Mobile application design & development

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Two students of mine recently presented their respective masters' theses. They had worked together & in parallel and their theses complement each other neatly.

Both theses were excellent, but as the topics are slightly peripheral compared to my main research interests (nowadays), they will not be listed under the "finished-theses" tab in my companion blog (a blog with suggestions for thesis topics). I instead post this text as well as links to the theses themselves (pdf documents). Do note that these theses are both written in Swedish.

Johan Alexandersson's thesis is called "Mobilapplikationsutveckling till smartphones - hur utvecklingsprocessen kan förbättras" ["Mobile application development for smartphones - how the development process can be improved"]

Andreas Blackne's thesis is called "Mobilapplikationsdesign: En utvärdering av designprocessen för mobilapplikationer till smartphones" ["Mobile application design: An evaluation of the mobile application design process for smartphones"].

As master's theses go, I think both of these are impeccably done. It was a pleasure to be their advisor and the process went like a breeze. Most readers might want to stop reading here, but I anyway append their abstracts below in the case someone has a special interest in this area.

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Abstract to "Mobile application development for smartphones - how the development process can be improved":

The development of mobile applications for the new generation of mobile phones, also known as smartphones, has become a worldwide phenomenon, not least in Sweden. Many companies have realized that this market is growing for each day and has therefore chosen to broaden their activities in this area. There are also many companies whose sole activity is to develop mobile applications. The problem is that this still is an unexplored area for many companies. For this reason, they still haven't formed any well-functioning work processes to use during the development. Instead, they use complex processes that, in fact, are suitable for development of software. The difference between traditional software development and mobile application development is that the mobile application development projects are completed in a shorter amount of time, and that there are a fewer amount of people involved. This is something that the companies have forgotten to take into account when they designed their own development processes. The goal of this study has therefore been to develop a new approach that is better suited for this type of projects. The new approach will also describe which steps that should be included in a mobile application development process, and the order in which steps should be performed to achieve the best results. This study is based upon interviews with people from ten Swedish companies. All the interviewees have different responsibilities, but are in one way or another involved in the development of mobile applications in their company. All the companies have basically told the same thing, both regarding their current situation, and how they would like their future situation to look like. For this reason, it has been easy to determine which parts of the development processes that can be developed and improved. It has also been easy to determine which parts of the process that is directly unnecessary for mobile application projects. The mobile platforms covered in this work are, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone 7.

Abstract to "Mobile application design: An evaluation of the mobile application design process for smartphones":

New ways of interaction produce unprecedented problems in use. Therefore, especially for ground-breaking technologies such as the smartphone, it is important to design usable user interfaces allowing users to interact with the device in an easy, efficient and satisfying fashion. Additionally, the production of mobile applications is still a fairly undeveloped field, leaving great room for improvement in order to produce better designed mobile applications. The aim of this study is to, through conducting qualitative interviews with people operative within mobile application production, evaluate how the design process for mobile applications can be improved and/or made more efficient. The results of this study show that the design process is—amongst other things—determined by the nature of the company and how design centered they are. Moreover, the results show that there, for most companies, exists a lack of thinking in terms of design, resulting in shorter design processes, which, according to the study, primarily stems from limitations in time, money and knowledge. The conclusions of this study demonstrate that the design should be performed by people with adequate skills in interaction design to ensure a high level of usability and a good user experience. The design process should also be given enough space in the agile methodologies characterizing modern software development..

Astroturf robot wars

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This week I specified and published a thesis topic concerning "Astroturf robot wars" together with a colleague of mine (Hannes). Astroturf in this context refers to "fake grassroots movements" that are paid for by someone with an interest in affecting or controlling the public discussion. The background to my interest in the area is:

1) my own experiences of hanging out on forums that are invaded, infested and overrun by vocal pro-fossil fuel anti-global-warming denialists (etc.) who seemingly show up the very second someone has posted something, and who never give up. I have several times tried to understand who these people are and how come they stay around and continue to post messages no matter how unwelcome they are and no matter how many times their arguments are refuted. Don't these useful idiots have other things to do rather than to post the same things for the XXth time? Are they in fact paid by someone to wreak havoc on the forums?

2) I think the latter view might not be that unfeasible after having read a number of texts on that topic by British journalist and author George Monbiot:

--- On astroturf robot wars and software for impersonating an army of "ordinary citizens" on the web (Feb 2011).

