities are public (contributions are shared) or private spaces (people can work from the confines of their homes), thereby raising questions over the effectiveness of the FITD and LB techniques. p. 2

Compliance without pressure techniques are designed to lead people to comply with requests without any obvious source of external pressure. Researchers from social psychology and marketing have developed several techniques that fall under this category, e.g. FITD, LB, door-in-the-face [7], that’s-notall [3] and bait-and-switch. FITD is one of the oldest and the most popular of them with well over a hundred studies devoted to it over the last 50 years [4]. LB has also been found to be one of the most effective of these techniques [21, 22]. Because of their effectiveness, FITD and LB are interesting candidate solutions to the problem of under-contribution in online communities, and we thus chose to investigate them. p. 2

Nature of online communication. Email and similar modes of communication are used most often by online social production communities to interact with their members, as it is the norm on the Internet. These modes are fundamentally not as personal as face-to-face or telephone communication – modes used by most studies of compliance in offline situations. Further, due to problems of email overload, it easy to ignore incoming messages. These reasons affect any interventions that use email as the underlying mode of communication. p. 2

Several theories have tried to explain why and how FITD and LB work (or not). The most popular explanation for the success of the FITD technique is Bem’s self-perception theory [1], which postulates that when a person is induced to comply with a smaller request, he/she is more likely to comply with a subsequent, larger request because of perceiving himself/herself as the type of person that does such tasks. Alternative theories including those citing psychological reactance, conformity to existing social norms including reciprocity and cognitive dissonance [11] have also been used to explain both successes and failures of the FITD technique. The LB effect has been generally explained using the theory of commitment [8], which says that people generally tend to stick to their commitments when acting in public view. We elaborate on these techniques in a later section in this paper while interpreting the results of our field experiment. p. 2

While compliance-without-pressure techniques may have potential to increase participation in online communities, if users perceive these techniques as manipulative, their use could negatively impact long-term member satisfaction and commitment. Accordingly, in this work, along with evaluating how successful FITD and LB are in an online social production context, we also evaluate the extent to which they are harmful and discuss the pragmatic issues designers of online communities might face when employing some of them. p. 2

Online communities have several key differences that makes them unique, and justify the need for an empirical evaluation of proven offline techniques: p. 2

Initial contact – FITD. We sent email to the subjects in the FITD group asking them to do the initial (small) task of extracting just one tag from a single note, with the subject line “A tiny favor: Cyclopath needs your help!”. The key passage was: Would you spare a minute to help this campaign? All we are asking you to do is to read the following note and extract only one meaningful tag (one or two word label) from it. The email also contained the note itself (we thought that once the subject eyeballed it, the task of extracting one tag would seem trivial), a sample note-tag pair, and a link to an interface to submit the tag. This link launched a simple HTMLbased interface where the subject could re-read the note and enter the tag he/she extracted (see Figure 1(a)). For example, a subject extracted the tags “Dirt path” from the note “dirt path connects to Arcade beware of curb”. Since the initial FITD contact had to be short and easy, we limited subjects to just one attempt at it: if a subject clicked the link again, the system would display a message saying he/she has already completed the task. After the subject submitted the tag from the HTML interface, he/she was thanked. p. 3

Our experiment design was guided by two hypotheses: H1. The FITD technique will result in higher compliance for the contribution request than the request being presented alone. H2. The LB technique will result in higher compliance for the contribution request than the request being presented alone. p. 3

We measured compliance using two outcome (dependent) variables:

• Response: Whether the user responded at all and the number of responses per user (we allowed users to respond multiple times, as described later) to the target request.
• Quantity of Work: The amount of work done by the user in response to our request, measured in terms of number of tag-applications to blocks and points, and number of new tags introduced into the tag vocabulary. p. 3

Initial contact – LB. We asked the subjects in the LB group (with the same subject line) to agree to extract one tag from a single note, explicitly asserting that this task should take only a minute to complete. The key passages were: Would you spare a minute to help this campaign? All we are asking you to do is to read a note and extract only one tag (single word label) from it (this should just take you a minute) and p. 3

