Last week my two group mates and I met to discuss the progress of our final project. The purpose of our meeting was to come up with a single document to submit regarding our work and progress. To do this, we all met in person and worked on a single computer to write our report. Needless to say, this will inevitably induce some frustration as only one person can really work on a computer at a time. This idea is brought up in Scott's article
“When multiple people engage in tabletop activities, they often interact with
artifacts on the table surface simultaneously (Tang, 1991; Scott et al., 2003).
Traditional computer technology does not support multi-user, concurrent
interaction. Instead, users are forced to share the available input device when
working together at a single computer (Inkpen et al., 1995).
”
Computers are currently designed for a single user, and for the most part it it still uncommon to truly use two computers collaboratively. Working on one computer, it was difficult to transfer ideas to words. For example, if one group member had an idea to add to the report, it had to be first verbalized, grounded with group members, then added. This draws on the concept of supporting fluid transitions between activities. When a person is working, others in the group cannot fluidly make changes to the task without interrupting the computer user and going through them.
A third topic covered in the reading that I noticed in our meeting was the availability of access to physical and digital objects. Working in our group, only one person had access the the physical object (computer) and digital object (document). Three people were trying to complete one digital document being accessed by one physical machine. Clearly this is inefficient. Ways to improve this most easily involve multiple computers; three people accessing one document via three machines. Provided that there was clear workspace awareness, the document could be edited much more efficiently.
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My blog discussed the same problem: multiple people working on one computer. Hopefully some technologies will come out that allow multiple people to share the same desktop. iChat currently has a function called "shared desktop" and, while its a step in the right direction, it's not yet effective enough to replace people getting together around a single computer.
ReplyDeleteI would like to see an office suite designed from the ground up for real-time interactive remote collaboration. I wrote about a similar topic this week, and I feel like there are a lot of ideas that could enhance the process of multiple people working on one text document from separate machines. One key difference in my scenario from yours is that all users had "read" access to the document, as we had it displayed on a projector. By displaying it on a projector, I think we caused more chaos - more people had more ideas for edits, which we had to reconcile with each other and decide which course of action we wanted to take. Perhaps designing a collaboration technology with this in mind would be beneficial.
ReplyDeleteit's always a toss-up which method is more efficient when working in group projects... do we sit around one computer and all try to contribute or do we split up the work then have to collocate and collaborate with the work we've done. this process entails alot of grounding, while all huddled around a computer is hard when it comes to simultaneous interaction.
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