--- On astroturf campaigns trying to control who and what is being heard in the cyber-commons (Dec 2010).

----How the tea party movement was jump-started by fossil fuel lobbying seed money (Oct 2010).

--- On systematic disinformation that is spread by corporations with political agendas and money to spare - but hiding behind innocent-sounding organizations that do their dirty work (Dec 2009).

From reading these and other texts, I now realize that it might be the case that these persons are not private citizens at all, but rather paid-off employees working for (for example) a PR or computer security firm. Since it would be too expensive to pay a highly educated (but amoral) person for posting a handful of blog comments every day, they need better tools and these have now turned up in the form of for example "persona management software".

It is on the basis of these developments that I and Hannes specified the "Astroturf robot wars" thesis topic which can be found here. That text contains a better introduction to the topic at hand as well as actual suggestions for what could be done by a student and references to materials to read up on.

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Can a student fail at a Swedish university?

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This text veers away from my ordinary texts that are usually based on personal experiences of something that happened during the past week. This text instead goes into the territory of educational politics of the Swedish university system. It was triggered by a conversation with our dinner guests yesterday (high school teacher Anna and Ph.D. Mårten).

I have, as a university teacher, met some students who are clearly out of their league at a university. I basically think everyone should have the chance to try to be a student, but some (for example people who don't like to read books) are not up to the task unless we drastically lower the bar.

Let's say I meet a third-year student who is in the process of writing his bachelor's thesis (I would meet him in the role of being his advisor) or who has almost finished his thesis (I would meet him in the role of examiner of the finished thesis). When I am examining someone's work, a student who produces a crappy thesis will hear about it from me. Although it is the student has to bear the full brunt of the crappiness of his thesis, sometimes I really feel sorry for him as I think that some of the critique should have been given by the thesis advisor at an earlier point in time, or better yet, the advisor should have given advice so that the situation (almost-finished but crappy thesis) could have been avoided in the first place.

The student in question most often fully understands the critique and furthermore realizes the extent and the scope of the mistakes he has made. He might understands much about what went wrong during his thesis work and what he should have done (earlier) in order to avoid it. At this late point in time, there is unfortunately not much to do about it but to bite the bullet and accept that the thesis will get a relatively low grade.

At other times however, the student might not accept the critique, or does not even understand it, and the problems with his thesis might be of a magnitude and a kind that any advisor would be hard pressed to "fix" no matter how much time she would have spent advising that student (barring writing the whole thesis herself). The thesis might at times represent nothing but a long line of bad judgement calls on behalf of the student. Furthermore, sometimes students have such a bad command of language that it is difficult to understand the text, and even more difficult to judge the quality of the thoughts that are in the text - somewhere. A number of questions then present themselves of which the premier one is: how can this student have made it this far in the higher education system? The next question is: what do I do now?

The question of what to do is difficult and politically sensitive, but I for sure know what I myself would have wanted to do at a number of occasions - and that is to fail the student. Do note that I didn't write that I would fail the thesis, but rather the student. Some students just don't have what it takes to be at a university and they really shouldn't. Not that they necessarily never will be able to get a university degree, but right here and right now their presence at the university is a drain on scarce resources, and no-one is happier for it except maybe (but not necessarily) the student himself.

When I reflect upon this issue, I have myself been the advisor of at least three or four such students. I a better-functioning world, someone would at some point - before they reached the third year of their studies - have told them that perhaps this whole thing (higher education) is not for them. But to say such a thing even - or especially - if formulated as "friendly advice" requires an authority figure (a teacher or so) who actually wields his authority. It furthermore requires a structure (rules, colleagues, bosses, sympathetic administrators) that fully backs that teacher up.

The alternative is an impersonal system where no one person has to take it upon himself to personally deliver the bad news, i.e. a system where a student at some point actually runs out of chances. At a Swedish university, it doesn't really matter how slow or unsuited a student is, because he will never be kicked out, and he will always receive yet one more chance (for example to write an exam). The student in question might quite quickly run into financial trouble (as you actually have to perform to be able to get new student loans), but a frugal or financially independent student can remain a student forever without actually accomplishing anything in particular. He might even wear his "opposition" down and "fix" one course after another by sheer force of will and determination and by expending enough time and energy - even if he has no talent and little knowledge of the subject at hand.

