Los objetivos confusos

In the last two paragraphs, I outlined a quite general introduction to awareness systems, including, for instance, systems that provide awareness information about energy consump- tion or stock market trends. Awareness information in the context of CSCW and groupware is more related to the topic of this thesis, however this also encompasses systems that, for example, show awareness information about the presence of others in a distributed environ- ment, something that is not necessary in co-located environments as I discuss them in this work. Thus, examples of awareness systems are outlined that focus on making groups aware of group processes during collaboration in the following.

An early example is CHATCIRCLES(Donath and Viégas, 2002; Viégas and Donath, 1999),

a system to enhance presence and activity awareness in an online chat. The tool represents each person by a colored circle that is accompanied with the participant’s name and can be moved on the screen to build clusters (see Figure 2.6, top left). Activity is represented by the

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Martin Ebner, Christian Haintz, Karin Pichler, Sandra Schön

geben. Der/die Vortragende sieht in seinem Webbrowser in Echtzeit das gesam- melte aktuelle Feedback seines Publikums. Dadurch soll die aktuelle Stimmung und das Verständnis des Publikums dargestellt werden, um als Vortragender unmittelbar darauf reagieren zu können.

3.3 Design

Das Design wird den Anforderungen entsprechend gewählt. Eine Anforderung ist Mehrsprachigkeit, diese wird speziell durch Einsatz von Symbolen und Bildern anstelle von Text erreicht (vgl. Abbildung 2 mit dem Display für das Publikum).

Abb. 2: Screenshot der Teilnehmeransicht des Backchannel-Prototypen

Auf der linken Seite in Abb. 2 sieht man die Eingabeansicht für die Teilnehme- r/in. Hier kann mithilfe von drei Schie bereglern die aktuelle Be ndlichkeit über- mittelt werden. Die rechte Seite stellt das Gesamtbild aller Teilnehmer dar. Alle Änderungen werden in Echtzeit dargestellt. Die Rückmeldung der Teilnehmer erstreckt sich dabei auf drei gewählte Feedback-Dimensionen (Zufriedenheit, Verständnis, Vortragsgeschwindigkeit) die alle durch Symbole erklärt werden sollen. Die Feedbackwerte der drei Dimensionen ergeben die Mimik und Gestik des Avatars, der den jeweiligen Zustand darstellt (siehe Abb. 3).

Figure 2.6: Related work on awareness systems.Top row from left to right: CHATCIRCLES by Donath and Viégas (2002), CONVERSATIONLANDSCAPEfrom the same system displaying the history of the chat, VISIPHONE by Donath et al. (2000). Lower row: a balanced conversa- tion displayed with PEOPLEGARDENby Xiong and Donath (1999), TALKTUNEPROPORTION metacognitive tool (top) and mirroring tool in form of bar charts (bottom) (Jermann and Dillen- bourg (2008)), RADARby Phielix et al. (2010).

size of the circles. With a posting, the corresponding circle grows. After a while, the posting fades out and the circle shrinks. The brightness of the circles shows how active participants are. Additionally, a visualization of the history called CONVERSATION LANDSCAPE is

designed to reveal identity as well as social patterns (see Figure 2.6, top middle). The y-axis represents the time and messages are displayed on this axis as colored bars while the length of the bars represents the length of the messages. For an overview of systems building on CHATCIRCLES, such as TALKING INCIRCLES(Rodenstein and Donath, 2000), see Donath

and Viégas (2002).

A system designed to assist in audio communication is the VISIPHONE by Donath et al.

(2000). It intends to support communication between two people who both have VISIPHONE

stations in form of a translucent dome (see Figure 2.6, top right). Information about the audio is displayed as colored dots that spiral outwards on the dome. Different colors are used for the two persons and for silent phases. By that, people can observe if the connection is established and if the audio signal is being transferred. The dome serves as an aesthetic object that shows the rhythm of a conversation.

