One key concept from the course that I feel is particularly relevant to the class video conference on Tuesday is the social-technical gap. As we have discussed in class, the social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically.
In one of the articles assigned for that topic, Grudin explains eight challenges for developers. One of these challenges that are relevant to the class video conference is ‘Disruption of social processes’. It states, “Groupware can lead to activity that violates social taboos, threatens existing political structures, or otherwise demotivates users crucial to its success” (Grudin 1994). For example, it is a social taboo to not look at a person while talking to them. This was kind of an issue during the class video conference. The Olsons mentioned that it didn’t seem like we were looking at them; instead it seemed like we were looking away from them. Even though it is common sense to do this in real life, it is difficult to support this technically. It just so happened that our camera was on the other side of the room, making it tricky to look at the camera and the screen of the Olsons at the same time. If this is a reoccurring problem, it may discourage users from using video conferencing systems.
The challenge of ‘Disparity in work and benefit’ was also apparent during the class video conference. According to Grudin, “A groupware application never provides precisely the same benefit to every group member. Costs and benefits depend on preferences, prior experience, roles, and assignments” (pg 96). That was the case during our video conference. It may have been useful for us to see the other distributed members because there were so few of them. But those distributed members had a difficult time seeing all of our class. During the video conference, someone in the distributed group joked that they couldn’t see if any of us were sleeping.
On the other hand, the class video conference helped prevent the social-technical gap by inhibiting fluid social activity. It was pretty difficult to multi-task during the conference. The set up of the room and cameras discouraged walking around or having side conversations. Instead it promoted engaged conversation, just like in real life.
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ReplyDeleteThese are great observations on the video-conferencing demo. Throughout the demo I kept observing the dynamics of the conversation and it was apparent that there were different of benefits for each person. The entire class could not attract the same focus as the people in the distributed groups. At the same time, if there had been more of a discourse, it would have been beneficial for the class to be able to converse with the remote participants as if we were all in the same room. In due course, it seemed to be so much more beneficial than other synchronous conferencing methods.
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