Here I'd like to invoke Neil Postman who writes that every new technology has winners and losers, and that every new technology brings pros and cons. Hopefully there are more winners than losers, and hopefully there are more pros than cons. The point here is that always giving every student one more chance, and never being able to fail a student might brings a warm, fuzzy feeling to many, but although less apparent, there are also substantial cons (disadvantages, costs) to such a practice.

Some of those costs are born by the university in terms of time and decreased job satisfaction on behalf of teachers and administrator. How much time should you spend writing an answer to the 76th e-mail from the same student and concerning the same issue? Other costs are born by fellow students as the quality of their education and the value of their degree decreases when "anyone" can get it. Some costs are born by companies who are suckered by the fine diploma and hires an ignoramus. Which again bring costs the university in terms of decreased public support and decreased confidence in the actual value of a degree ("what are spending our money on?"). Some costs are born by society in the form of more numerous, but less qualified engineers, teachers, economists (etc.) doing a shoddy job instead of fewer doing a better job.

The problem is difficult to solve and an analysis of underlying reasons is sensitive (spinelessness, conflict-avoidance? misjudged "care" for students' tender egos? ideological blindfolds? lack of (perceived) legitimate authority?). I think it is quite clear though that there are no incentives whatsoever today for any one person to make and to stand by these difficult decisions. Furthermore, it might be the case that (especially young) people in our society are not used to setbacks of any kind and would feel offended and wronged by someone pointing out (however gently and however much it was justified) that "they might just want to think it over and ask themselves if they are spending their time and efforts in the best possible way - taking into account that they have failed so miserably during (let's say) their first year at the university".

How big is the chance that we will talk about and solve this problem? How big is the chance that we will try to solve or just ameliorate them? Not very big, I would say. So in the meantime I will personally have to struggle with those (fortunately) few students who are failing and flailing and who lack the insight to realize that they are out of their league.

According to the 80-20 rule, 80% of my time as an advisor can be spent taking care of business originating from 20% of the students. It's really not that bad, but it is clear that the weakest 20% of the students will always need extra time and support - no matter how much they are already receiving. The problem is that the least able students "steal" time from the more able students who will always excel no matter how little attention or time they get from their teachers. As a teacher I would personally want to spend less time with less able students and more time with the sharpest and most ambitious students - helping them reach even higher. Less able students represent a drain on my time, on my energy and on my enthusiasm, and they will always need more support in order to make it through the educational system.

PS (March 2014). We are very polite nowadays. It's of course unacceptable to tell someone he/she is "stupid". It is also not considered acceptable to tell someone that an opinon of his/hers is "stupid". History professor Dick Harrison writes about students feeling aggrieved by facts they don't like when he teaches (the article is written in Swedish).

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Gendered design

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BREAKING NEWS (October 2019): Karin was given the opportunity (14 years after the work was done!) to present her results in a 14 minutes long TedX Stockholm talk, "Cross-dressing appliances reveals design’s gender bias".

This week I listened to a thought-provoking talk by KTH Ph.D. student Karin Ehrnberger about gender-coded design. The pictures above says it all. As an industrial designer, Karin's thesis work concerned a practical exercise in uncovering (deconstructing, opening up the black box of) design and values. More specifically she has uncovered gender-coded design practices through an innovative design "intervention". More specifically, she switched the design conventions of a drilling machine and hand blender with each other so that the drilling machine used the conventions of the hand blender and vice versa. The result was the drilling machine "Dolphia" (named after non-threatening round, friendly dolphins) and the hand blender "Mega Hurricane".

Karin also mentioned that all the stuff at IKEA that is made out of soft materials (plaids, curtains etc.) are called Anita, Felicia, Birgit, Inez and Kajsa while stuff made out of wood (bookshelves, footstools etc.) are called Ivar, Billy, Oddvar, Hugo and Bosse. I really haven't thought about that before. The whole talk was an eye-opener. As a Ph.D. student, Karin is now trying to (theoretically) understand and further explore what she did in her master's thesis in terms of design and values (including but not limited to issues of gender).

