Description:
Collaboration is an important part of nearly all work and educational settings. In practice, however, collaboration is rarely perfect; numerous problems arise, ranging from social loafing to coordination losses. In this talk, I show how a multidisciplinary approach can help in the design of collaborative technologies. For example, in designing IRC Français, I drew on the educational literature to develop a chat-style environment for foreign language learning. Once placed in the classroom, however, surprising conversational patterns arose. Social psychology helped explain these patterns and offer guidelines for designing similar environments. However, questions still remained. I describe an empirical research study into questions of research ethics and initial results from a naturalistic study into the quality of interaction in online educational environments. I conclude by discussing open research questions and how a multidisciplinary approach that combines naturalistic inquiry with empirical studies can help to answer them.
Speaker(s):
Jim Hudson, Ph.D. candidate, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
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