One issue that we ran into was ambiguity when someone would say "oh change that line right there" or "this looks like a problem". We would often have to point at the computer screen or grab the laptop from one another to make coding changes. Scott says that "technology designed to support group activities needs to support the interpersonal interaction at the heart of collaboration". He suggests that in order to collaborate we all need to be able to talk, best if face to face, and the laptop just serves as a tool for us to get the work done. In this case that idea doesn't hold true, as the laptop wasn't very effective and our progress was slow. Being able to communicate face to face didn't help us very much, just due to the highly technical nature of our work.
The other problem was that we could only complete one task at a time. While one person was trying to make a change to some code, everybody else could only think about what they wanted to do. This caused a slower debugging process and probably resulted in people forgetting what they were thinking about. We would have definitely been better off with a multiple display system so that everyone could work at the same time, or atleast have a personal view of what was going on. Scott discusses the importance of workspace awareness and in our case only the current user of the computer had full workspace awareness.
The final and most important problem we ran into was that not everyone could see the screen we were working on. Cao Massimi and Balakrishnan rave about the ability for large displays to facilitate collaboration, sharing and exchange. However, these things can only happen if the display effectively transmits information to everyone necessary. In our case only a few people could see the screen while everyone else was huddled around trying to get a decent look at what was happening. This caused a lot of disruption in our debugging process and required people to spend extra time reading over the code when they finally got the computer.
Clearly, our problems were ambiguity in what people were referring to, lack of simultaneity, and a small display. While many, like Scott, argue that interpersonal connection is at the heart of collaboration, I believe our situation could have been improved with a multiple display system and long distance connections. Debugging code is one of this situations where you don't need face to face contact, you need to be able to specifically reference areas of the code (via highlighting or pointing), make changes at the same time or in quick succession (by having multiple mice on the screen or users take turn controlling the mouse) and have users all be able to see the information.
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I ended up writing about something very similar (we all had to huddle around one screen) and we ran into many of the same problems it seems. I hadn't considered that the reason why face-to-face interactions didn't work as well was because the work was primarily technical, that's an interesting point. I wonder whether there are other types of work that would produce this result.
ReplyDeleteDon't you think that some of the problems that you bring up happen when group work occurs without technology as well? That could make these problems be inherent of doing group work, and not necessarily due to the technology being used.
ReplyDeleteI mean, take the example of a group editing an essay. They might have the same problems that you describe here; pointing at a specific line, not everyone being able to see, etc.
It's an interesting thought.