I immediately thought about the huge difference in design between the original (aggressively "male") Xbox computer game console (2001) that flopped big time in Japan - not the least because of the design - and the (organically "female") Xbox 360 follow-up (2005). Since computer gaming and game consoles have made the trip all the way from the domain of teenage boys to the family living room and even retirement homes (Nintendo Wii) in just a decade or two, it would be really interesting to see a study of how the design of these machines have changed together with the remodeling of computer gaming into a social family activity. At the same time we have another development in the emergence of pro-gaming and professional gamers. I wonder what can be made out of the form language of high-end computer gaming equipment (computer mice etc.). I bet the design conventions are (very) "male", attempting to convey values of speed, force, no-nonsense effectiveness and so on...

Hand mixer with a "sporty" display with a rev counter and a "trigger" button.

Drill with "non-threatening" organic forms and simple interface/settings

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Social media in higher education

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Me and a couple of colleagues (Stefan, new ph.d. student Pernilla and my wife Tessy) are planning to write an article about student attitudes to social media use in higher (university) education.

It started with a call of paper for the journal "The Internet in Higher Education". More specifically, there will be a special issue on "Social Media in Higher Education" (pdf file) where my colleague Stefan Hrastinski is one of the two guest editors. While this call for papers provided the initial push, we later decided to skip this special issue, not the least because a tight deadline (March 15) as well as a possible conflict of interests on Stefan's behalf if he were to be both an author and editor for the special issue.

Instead we met in the beginning of December for a brainstorming session and formulated some loose questions based on the overlap between the call for papers, our research interests as well as my course on Social Media Technologies (and the 60+ students who took that course).

These loose pre-Christmas discussions were quite unfocused (being of a more brainstormy nature), but they did make an impact inasmuch as I actually formulated no less than four different open-ended questions for the (home) exam for the course that relates to the topics that interest us. I don't know for sure, but this feels like it is a pretty unique (or at least unusual) way of conducting research... What do you, dear reader, think about this?

What's great about this from my/our point of view is that we have a captive audience of 60+ informants who are doing their utmost to write the best possible answers to these questions (since their grades depend on the creativity and quality of their answers). Here are the four questions (slightly edited):

Question 4

Some students fired me at a seminar because there will be no role for university teachers in the future (when you can find everything on the Internet)! Or will there...? Will university teachers be even more important in a world of super-abundant information?

a) With support from the course literature, please either argue why

- I will be out of a job as a university teacher 10 years from now, or

- why my job as a university teacher will be more important that ever 10 years from now.

b) What (other) job could I have 2020? Please try to argue convincingly why your suggestion is reasonable. Do note that I will judge your answer based on your arguments, not on how appealing or lucrative my (potential) future job is!

Question 6

I became a little inspired by formulating the last question on the course course evaluation form you filled out:

The goal of some course activities (especially the group assignment) was to force you to work together with new acquaintances and extend your social network. What have the effects of establishing new, weak (?) ties to other students during the through the course been for you personally? Or if you haven't made any new contacts, why do you think that is the case?

a) How many persons who took the course did you know before the course?

b) Discuss and analyze network-inducing activities that have taken place in and around the course from a perspective of "weak" and "strong" ties. The "network-inducing" activities I refer to could have been initiated by me (group formation exercise/group assignment) or by you or another student (for example striking up a conversation during a break).

Question 7

Formulated already in 1980, this is the "media gap":

Please fill "the media gap" (below) with Internet/social media technologies.

a) Please argue about and justify your choices and their placement relative to each other and to other kinds of media surrounding "the media gap" (see picture above)! Then choose one out of the following two questions:

b) Analyze and discuss the proposed division between one-to-one media, Internet/social media and mass media. What are possible factors that complicate this seemingly simple division between different kinds/functions of media?

c) Analyze and discuss the Internet/social/"media gap" media in your figure in terms of Jenkins' use of the terms "interactivity" and "participation".

Question 8

Teaches A, B and C all teach the same masters-level university course. Teacher A always try to use as many different social media tools as possible during the course. Teacher B tries to use a few selected tools. Teacher C sees little use of social media in that course.

Please take the role of one of these teachers and specify what kinds of social media tools you will use and what kinds of tools you will not use. Please also motivate and argue why you made those choices, and, please try to think "beyond" the use of social media in this particular course (a course which happened to be about social media)!

Please answer in the form of a 1-2 pages long "mini-essay".