If you agree now, we’ll contact you with specific instructions in near future, after we have heard from more people. The email also contained a sample note-tag pair and a link to an interface to express commitment. This link launched a simple HTML-based interface (similar to the FITD interface) where the subject was thanked for agreeing (see Figure 1(b)). p. 4

Summary of results. Our results suggest that the LB technique significantly increased the quantity of work subjects put in (hypothesis H2). The FITD technique, on the other hand, is not as successful – an average FITD trial produced more work than a control trial, but on an average, FITD subjects did no more work than control subjects (0.57 ≈ 0.60) (hypothesis H1). There also was evidence that the LB technique fared better than the FITD technique. p. 5

Reciprocity: Cyclopath did not return the favors asked. p. 6

The LB effect is theoretically simpler: it is generally explained by the theory of commitment. The seminal work on the LB effect [8] attributed its success to the development of commitment to the task in the minds of the person as a consequence of the initial contact. Further research [6] has shown that commitment to the requester, not the task, is actually responsible for the increased likelihood of compliance to the target request. In our case, either is possible: task commitment, since we explicitly asked LB subjects to agree to the task of extracting a tag from a note, or requester committment, as Cyclopath is a community resource, and people tend to care for the communities they are a part of. p. 6

Conformity to norms: Was the target request not to be done? p. 6

Consistency needs. p. 6

There have been several attempts at explaining the FITD effect (or the lack of it) using a variety of psychological processes and theories [4]. Based on these theories, we speculate on the following reasons behind our results.7 p. 6

In the FITD context, when a subject is presented with the larger request, he/she behaves consistently with his/her prior behavior in a similar context, i.e., the compliance to the initial smaller request. p. 6

Self-perception not strong enough. p. 6

Reactance as a result of excessive requesting. p. 6

We designed a follow-up study to address the following research questions that we constructed from analyzing the results of our field study: p. 6

RQ-FITD. Why did the FITD technique meet with limited success? Possible reasons include:

• FITD subjects did not perceive themselves to be the type of people who respond to requests from community sites like Cyclopath (self-perception).
• FITD subjects did not feel motivated enough to comply with the target request because they felt that they had already done their part when they responded to the initial contact (reactance).
• FITD subjects felt that the repeating requesting behavior from Cyclopath was badgering them (reactance).  p. 6

• FITD subjects who turned down the initial contact felt obligated to comply with the target request on the grounds of reciprocity (reciprocity). p. 7

RQ-LB. Why did the LB technique succeed in eliciting more contributions? Possible reasons include:

• LB subjects complied with the target request because they felt a sense of commitment towards the task of extracting tags from notes (task commitment).
• LB subjects complied with the target request because they felt a sense of commitment towards Cyclopath (requester commitment). p. 7

Mainly useful for one-offs, not for fostering long term increase in participation p. 9

REFERENCES p. 9

Citation	Koh, J., Kim, Y. G., Butler, B., & Bock, G. W. (2007). Encouraging participation in virtual communities. Communications of the ACM, 50(2), 68–73. ACM. Retrieved from http://business.kaist.ac.kr/re_center/fulltext/2007/2007-034.pdf.	Sidewiki
BibDesk		PDF

Key ideas

Notes from P2PU discussion

Survey + statistics from 71 Korean communities to find success factors. Offline meetings leads to increase in posting, usefulness leads to increase in reading. Moderator has no effect.

Literature review

Social presence

Definition: the degree to which the medium facilitates awareness of other people and interpersonal relationships during an interaction

Critical for effective communications in many social/work contexts.

Textual information prevalent, but low social presence - needs support with graphical, textual or video interfaces.

