My conversation with a friend was over IM, specifically about our Operating Systems assignment that we had due later that night. The conversation started with the normal “Hey”s to each other, but we quickly drew on some common ground that was established before.
Steve: how far are you?
Me: Working on number one
The grounding here is that we both knew that there was a homework assignment due tomorrow for this class, and probably the only one that we both have. We know about each other’s schedules and because of our study habits, there’s a good chance too that we both were working on it. If it wasn’t due tomorrow, we’d probably have to establish more grounding. Though I assumed that he was talking about OS homework, the next response from him would determine if I was wrong or right in my grounding assumption.
Steve: which part?
He understood what I meant, and I also knew that there are multiple parts to the first question. Interestingly though, the more we got into the conversation about our assignment, the more grounding we had to do. We started talking about specific parts of the each problem so we could better understand what the other person did to see if it was a better solution. We would have to use phrases like “For this part” or “In this object”, and then the other person would know what aspect of the problem he was talking about.
Interestingly, the IM medium had both aided in grounding and caused confusion. The reviewability of IM is very nice when we’re trading snippets of code or detailed explanations about certain functions. We would then go back and make sure each part of whatever the other person said made sense, even if the conversation had moved forward with more utterances. We can then put the overall picture together and make sense of the respective algorithms.
The cotemporality of IM though also made it difficult with respect to making sure we didn’t interrupt each other’s flow. Even though the other person can type a long response without technically being interrupted, we both type usually around an utterance being a sentence. If I ask him a question while he’s giving an explanation about his algorithm, he’ll either see that I sent a message and interrupt that train of thought, or he might lose the message and see that it was never there. Both happened during our conversation.
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I find it interesting how for each person that someone has contact with they have immediate common ground. There does not need to be any specific statement but all there is are assumptions. I noticed how grounding saves typing and time. With your project if everything needed to be explained the conversation would have probably been longer than you guys would have liked. This would have then put a strain on progress with the homework or would have gotten one of you annoyed if attempts to go off of existing grounding was unsuccessful.
ReplyDeleteIM is a difficult way to do operating systems homework. I remember when I took the class the numbering system for the problems makes it hard to randomly pick a problem and start discussing it via IM without the notion some common ground. Also the injection of code in such a small window can make it difficult to read or find error in code. Best of luck in OS.
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