Transcript Enhancing Groupware with multimedia

Enhancing Groupware
with multimedia
Acknowledgements to Euan Wilson (Staffordshire University)
Why?
• Co-operative working involves a
number of people working together
to achieve a common goal
• The distribution of organisations
often requires that personnel are
forced to work with colleagues who
are situated remotely
•  “Home working”
• Email, document exchanger etc.
have assisted but there is still a
failure to provide the level of user
interaction that is required for cooperative working
Computer Support for
Co-operative Working (CSCW)
• Term coined by Grief and Cashman
[1984]
• exact meaning of term is open to
debate but most authors agree
– work is a co-operative activity,
generally involving groups of people
interacting to achieve common goals
– the designers of supporting computer
systems must address this cooperative nature of work
Role of Multimedia in
Asynchronous Co-operation
• Often referred to as message
systems
• build and send messages
• widely accepted and used
• many systems provide textual
• some allow the user to embed /
attach other types of media (sound,
video etc.)
Synchronous Co-operation
• Requires
– the present of co-operating users
– a shared information space / resources
• Provides
– multiple users with synchronous
access to the same data
– speeds up processes which require the
involvement of remote users
Synchronous Co-operation
– Joint access to information reduces
many of the overheads of travel and
pre-arranged visits
– periods of interaction between remote
users become more frequent and
shorter in duration (reflecting more an
inter-building style of
communication)
Synchronous Groupware
• Goal of achieving a shared digital
workspace
• 4 classes
–
–
–
–
Desktop conference systems
Shared screens / windows
electronic meeting / decision rooms
media spaces include audio / visual
Desktop conferencing systems
– workstation based applications for
collaborative work at a number of
desktops
• outlining, writing, sketching, drawing,
building spreadsheets etc.
– originally intended to augment faceto-face interactions
– later expanded to support distance
conferencing
– [Engelbart 1994]
– Basic concept that all users saw the
same things on their screen (a shared
view) and
– each could take turns interacting with
the system
• Xerox PARC
– collaborative brainstorming, argument
development, free style sketching
– small groups of two to six individuals
System Infrastructure for
Desktop Conferencing
• Two general approaches to building
groupware
– Collaboration transparency
• a single user application wrapped by
system software to make it usable by a
group
– Collaboration aware
• an application that is modified or rewritten
Issues with Groupware over a network
• Greenberg & Marwood 1994
outlined
– distributed processing
– replicated information consistency
– creating and maintaining real-time
consistent views of a shared digital
workspace
– synchronisation issues
– concurrency control
Approaches
• A single-user application deployed
to multiple workstations which
accepts inputs from all (requires a
screen sharing system)
• or
• A windowing sharing system which
enables the user to have a private
workspace and to be able to share
work when it suits the individual
user
• Or
– replicated verses centralised
architecture
Issues - Shared view systems
• Both Screen and Windows sharing
systems leverage existing software
into groupware
• therefore off-the-shelf software can
be utilised, which has a major
benefit in terms of cost, training,
deployment etc.
But … two serious limitations
– shared software is collaborative
transparent the systems offer limited
group capabilities
• this forces the group to work around the
system I.e. only one member may be able
to work at one time
– technical limitations of the software
• issues arise due to the infrastructure of
both the underlying operating systems
and technical design of the software
Therefore
• Most systems are developed with
the technical issues rather than
what the users require.
• This results in performance issues
and usability problems
Resulted in
• Research
– moving away from operating system issues to
support groupware to
– design and construction of environments,
toolkits and languages for building groupware
» [GroupKit, Greenberg and Roseman 1994]
» [Rendezvous, Patterson 1993]
– requirements for systems to facilitate
customisation and application evolutions
» [Dourish 1995]
Electronic Meeting Rooms
• Original pioneers where not in
Computing or Commercial R&D
but in management and business
schools
• requirement to produce GDSS
• seen as primary product of
“management”
GDSS
• Tools to support
–
–
–
–
idea generation
idea organisation
prioritising
voting (normally anonymous)
Issues concerning the design of GDSS
• Architectural and ergonomic
– Aspects of room, placement of
people, method of user participation
• can effect
– effectiveness and usability of the
system
• other issues
– interior design, colours, shape of
table, position of workstations with
respect to table
Idea Organisation
• Tedious task of idea organisation
has been attached by using
semantic analysis programs to
make a first pass at clustering ideas
• although imperfect it has been
found that people enjoy this stage
more when the software has made a
first pass
» [Nunamaker and Briggs 1994]
Media Spaces
• Is a computer-controlled
teleconferencing system in which
audio and video communication
and shared digital workspaces are
used to overcome the barriers of
physical separation
Media Spaces support
• Interpersonal space as well as a
shared task space
» [Buxton 1992]
• They not only support an
application in use but give its users
an awareness of who is around and
how they can be reached
» [Cockburn and Greenberg 1993]
Research has shown that video
• Can reduce physical barriers
(through transmission over a
network)
• and temporal barriers (through
recording and playback)
Xerox Parc
• Mid 80’s
• Linked two labs by a 56 Kps lease
line
• Audio and video link with a central
feature of a video window
• allowed both labs to function and
feel like one group and to convey a
sense of presence
• Certain verbal and non verbal cues
where not transmitted as well as
they would have been in a face-toface situation.
• Resulted in the need to alter social
protocols, supplement face-to-face
meetings for video, and to be
sensitive to issues of privacy
Deployment & Use of Groupware
• Grudin (1988)
– Most groupware requires that all
group members that use the
application, but not everyone benefits
– Intuition is a less reliable guide in
developing and selecting groupware
that single-user applications
– Evaluating groupware is more
difficult than single-user applications
Additional challenges
– The need to reach a critical mass
– difficulty of supporting existing social
conventions
– high degree of exception handling and
improvisation that characterise group
activity
– designing features that are
unobtrusive yet accessible
– developers must carefully meet the
challenge of adoption of the system