2 Feedback

Xiong and Donath (1999) and Donath (2002) use the metaphor of a garden with blooming flowers to visualize conversation. Group members of an online chat are represented with flowers whose petals represent their postings. Information that is encoded is the time of the posting (petals are arranged by time in clockwise order), the amount of responses (blue petals) and whether a new conversation is started with a post (red petals) (see Figure 2.6, bottom left).

Other systems allow group members to rate contributions of their peers or to indicate un- derstanding. Buder and Bodemer (2007) developed a system tailored to support CSCL dis- cussions. Group members can rate how much they agree to contributions of others and how novel they estimate them. This information is displayed on a two-dimensional graph with agreement and novelty on the axes. Dehler et al. (2011) present a system that mirrors the group members’ knowledge. In contrast to Buder and Bodemer (2007), they could show that the tool guided communicative activities.

A system displaying qualitative information is TALKTUNE PROPORTION(Jermann and Dil-

lenbourg, 2008), showing the balance between talking and using a simulator and providing information whether the balance is acceptable (see Figure 2.6, bottom middle). Results indi- cate that a metacognitive tool (upper image) can effectively influence group processes, and that it is more successful than the compared mirroring tool (lower image).

RADARand REFLECTOR(Phielix et al., 2010, 2011) are a combination of tools supporting

computer supported learning. RADAR is a peer feedback tool that allows group members

to rate themselves and others in terms of friendliness, cooperation, reliability, productivity and in terms of the quality of their contributions. The ratings are mirrored to the group in form of a radar diagram (see Figure 2.6, bottom right) so that group members can compare themselves with the group. The REFLECTORis used to reflect about the own and the group’s

behavior by answering different reflective questions. In a study it could be shown that with this tool, group satisfaction could be increased.

A number of other awareness systems such as the GROUPMETER(Leshed et al., 2007, 2009)

and an approach by Mathur and Karahalios (2009) or awareness tools in the context of computer-supported learning (Janssen and Bodemer, 2013) are also related to the topic of this thesis, but cannot all be described in detail here.

There are several parallels and also mutual influences between the presented awareness sys- tems for distributed group work and the group mirrors that are designed for co-located col- laboration. The history visualization of the CONVERSATION CLOCK, for example, resem-

bles the visualization of the history of CHAT CIRCLES. In both systems, colors represent

different participants on a temporal axis (in case of the CONVERSATION CLOCK, this axis

has a circular shape). One difference is that the length of the bars represents the length of the message in CHAT CIRCLESand the loudness in the CONVERSATION CLOCK. Similarities

to the VISIPHONEare, for instance, that the size of the circles represents the volume of the

audio and that silent phases are shown using grey dots. The tool TALKTUNEPROPORTION

resembles the SECOND MESSENGER, as colored bar charts are used to visualize the amount

of speech (in the TALKTUNE PROPORTION, the interactions with the simulator are addi-

tionally displayed as bar charts). The group mirror of Streng et al. (2009) uses metaphors such as trees and the weather to represent group processes, Xiong and Donath (1999) use the metaphor of flowers and a garden to reveal conversational patterns.

Systems that support awareness in distributed environments often focus on regaining aware- ness about information that is getting lost due to the nature of remote collaboration. In face- to-face collaboration, group members are commonly more aware of each other. However, even in face-to-face collaboration there are processes and group dynamics that stay unno- ticed by the group. In these cases group mirror systems for co-located collaboration can provide further support. These systems - that have been investigated far less than systems designed for distributed collaboration - are in the focus of this thesis.

3

Application Areas

For the evaluation of technologically mediated feedback on group processes, this thesis fo- cuses on two specific classes of tasks: collaborative creativity and argumentation. These tasks were chosen as they represent two different manifestations of a continuum of tasks reaching from more open-ended to more structured. Though collaborative creativity meth- ods can follow certain structures, the result of this task is undefined and the creative process is difficult to understand and capture. In contrast, argumentation and debates are more struc- tured tasks. The goal is to build proper arguments, for example, with the goal to persuade others of the argument. The next two sections provide an overview of background and re- lated research both about collaborative creativity and argumentation.