Sustainable virtual communities

Require

• clear purpose or vision
• clear definition of members' role
  • for example based on life cycle, visitor, novice, regular etc
• leadership by community moderators
  • play an important role in developing social climate, critical success factor for sustainability of any virtual community.
  • who face challenge of dealing with heterogenity of members: age, education, profession
• online/offline events
  • strengthen members' identification within community, and with one another
  • to amplify this, encourage community members to remember physical appearance of other members or help them match real names with nicknames, etc.
  • can also be replaced with multimedia support, camera chatting etc

Other perspective, requires:

• clear vision
• opinion leaders
• offline interaction
• basic guidelines
• useful content

Research question

Factors that stimulate participants' posting and viewing of community content

Which of four following factors stimulate virtual community:

• leader involvement
• offline interaction
• usefulness
• IT infrastructure quality

Site

77 virtual communities in Korea on Freechal.com, which has half a million virtual communities. Used survey, as well as archival data to measure community size, age, and average monthly level.

Findings

Posting activity influenced by offline interaction

Viewing activity affected by perceived usefulness

The fact that these two are influenced by different factors is a key finding.

Contrary to expectations, efforts of community leaders not directly associated with either.

Discussion

Could be because of collectivist and long-term orientation of Korean culture (explain effect of offline interaction), while perceptions of power distance and strong sense of equity explain insignificant effect of leader involvement.

Links here

Plugin Backlinks: Nothing was found.

Images

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p. 4

General notes about HCI

Course at Coursera

Week 1

General about HCI

• consistency and feedback
• best interfaces become invisible to us
• attentional shift happens when interface becomes intuitive (blind person feeling the world at the end of her cane)
• people's tasks, goals and values drive development

Prototyping

• grounds communication
• rapidly creating an approximation of a design idea
• embodies design hypotheses - a reflective conversation with materials
• Goal of prototyping is the feedback - “a question rendered as an artefact”
• Role of prototype in conversation - serves as common ground
• Prototypes are always incomplete
• Sketching before you make a painting
• Human psychology: people are notoriously bad at estimating the space of possible outcomes, intuitions are often wrong
• Focus on goals of design, rather than of a particular design itself
• Cycle of flair and focus, hallmark of design processes Early on very broad ideas, towards end, micro-adjustments

Strategy to deal with things that are hard to predict

• “known unknowns” - wonder whether they'll be an issue
• “unknown unknowns” - stuff you hadn't even thought about

Rights of prototype:

• should not be required to be complete
• should be easy to change
• gets to retire

What do prototypes prototype?

• feel, what might it look like
• implementation, what might it work like
• role, what might the experience be like

Two dimensional chart - how much you learn from a prototype, and how long it took to create it

Annealing - hill climb, local maximum and global maximum (you can optimize a certain strategy, but maybe that strategy isn't the best overall - be able to jump)

Cost of change over time - physical products vs web sites etc. Not just programming cost - people get used to a certain piece of software → ideal is to make the biggest changes early (when it's cheap) and then keep refining (smaller changes)

Evaluating designs

• design and its relationship to truth and objectivity
• the people designing the interface know too much about the interface (and the ideas behind it) and too little about the actual user needs and practices

Different kinds of empirical research

• usability studies, bringing people to the lab and watching them use it, informal ↔ formal
  • shortcomings: setting isn't very ecologically valid (especially for mobile interfaces that users are expected to use “on the go” etc)
  • “please me” experimental bias, may work harder or be nicer than they would otherwise
  • if you only try one (the current) interface, you have no comparison
• surveys
  • get feedback from many people, compare different alternatives
  • difference between what people say they are going to do, and what they actually do
• focus groups
  • the group dynamics might be positive and give you more useful data, or negative - people agree too much or come up with things that aren't really what they think
  • especially difficult for taboo topics or cultural biases
• feedback from experts
  • useful to have a structured format, like rubrics
  • for example heuristic evaluation (we'll learn) - Jacob Nielsen
  • dogfooding ?
  • peer critique
• comparative experiments
  • see actual behavior as opposed to self report (compared to surveys)
  • can see multiple alternatives (as opposed to usability studies)
  • often more actionable
  • if running it online, can't see much about the person on the other side of the screen
• participant observation - for realistic longitudinal behaviour
  • observing what people actually do, in their actual work environments
  • Sutton and Hargardon - brainstorming
• theories and simulations
  • we have a theory about which factors are more important, if we can operationalize this with math, can run simulations
  • Monte Carlo optimization
  • been used a lot for input techniques, because people's motor performance is one of the most quantified aspects of HCI
  • can also be used for higher level cognitive tasks (Peter Pirolli)

