CSCI-7212: Assignment 1

Tomohiro Oda

1. what did you find

1-1. interesting about the article?

I'm interested in this paper and EDC because it's approaching collaboration issues from phisical, social and cultural perspective instead of technical elements.

1-2. not interesting about the article?

Nothing particular.

2. what do you consider the main message of the article?

Researches on HCI has to deal with collaborative and cognitive properties and overall phisical and social settings rather than features of technologies.

3. are themes discussed in the article which you would like to know more about?

The relationship between open source and collaborative learning is interesting for me. The paper describes possibilities and necessities of open source as open-ended development in perspective of collaborative learning and design, but I don't know how much and how often end users can contribute to open source development. For example, assuming that EDC system is deployed with open source licence, how, how much and how often can participants of bus route planning contribute to the development of the EDC system? What technical elements are required to augment those contribution activities?

4. what did you find interesting about the "Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC)" system?

I know this might be out of concern of this class, but honestly speeking, my first impression of EDC is beautiful integration of physical objects and simulation objects. I had been working on development of 3D graphics library when I first saw EDC demo, and I was defeated by physical blocks on smartboard. Later I found that the use of physical blocks are just a part of EDC's point. For example, I think that setting action space on a table and reflection space on a vertical display is very important to augment participants understanding and discussions. I have been too much focused on software side of view and EDC opened my eyes to importance of those environmental settings.

5. do you know of other papers, ideas, and systems which are closely related to the article and the EDC system?

I think ideas of extreme programming are related to some of concepts in this paper, such as informed participation (on-site customer representive), action/reflection space(main programmer can be in charge of action space and his/her pair can deal with reflection space) and daily unit tests (approximated reflection in action).

6. what does the article say about

6-1. design

Design is incremental process using previous result of design to create new one. In this sense, reflection in action is important to support design activities.

6-2. learning

Learning is an activity to exchange what I know and what you know, by showing different perspectives of one thing each others. It is therefore a collaborative process.

6-3. collaboration

Collaboration is necessary to solving/resolving complex problems because they are often beyond one person's capability. Symmetry of ignorance is a source of power of collaboration.

6-4. innovative media support for these activities?

An innovative media support has to take benefits of symmetry of ignorance as a driving force of collaborative learning and design, and has to support every user as a designer instead of a consumer.

7. do you have any ideas how this research could / should be extended (based on your own knowledge and experience)?

I think applying ideas described in the paper in perspective of software developments will be interesting. Developing software systems is basically collaborative activity and is also an opportunity of learning. Open source aspects of collaborative activity is described in the paper, but I think breaking down programming activities, design activities, specification activities, documentation activities and operation activities in perspective of collaborative design and developing environment which support those activities will be interesting.