I will not go into details about the aim of our interview study (I might come back to it later though), but sufficient to say is that we met this week and planned and discussed the study and the resulting paper. As a result of our meeting I have now taken the exams of 15 students (25% of those who took the course) and pasted their answers to the questions above into four separate documents. These four documents each became between 16-30 pages long (!) and 90 pages long together. We have divided the documents up and will read them before our next meeting with an eye towards the generation of questions we want to ask the students in the study about their attitudes to social media use in higher education that we plan to conduct.

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Rich pictures and climate challenges

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I have previously written about the Rich Pictures exercise that I held in my course on social media. I have now adapted, or perhaps returned to the original form and purpose of the exercise; to organize a one-off 3-hour exercise in the area of sustainability, environmental issues and climate challenges.

I have previously written about the evening course I took during the autumn. Some things were good about the course, some things less so. The social framework around the course did not work so well. I did not feel that course participants had good opportunities to get to know each other and develop relationships based on the ambiance and natural curiosity that people who have an interest in common (and are interested enough to take an evening course on that topic) harbor towards each other. That didn't matter (that much) to me as I took the course together with two friends of mine, but none of us did make a lot of new friends through the course even though I'm sure that there were people there that I would have liked to get to know better.

So, part of the purpose of the exercise was to let students in the new-but-similar course that runs during the spring term get to know each other better early in the course. There were several other purposes beyond this purpose of being an ice-breaker and social mixer, such as:

- a way to divide the class into groups without the hassle of course administrators themselves having to fine-tune the work and accomodate different participants' wishes.

- give the students an exercise with a lot of room for (own) creative thinking. Perhaps a few groups will even find new ways of thinking about a topic?

- a way to get "into" the topics covered by the course.

- realize the difficulties (and benefits) of working in a group and having to negotiate and find common ground.

- work with the (in the academic world often-forgotten) sensory and emotional dimension of climate challenges and with an added possibility of "touching" (affecting) participants in other ways than just intellectually, through reading a text or listening to a lecture.

So I suggested a Rich Pictures exercise in the beginning of the new course as, among other things, a way to kick-start the creation of a social structure around the course. I took care of all practical aspects of carrying through the exercise and I have to say the exercise turned out to be a success. The exercise lasted for three hours and I had divided the evening into five "acts":

- Act 1 - selecting a picture and negotiating with others in order to form groups around topics/themes.

- Act 2 - discussing the topic at hand and working with your new group to create a poster.

- Act 3 - presenting the poster and "voting" on you favorite poster (by placing small sticker directly on the poster).

- Act 4 - choosing a task that your new-formed group would work on throughout the term and in parallel to the course.

- Act 5 - filling out an evaluation form so that I would get feedback on the exercise.

I'm especially happy about some constraints we formulated for Act 1 above. All groups had to consist of three persons. All groups had to consist of both men and women. All groups had to consist of both students and "returning" students. And finally, you were not allowed to form a group that included someone that you knew from before the course started. Despite the exercise on the whole being a success, there were still a few things that could have been improved and the main two points are:

- With so many moving parts (acts 1-5 above) and groups leaving to work and returning for further instructions, I could have printed a time-table so that the groups would have known at what times be back in the classroom. As it was, participants were a little on the time we were supposed to reassemble and so we had to go around to check on the groups and also gently remind them that "they had 10 more minutes to work before meeting up in the classroom again"

- The biggest problem though was that I handed out an evaluation forms before they left, but it was done in a haphazard way; people filled it out quickly and handed it in before leaving for the evening. While the feedback on the whole was extremely positive, the actual text was very short, sometimes just summarizing what they thought in a few or even just one singe word ("Great!").

The problem is thus that I did not get a lot of input for my own planned study and for a future paper on the topic of rich pictures. I now realize I should have created a more protected space (in time and in space), for example by asking them to help put the furniture back and then sit down for a concluding summary of the evening. When seated, I could have walked around, personally handed out the evaluation form and stated that they should take their time to think about the questions and try to answer them carefully as a kind of personal service to me. Or we could have had a public "gripe session", a sort of group discussion about pros and cons of the exercise. This gripe session could have been precluded (or followed up) by an evaluation form, perhaps filled out during the following days over the Internet. This is something I need to think about a lot more before I do this exercise again (and discuss and calibrate with my future co-author in Manchester). Even the (current) questions themselves were pretty lame so I have to think a lot more about what I want to get out of the evaluation.