Issues to consider:

• reliability/precision
• generalizability
• realism
• comparison
• work involved

Needfinding

• comes from anthropology and field work, Malinowski, “deep hanging out” (Genvieve Bell)

5 key questions:

• what do people do
• what values and goals do people have
• how are these particular activities embedded in a larger ecology
• similarities and differences across people
• …other types of context, like time of day

Jack Whalen - call centre (Xerox PARC) (people who knew the second most were not the people who had been in repair shop the second longest, but those sitting next to the one that had been there the longest: apprenticeship, tacit knowledge)

Ron Yeh - PhD on software tools for field biologists

Apprentice yourself

• set up partnership with people to be observed, be taught steps, observe practice, validate what you are observing with those observed as you go along (work arounds etc)
• workarounds and hacks - errors are a goldmine

Lucy Suchman - Xerox PARC, photocopier use (with John Seely Brown)

Walmart example “Do you want the aisles to be less cluttered” - leading question, self report → lost sales

Resources:

• Bill Buxton - Sketching user interfaces
• Institute of Design at Stanford (dschoolstanfordedu)
• Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience
• Beyer & Holtzblatt, Contextual design

Interviewing

• choosing participants
• representatives of target system
• maybe current users of similar system
• or non users (broaden set of users who can do a task)

use open-ended questions, non-leading. Can be based on log files, recordings etc.

Avoid self-report on:

• what users would want or do in a hypothetical scenario
• how often we do things (better to ask how much you exercised last week, as opposed to “each week”
• how much you like something on an absolute scale (what does 7 mean?)
• avoid binary questions

Longitudinal or sporadic behavior

having participants do the capturing themselves

• diary studies - structured task, specific piece of information
• think about appropriate technology - paper for notes in class, audio recorder while driving etc
• scales much better than direct observation
• as frictionless as possible
• training is needed
• might need reminding and follow up

Experience sampling

• beep people at some regular interval, write down a key piece of information
• “pager studies”

Lead users

• users as sources of design ideas
• Eric von Hippel at MIT
• help lead users turn their specific individual solutions into something that can be more generalized
• lead users as distributed creation engine

Extreme users

• (edge cases)
• how do people handle thousands of messages per day
• interesting users, technophile or technophobe

Personas

• how do you keep insights from users in mind during the entire design process
• concrete, have demographic information, motivation - easier to be empathic towards a real human person than a generic one

Week 2

How to do quick prototyping

Increasingly hard to do, and higher fidelity (as fidelity increases, kinds of useful feedback changes - with digital mockups you might want more formal experimentation techniques)

• storyboards
• paper prototypes
• digital mockups
• HTML
• dynamic
• database

Storyboarding - all about tasks

• don't have to be good at drawing - “star people”
• should convey
  • setting (people, environment, task)
  • sequence (steps, task)
  • satisfaction (motivation, filling need)

Good idea to impose harsh time limit - like 10 minute for the storyboard.

Paper prototyping

• can mix fidelities, print out of actual screenshot with annotations on top of it
• can copy common elements

Try many different alternative prototypes, get users and other stakeholders to help design. Scaffold their efforts.

Wizard of Oz prototypes

You can have high and low fidelity. Advantage of low fidelity - it's clear that you haven't put a lot of time into it, so users feel more free about critiquing it.

When preparing a Wizard of Oz scenario, keep in mind that you need to be able to implement the interaction in software at some point - limit the possible responses. Also practice with a friend before facing “real users”, how to act as a wizard, and what kind of inputs you can expect.

Two people (ideally): one who is the wizard, and one who is talking to people guiding them through it.

What feedback do you want from users? Think-aloud is good, but can be distracting, video prompted recall

Video prototype

• can have a range of fidelities
• should show the whole task, including motivation and success
  • establishing shots and narrative help

How many prototypes should you build?

