Although our video conference last week didn’t involve a specific task, I thought it would be interesting to examine the video conferencing environment with respect to workspace awareness.
Gutwin and Greenberg generally look at awareness in terms of the who, the what and the where. The video conferring environment was extremely effective in helping users to identify who was in the workspace at a given moment. In our conference, we used separate windows to show all the different contributors by video and we found you could use a tiled configuration as well. Furthermore, the environment offers a type of participant list that enables all the users to see who can be contacted at a given time without directly opening their windows, this refers to being in the “Selective Mode”. These features helped to support presence and identity in the workspace. If we look to authorship, it might be useful to examine the whiteboard application which can be used as a type of collaborative tablet. Unfortunately, it seems to me that with a lot of users, it might be difficult to tell who was drawing what on the board without identifying specific colors for each person or talking through the drawing.
Once we move on to the what of awareness, we look to see how easy the environment makes it to tell action, intention and artifact. Although we did not have a specific task, I think this would be fairly well supported with Iocom. The different camera angles can help people to see their immediate environments (assuming you have a sophisticated system, like the one in the room we were located in). The environment also allows people to show their entire desktops which is useful if you intend to work on an “artifact” that is on your computer system. Intention can always be difficult to show, but the audio capabilities makes it easy to tell people both action and intention.
Finally, we move on to the where. The obvious issue encountered here, was our difficulty with gaze. Because of the way our cameras were positioned, it was hard for Eric and the Olsons to tell where we were looking. This, however, could be easily fixed by readjusting camera positions. The ability to show your own video as well as others also helps to explain what all other participants can view. In addition reach and location are easily identifiable by multiple camera views.
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I like your analysis of the conference with respect to workspace awareness. In the who section, I think one of the most helpful aspect of the video windows is that they could be closed and reopened, allowing the user to decide the views they want to see. This dynamic way to change their workspace allows each user to use it how they want to. This kind of control over what you show or see on the videos also relates to closing of the social technical gap.
ReplyDeleteI do not think that there is a lot of awareness during video conferencing. Although, selective mode let's you choose which user's windows you wish to view, it is confusing to use during a group video conferencing where you would need to see multiple screens. You cannot hear someone's thoughts without viewing them so it is inevitable that multiple screens will be showing at once.
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