Since the students were positive about the exercise, I'm sure they could and would have provided me with better input to my study had I given them the chance. This was after all what I would get out of the exercise (except the experiences of having conducted it). This is really a crucial point too, as there is little incentive (for me) to do the exercise again from a scientific point of view if it doesn't yield any data that I can use in a future paper about all of this...

However, I did have a lunch meeting with the course administrators one week after the exercise and they were certainly happy enough to invite me to do it all again after the summer, when the next course (the one I took last term) starts again. I think I will do so but I then have to prepare the data collection part a lot better!

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Spatial sound in computer games

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I just (two hours ago) submitted a paper about sound in computer games and it's a huge relief to be done with it, the work has been quite intensive during the last week and today was the very last day to submit it. Only yesterday the paper was 10% longer that what was allowed and the threat of failing to shave off 500 words of the paper was pretty clear: "Submissions in excess of these limits may be rejected without refereeing".

The paper has been submitted to the journal IEEE Software for a special issue on "Engineering Fun". It will be published in the September/October issue if accepted. From the call:

"As large and complex software projects, modern computer games pose many software engineering challenges, with complex and performance-intensive design and implementation choices. As entertainment products, games also rely heavily on less well-defined, abstract properties such as playability and fun. The influence of soft, thematic, and aesthetic requirements on precise and practical designs introduces a variety of interesting development constraints and goals."

The paper is based on a great bachelor's thesis by a student of ours, Markus Bogren Eriksson. His thesis was presented half a year ago and it is called "The sound of reality: Simulated spatial acoustics in modern game worlds". The paper we submitted today is called "Fabricating reality through spatial acoustics". Markus is first author of the paper and I'm the second author.

It just so happened that I came across a call for papers to this special issue only two months ago and directly felt that Markus' thesis would fit hand-in-glove with this special issue. I directly sent a mail to Markus (in the beginning of December). A week or so later we had a great brainstorming session about how to transform (parts of) his thesis into a paper - and then I left Sweden for a month-long trip. Markus worked on the paper over Christmas and we have worked together on the paper (primarily through Google Docs) during the last two and a half weeks.

Even though the topic of the paper is not really my thing, I still think the paper turned out great in the end and I think it has a pretty good chance to be accepted to the journal. At the moment I have a hard time to distance myself from the paper but I hope it is a good as it subjectively feels right now! Here is the abstract:

Fabricating reality through spatial acoustics

We argue that sound is a neglected area of computer game development in comparison to graphics. At this point in time, increased realism and immersion in computer games might thus best be attained by expanding current two-dimensional soundscapes into the third dimension through simulated spatial acoustics (SSA). This recommendation is based on two studies or ours as well as an examination of 20 contemporary computer games and interviews with game developers, sound designers and sound engineers at two progressive gaming studios.

Keywords: computer games, spatial sound, sound and music computing, modeling, simulation

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Data driven sustainability

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A ph.d. student at my department, Jorge Zapico, has come halfway and so and he wrapped up one research project and kicked off a new one this past week. These projects are not his own personal projects, but he is the person most heavily invested in them and the driver and de-facto (though not formal) coordinator and project leader.

I could not attend the part where the "Persuasive services" project was wrapped up, but I did attend lunch and the official kick-off of the "Data driven sustainability" project. I will be one of three persons in the "reference group" for the project, i.e. I will not work in the project itself but will have a ancillary role in supporting, evaluating and providing constructive feedback and advice. I will start doing that right here and right now.

I have not had time to speak further with Jorge about the project beyond reading the project plan and there are several things I do not understand yet. Although I did find the project plan exciting, I also found it lacking in coherence. In a best-case scenario this is due to a lack of understanding on my part. In a worst-case scenario this is due to conceptual weaknesses in thinking about (and writing up) the project. Somewhere in-between and hopefully closer to the truth is the case of:

- a) the project plan being really open and only hinting at and pointing in a general direction (i.e. for now leaving many things open), or,

- b) having some basically sound ideas that could be developed further and that (perhaps especially) could be communicated better.

I can certainly see that the basic techy ideas can dazzle someone who is not knowledgeable in the area and who might then restrain himself from asking further questions and making a fool of himself. That person might be me not being knowledgeable enough - except that I'm not afraid to ask about what I don't understand. Furthermore, it is pretty pointless for me to be in the reference group unless I really grok what the project is about.