• many! people graded on quantity of vases vs quality of one vase, egg drop devices etc
• functional fixation (Duncker 1945)
• empirical: parallel prototyping (first creating three different prototypes, and then getting feedback), rather than one design, feedback, iterated new design etc - were better
  • separates ego from feedback
  • encourages comparison and transfer
  • alternatives provide a vocabulary for talking about designs - especially for prospective users who don't know about the whole “design space” available

Key to good design

• what makes an interface easy, hard or “natural”

Making of gulfs, how easily can someone

• determine function of a device
• tell what actions are possible
• determine mapping from intention to physical movement
• perform the action
• tell what state the system is in / if it's in the desired state
• determine the mapping from system state to interpretation

To reduce gulfs (from Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen)

• visibility (perceived affordances or signifiers)
• feedback
• consistency (or standards)
• non-destructive operations (undo)
• discoverability (systematic exploration of menus etc)
• reliability (things work, nothing random)

Mental models

• changing temperature in freezer and refridgerator
• arise from experience, metaphor and analogical reasoning
• slips vs mistakes
  • slip: right model, but made a mistake
  • mistake: did what I intended, but had wrong model

Citation	Hoadley, C. M., & Kilner, P. G. (2005). Using technology to transform communities of practice into knowledge-building communities. ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, 25(1), 31–40. ACM. Retrieved from http://tophe.net/papers/Hoadley-Kilner-SIGGROUP05.pdf.	Sidewiki
BibDesk		PDF

Key ideas

What role does learning play for communities, or communities for learning?

Literature review

Major models of how learning happens (and role of community)

• knowledge transmission
  • naive, simply focus on communicating information, overlook difficulty in comprehension
• behaviorist learning
  • learning as result of conditioned responses
  • interaction with others in a community can be the feedback that conditions responses to stimuli
• developmental learning
  • learning as result of interaction with the world, plus biologically mediated maturation processes
  • interaction with peers and near-peers in a community may provide developmentally appropriate scaffolding
• cognitive learning
  • learning as the result of active cognitive processes that yield new mental representations and predispositions
  • participating with others in groups can provide an opportunity to generate explanations, which results in deeper individual cognitive processing and hence, better learning
• sociocultural learning
  • learning as a result of appropriation of social practices
  • communities provide fertile ground for sociocultural appropriation (adopting expert practices through social processes)

Developmental and cognitive theories both fall under constructivism.

Definition of learning

• learning as changed behavior
• developmental changes
• changed mental representations
• changed social practices

Learning does not need to be positive, for example “learning to be ruthless criminals”. Learned helplessness, learning to “play the game” in school.

Knowledge

“Knowledge as a systemic property of people in communities”

Ebb and flow between tacit and explicit, constructed by individuals, shared, reconstructed by others. Flows in formal dialogues, and in dialogues among groups. (see SECI model)

Learning and communities

CoP: Reciprocal relationship between communities and learning.

To endure, communities need to replicate themselves by enculturating new members through learning. As newcomers arrive in a community, they participate peripherally in its practices. Over time, their participation can become more central as their practices become more expert-like and their identities more entwined with community membership.

Knowledge-building communities

A particular kind of CoP, focused on learning. Based on scholarly communities, explicit goal: development of individual and collective understanding.

C4P

Five key elements

comprise a non-linear system that occurs in a CoP. An increase in any of the elements tends to result in an increase in all of them.

Content

explicit, static knowledge objects - documents, videos (monologue)

purposes:

• attracts members by providing immediate value
• socializes new members by implicitly communicating what kinds of topics and voices are appropriate
• serves as a basis for conversation
• motivates members as they see themselves jointly building their domain of knowledge

Generating quality content is one of the great challenges of nurturing a knowledge-building community, but people are often hesitant to contribute content. The other factors encourage content creation.

Separation between content as external (articles, etc) and generated by the group members? If generated, does it come under "conversation?"

Conversation

face-to-face or online discussions (dialogue)

The most effective mode of knowledge transfer and generation, because the personal connection and back-and-forth nature of conversation provide the greatest context for information.

The challenge within a knowledge-building community is to generate conversations that draw out meaningful knowledge, not aimless chatter.

