Visible Effort
Summary: At the end of this presentation, attendees will have learned about a new method of monitoring and stimulating group collaboration.
Description:
Visible Effort is a wiki-based on-line collaborative environment for classroom projects that involve creation of digital content (mainly text documents). The environment interface, which is be a variation of the MediaWiki software, communicates in a transparent manner the quality of the collaborative effort and facilitates, if necessary, student or instructor intervention for improving it. By “quality of collaborative effort” is meant the diversity and equality of user contributions to the collaborative project. This is measured by tracking the over-time contributions of each user to the project. The synthetic measure of content diversity/distribution of effort is used to structure a number of visual guides (background colors, visual markers), which facilitate “at-a-glance” assessment of project status. The platform interface can tell if only a few students have contributed the most to the digital document or if the work has been evenly distributed. In a word, the environment makes group efforts visible and this information can be used in a direct manner by individual team members for adjusting their group efforts. The platform can be extend beyond the classroom. As a new framework for digital content creation and evaluation it can be used for knowledge management, web publishing, on-line social interaction, etc.
See http://veffort.us
See http://veffort.us
Sorin Matei
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
Dr. Matei, an Associate Professor of Communication at Purdue University, is known for applying, from a cross-analytical perspective, traditional statistical, GIS, and spatial methodologies to the study of information technology and social integration. He has conducted a number of studies on the social and cognitive impact of location aware systems deployed in real or virtual environments. (Location aware systems take into account the geographic or social context of the user when delivering information.) His current research is particularly focused on the role of spatial indexing on learning in location aware situations and on the role of physical affordances in structuring location aware communication experiences. The experimental work he conducted at Purdue University’s Envision lab indicates that there are some benefits for information acquisition in location aware situations. In addition, he has conducted large-scale multidisciplinary surveys of communication technology use in local communities both in the United States and in Europe. His research was funded by Motorola, Kettering Foundation, University of Kentucky, and Purdue University and was recognized by various professional organizations with paper and research awards. His teaching portfolio includes research methods, multimedia design, usability, online interaction and online community development classes. His teaching makes use of a number of software platforms he has codeveloped, such as Mindmeld (http://purdue.isours.org/mindmeld). Dr. Matei is also known for his media work. He is a former BBC World Service journalist and is still actively involved with a number of media projects, such as his research blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink), online magazines (http://www.pagini.com), and his weekly column “Ideas to spare” published every Tuesday by Adevarul (http://www.adevarul.ro) , a major Romanian language newspaper.