Browsing by Author "McEwan, Gregor"
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- ItemOpen AccessEXPLORING MULTIMEDIA HISTORIES OF CASUAL INTERACTIONS(2002-12-06) Tang, Charlotte; McEwan, Gregor; Greenberg, SaulMany groupware systems now allow people to converse and casually interact through their computers in quite rich ways - through text, images, video, artifact sharing and so on. If these interactions are logged, we can offer these multimedia histories to a person in a manner that makes them easy to review. This is potentially beneficial for group members wishing to find and reflect on their past interactions, and for researchers investigating the nuances of online communities. Yet because we have little knowledge of what people would actually do with these histories, designing an effective history review system is difficult. Consequently, we conducted a user study, where people explored real data from an online community. Our study identified a set of tasks that people would do if they could review these histories of casual interaction. It also produced a list of parameters pertinent to how we could visualize these historical records in a tool. With the increasing popularity of computer-mediated casual interaction tools, this study provides an important guide for developing tools to visualize and analyze past multimedia conversations.
- ItemOpen AccessA Field Study of Community Bar: (Mis)-matches between Theory and Practice(2006-03-27) Romero, Natalia; McEwan, Gregor; Greenberg, SaulCommunity Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction. CB s design was derived from three sources: prior empirical research findings concerning informal awareness and casual interaction, a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, and the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. We conducted an in-depth field study of a group s on-going use of Community Bar over several weeks. We use results obtained from this study to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical usage behaviour predicted by our theoretical design principles versus the actual usage behaviours observed in the deployed implementation. As a critique, this reflection is an important iterative step in considering how CB should be redesigned, and serves as a cautionary tale of the difficulty of translating theoretical nuances into practice.
- ItemOpen AccessGroupware Plug-ins: A Case Study of Extending Collaboration Functionality through Media Items(2006-02-23) McEwan, Gregor; Greenberg, Saul; Rounding, Michael; Boyle, MichaelGroupware normally offers only fixed functionality, which can be a poor match to the actual needs of particular group. We argue that groupware should be extensible by third party developers, and describe groupware plug-ins as a method that enables this. Using the Community Bar (CB) as a case study, we illustrate an easy-to-program extensible groupware architecture. Unlike single user plug-ins, CB groupware plug-ins automatically share and populate a distributed data structure, using a distributed Model View Controller pattern to simplify programming. Several 3rd party plugins illustrate what people can create in practice.
- ItemOpen AccessMoving a Media Space into the Real World through Group- Robot Interaction(2006-03-27) Young, Jim; McEwan, Gregor; Greenberg, Saul; Sharlin, EhudNew generation media spaces let group members see each other and share information. However, they are separate from the real world; participants cannot see beyond the video, and they cannot engage with people not attending to the computer. To solve this problem, we use a robot as a physical surrogate for a media space group, which allows this distance-separated group to extend their interactions into the real world. Through video, all media space group members see a first-person view of what the robot sees. All have opportunity to control it: where it walks, where it looks, and even the sound it makes. The robot becomes a physical tele-embodiment of the group, representing it for people who may not physically be part of the group but are collocated with the robot.
- ItemOpen AccessSupporting Social Worlds with the Community Bar(2005-05-18) McEwan, Gregor; Greenberg, SaulThe Community Bar is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social worlds: a group of people with a common purpose. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a community who had been using both the Community Bar and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. As a consequence, Community Bar s design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained within multiple locales: places that offer a group the site and means for maintaining awareness of one another and for rapidly moving into interaction. This includes a person s lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.