Meaningful conversation fostered by

• quality content
  • conversation that is focused on a piece of content is likely to build upon that existing knowledge, if content is relevant to community, conversation will probably be too
• clear purpose
  • fosters culture of productive conversations
  • everyone understands that goal of conversations is to support purpose, not just chit-chat
• personal connections
  • leads to culture of trust, members feel safe to challenge each other's assumptions etc

Connections

interpersonal contacts between community members that involve some level of relationship

Lifeblood of a knowledge-building community. Without connections, an online space is merely a document repository (content) or chat room (conversation).

Foster the relationships and subsequent trust that enable distributed people to work together on the common goal of building their knowledge domain.

Can be facilitated by other elements:

• purpose
  • members know they have things in common
  • reduces barriers to forming connections
• content and conversation linked to member profiles of those who contributed knowledge
  • other members get to know contributors, more likely to connect with them

(information) Context

whether and how information is useful to community members

Richness of detail that makes information meaningful and memorable

Enables learners to learn more efficiently and effectively

Answers

• where a knowledge object came from
• how it has been applied in the past
• who the contributor is, and his or her situations
• what a contributor is communicating
• whether the information applies to me
• how can I apply the knowledge to my own situations

Helps situate knowledge among people who are not physically co-located.

Conversations and relationships increase context of information.

Purpose

reason for which members come together in the community

Creates energy and produces results.

Stated purpose vs actual purpose, which inheres all the other four elements. Ideally stated and actual purposes are identical.

Interaction between elements

Elements reinforce each other

• Content shapes conversations and fosters connections
• Conversation generates new content and adds context to existing content
• Connections spark conversations and add context to content
• Information context connects content to related content and to the community’s purpose
• Purpose provides the metaconnection between all the other element

All five elements are important:

• If content is absent, conversation is likely to have difficulty getting started and staying focused on the community’s purpose
• If conversation is missing, knowledge may transfer but is unlikely to be generated
• If connections are absent, there will be fewer contributions of content and conversation the contributions will have less context
• If information context is absent, the community is prone to misinterpret content or apply knowledge inappropriately to new situations
• Without purpose, knowledge building will founder
• A clear communal purpose gives meaning to content, provides direction to conversation, fosters connections, and is the unifying context for all activities in the community.

Design for Distributed Cognition

Encompasses not only cognitive phenomena that might take place in the head (mental representations, human information processing) but also representations and phenomena that take place in the world, between and among people in a social system

Formerly called C-P-C framework, developed in 1998 by analyzing examples of successful information technologies for learning.

Guiding question: “What is the special value added by technology when used as part of best practices in education?”

Advantages that technology can provide to learning environments

Representational advantage

Enormous flexibility and new ways of representing information

• multimedia
• interactivity (real-time)
• presenting information in multiple forms
• microworlds and simulations (cognitive tools)
• multiple linked presentations (representational guidance, MUPEMURE)
• access to information that would otherwise be unwieldy (encyclopedia on your cellphone)

Process advantage

Ability of interactive technologies to scaffold tasks, procedures or processes that learners encounter during learning.

Computer as

• gatekeeper
• timekeeper
• grader
• scaffold/scripting
• intelligent tutoring systems

Support metacognition (self-regulated learning)

• self-quizzes or checklists
• post-hoc video analysis of tennis swings
• reflection prompting systems

Can also

• be used by instructivists to support students in just-in-tim einstruction
• by cognitive construcitivists trying to reduce a student’s cognitive load
• by sociocultural constructivists to support social scaffolding and appropriation processes

Social context advantage

Technology used to change or distort social context in which learner operates to facilitate more or better learning.

• bringing in external experts
• allowing anonymous communication
• role-playing

Can be used by

• an instructivist or a cognitivist to change the affect or motivational set of the learner
• a sociocultural instructor to alter context to support legitimate peripheral participation or other cultural shifts

Examples

Use DCC and C4P to discuss two web-based online communities, CompanyCommand (CoP for army pastors) and CILT Knowledge Network (defunct CoP for edutech researchers)

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