So I expect to have conversations with Jorge, with Hannes and with Ambjörn around our coffee table about this project during the coming months and look forward to that. This is what I understand the project to be about right now:

There are several cool up-and-coming technologies such as increased numbers of sensors and increasing amounts of real-time data, open data, linked data, APIs and mashups. This makes it possible to explore new metrics, applications, tool and theories for using this data so as to support sustainability by making environmental information more visible and more based on facts (quantitative data) of how things really are - right here and right now. Collecting, accounting and analyzing environmental information should thus support better decision-making in the area of sustainability.

That's about it. I also understand that so-called "interventions" are an important part of the expected results of the research project. These interventions are basically prototypes or (web) applications that are part proof-of-concept, part open-ended "toys" (albeit serious) and part something else. An example of an "intervention" from the "persuasive services" project is carbon.to (check it out, it's fun!).

It thus sounds like a practical and really fun project. What I don't understand is how the project is supposed to create a "theory" of... something (as per the project plan). The plan states that one of the two main outputs of the project is "A theoretical framework and toolkit of how ICT can allow making visible the environmental variables and how this information can help to move towards sustainability". That's a worthy goal, but I can't right now connect the actual (practical) work that will be done in the project with these more "heavy" theoretical outputs of the project. What I can see is a project that explores different ideas, builds stuff that might spread virally and thus change the world by "starting a revolution" from below.

Hopefully things will become a little bit more clear later this term. I anyway with Jorge the best of luck in launching the project!

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No open laptops at the seminars!

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For my course on social media, it is stated in the criteria for examination and grading that:

"I will try to take active participation at the seminars into account, i.e. the fact that you have contributed a lot (talked, asked questions and answered questions posed by others) at the seminars might make a difference if your final grade for the course hinges right in-between two different grades."

Some way into the course I felt that I had a good grasp of who was who - without which the statement above would be pretty futile. Halfway into the course however, I went one step further in my "intrusiveness" in "laying down the ground rules to support the students' deep learning of course materials".

I can't (unfortunately?) control the students' attention, and the fact that some don't utter anything at all during a seminar is, I guess, ok (some might feel shy or that their English language skills is an impediment to full participation). But I actually feel pretty secure in my judgement that if a student has a laptop open and his/her nose inside it throughout a two-hour seminar, that person is a notorious non-contributor to the seminar. Although the physical body is present (and the student will get credits for attendance), the student is mentally not really "there" to the same extent as other seminar participants. Just as some persons are can be rewarded for active participation, others might thus be penalized for active non-participation in the same way (i.e. it might make a difference if the final grade for the course hinges between two grades).

It should be noted that I am only referring to seminars here - students are free to surf as much as they want on the lectures (just as they are free to not attend them at all). Students are not particularly expected to contribute that much to lectures except by (passively) listening - as apart from the seminars.

Instead of stirring things up in this potential hornet's nest and instead of intruding too much into what students might perceive (probably at least partly correctly) the be their own business, I have on the other hand later realized that I could easily have reached the same goal (no computers in the classroom, higher chance that students contribute to the discussions) by physically rearranging the classroom. With one big table in the middle of the classroom where everyone can see everyone else, it is really very difficult for a student to haul up a laptop and start surfing. And if they do, then we just sit in a big circle on our chairs next time around without even having a table in front of us...

I anyway really don't know if this was a controversial decision as there were scant possibilities for students to oppose or discuss the issue within the course itself (except by commenting on the blog post where the new "rules" were stated - which no one did!). What do you dear reader think - is this a controversial decision? I suspected it might be and I therefore supported my position with a couple of quotes from a book we "almost" encountered as course literature (we read a shorter article on the same topic and by the same author; "Is Google making us stupid?"):

"In [an] experiment, a pair of Cornell researchers divided a class of students into two groups. One group was allowed to surf the Web while listening to a lecture. A log of their activity showed that they looked at sites related to the lectures content but also visited unrelated sites, checked their e-mail, went shopping, watched videos, and did all the other things that people do online. The second group hear the identical lecture but had to keep their laptops shut. Immediately afterward, both groups took a test measuring how well they could recall the information from the lecture. The surfers, the researchers report, "performed significantly poorer on immediate measures of memory for the to-be-learned content." It didn't matter, moreover, whether they surfed information related to the lecture or completely unrelated content - they all performed poorly. When the researchers repeated the experiment with another class, the results were the same.

