| WikiConversation: Capturing Info Between Meeting |
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Team Members
Phong: phong[at]colorado[dot]edu
Scotty: scott.allen[at]colorado[dot]edu
Goal and Objective
We would like to create an initial prototype of a wiki that would allow "conversations" between contributors to a wiki document.
Context
As students with different schedules, both of us often need to collaborate across time and distance. To produce a common document we use a word processing program coupled with email, or if it is available, a class wiki. Many word processors, such as Microsoft Word, include a collaborate editing feature where different users may edit a document. The word processor will display each user's addition or changes in a different color and the original document owner may choose to accept or reject a suggested change. The feature is easy to use but we find its serial nature to be limiting. For instance, it is convenient for the document owner to review suggested changes, but if different reviewers have diverging suggestions, the document owner must resolve these differences on her own. In addition, reviewers do not have access to other reviewers' comments. As a result, this collaboration is a central star model where the document owner interacts with one reviewer at a time.
The other approach of a class wiki promotes group interaction by enabling multiple users to collaboratively contribute to a common document. Although the wiki is better suited to group authoring we also find that its current implementations to be limiting. For instance, users cannot separate text intended for document's eventual content from comments regarding the production process (e.g. questions regarding what should be included or comments that provided needed info). In addition, users need provide their own user context by adding their name, an explicit time when the comment was added, and reference to specific place in the document that a comment addresses (e.g. anchoring).
Research / Implementation Focus
We believe that the wiki is a great start to promote collaboration but can we enhance its collaborative potential by making it easer for users to separate document content from information regarding the collaborative and document production process and enhance users' ability to manage these "meta conversations"? Specifically we'd like to investigate the following questions:
- Are there better ways to improve the actual user interface to support multiple users interacting in the same textual space at the same time? What cues can we give the user about what other users are doing?
- From a design perspective, one option is to implement threaded commenting. In such a design, a small icon attach to a sentence or paragraph would indicate the existence of comments. A viewer would click on the the icon to view an expanded threaded discussion. See the Wikipedia for an example of the embedded icon (i.e. the external link icon, see an example of this in a Wikipedia page on Leornardi da Vinci. In this context, is it useful to incorporate threaded commenting anchored in the text?
- How would these additional ways of managing meta information affect the collaborative process?
Means
We propose to use a user and task centered design process to our implementation. We like to begin with a review of the research literature and investigate how researchers have conceptualize this question and how they have implemented solutions to help users manage meta information. Next, we would interview potential users, in this case, from this and other classes that have used a wiki, to get a sense of users' needs. Next, we would produce several low fidelity prototypes and a high fidelity prototype that would be tested via think-aloud protocols with users.
For our implementation we propose to use mediaWiki, the open source software that supports Wikipedia, and create extensions to implement our meta conversation capability.
Specific Challenges
At this time our main anticipated challenge is to understand mediaWiki and how to create extensions for this open source software.
Individual Focus
Phong: I am particularly interested how this enhanced meta conversation capability can be implemented in event-based learning systems to support science learning in primary and secondary education.
Scotty: I'm also particularly interested in trying to implement some of these ideas in a prototype, and potentially doing user interaction testing. I'm also particularly interested in the embedded, contextualized, threaded discussions that Phong outlines above.
Relationship to Course
Our proposed project directly addresses the theme of design for collaboration. We hope to integrate both a conceptual approach in understanding collaborative editing and to implement some of what we learn in an initial prototype.