[...]

"Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we're involved in, the greater the impairment the distraction cause."

[...]

" 'the brain takes time to change goals, remember the rules needed for the new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous, still-vivid activity." Many studies show that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we'll overlook or misinterpret important information."

[...]

"What determines what we remember and what we forget? the key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetitions or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory"

Sources:

Hembrooke, H. and Singleton, L. (2003). "The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments". Journal of computing in higher education, vol.15. no.1 (september 2003), pp.46-64.

Trafton, J. and Monk, C. (2008). "Task interruptions". Reviews of human factors and ergonomics, vol.3, pp.111-126.

Jackson, M. (2008). "Distracted: The erosion of attention and the coming dark age". Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

Kendel, Eric. (2006). "In search of memory: The emergence of a new science of mind". New York: Norton.


PS (140919): Clay Shirky came around to the same position on this issue as I have.

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Media Technology and Sustainability

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A big event at my department, Media Technology and Graphic Arts, is that Nils Enlund, the professor and founder will retire this spring after 25 years or so at KTH. That is a great loss, but also an occasion for some soul-searching and introspection, and the basic question is: ”what will we do from now on?”. The background of our group lies in media production (especielly printed media), but I myself and several others have no background whatsoever in that area.

So, what areas should our group cover, what do we want to excel in, how can we formulate areas that can engage us and others (and in which we can find critical mass among ourselves)? Oh, and by the way, how will we divide all the administrative tasks that Nils has shouldered (including the responsibility for the budget)? These and other questions were the topic of a kick-off earlier this autumn. The group that I belonged to came up with a suggestion for five different topics/groups/”theme areas” that our department could muster around (other groups came up with similar suggestions). This is a big change compared to now when it’s more of ”every man for himself” and the interests of our relatively small group point in a thousand different directions.

Since these five theme areas were sketched out, they have been semi-officially approved. Even though nothing has been decided upon officially, it is still difficult to see what could hinder such a development at my department. At our monthly department meeting in November I therefore suggested we should move forward and ask people at the department what theme areas they would like to belong to. The suggestion was that each person should preferably belong to at least two, and a maximum of three areas. Another suggestion is that each person will ”belong” to one theme area and ”follow” one or two other theme areas.

The big news is that one of the theme areas will be called ”Media Technology and Sustainability” and it will be led (or at least started up) by none other than yours truly. My group managed to have a start-up meeting before the winter leave and so have started to discuss issues that are relevant to this (budding) group/theme area; the need for a common foundation for stating our interests (i.e. comparable to a corporate ”vision” and a ”mission” statement), short- and medium-term goals, short- and medium-term activities, people and other resarch groups we would like to cooperate with and so on.

What’s in a name? ”Media Technology and Sustainability” includes, but is wider than just environmental sustainability and encompasses also issues of social and economic sustainability. An example of a social sustainability (research) issues could for example be the use of social media in a crisis situation (like the ash cloud covering most of Europe earlier this year). An example of an economic sustainability (research) issue could be how society through smart IT use could cope with an extended lack of economic growth (for example by localizing economies and by using alternative but complementary currencies).

The lack of earlier, solid work in an area that combines Internet/media and sustainability is of course a problem, but can just as easily be reframed as being a possibility for our group - a wide open area that we can "colonize" and establish ourselves in. Some work has been done in the area by a few precursors and part of our group’s work during the spring will be to read up on efforts and results of these early pioneers and to formulate a position and an ambition that allows us to stake out some territory of our own.

Our early work will eventually lead to research grant applications and scientific studies and so on. An easy way to explore an unknown area and to do studies ”on the cheap” in the meanwhile is to have master’s students do some of the initial exploration. So one of the tasks of our group during the spring will be to formulate interesting research questions in the form of master’s thesis proposals. A lot of interesting ideas were suggested already at the initial brainstorming meeting and ”in the corridors” before and after that meeting, but much is currently up in the air and has not ”landed” yet.

I end this relatively timid (and secretive) announcement of (hopefully) great things to come with a wish for a great 2011!

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