Je sais pas pourqoi les séminaire (comme celui-la) sont si pompeux, au 21ème siècle, 30 ans après les situs (debord rulez), il serait temps de se rendre compte que la ville, terrain de la collectivité est une aire de spectacle dans laquelle peuvent s'insérer des activités passionantes et inutiles (dans le sens, sans but comme aller acheter du pain ou aller a la laverie). Est-ce qu'il y a des gens qui s'intéressent à l'acte urbain inutile, aller flaner n'importe où, se pencher sur l'esthétique des zones industrielles, des cylindres de fumée partant dans le ciel ou le flux des gens dans les rues...

On pourrait imaginer tant d'activités inutiles au coeur des villes... pour que les gens se la réapproprient. Un geste simple, c'est regarder en l'air, les batiments par exemple, plus personne ne semble s'intéresser à l'urban planning général de son lieu de vie :(

Il semble que ce soient les technologies qui provoquent une sorte de "choc" et donc des transformations : les suédois avec leur sorte de jeu de rôle grandeur nature avec téléphone portable (il s'agit de lancer des sms pour "attaquer" des adversaires repérés par gps sur site web par un contact resté devant son pc at home), les new yorkais qui balancent des sms groupés pour avertir leur potes qu'ils ont vu une star dans la ville... ou plus simple : se balader en ville avec une digicam, prendre des pics et les balancer sur les forums pour ?

TODO : faire un state of the art des technologies de location-based entertainment urbain

La technologie pourrait être un détonateur permettant la création d'ACTIVITES URBAINES, a mi chemin entre la contempaltion des situs sur la ville et l'interaction du jeu vidéo, le tout traversé par le courant des jeux de rôles grandeur nature...

Humour absurde

Cluster d'auteurs (bd, frontmen, videos) absurdes a checker absolument : - pierre la police : absurdite absolue, des bd en phase avec le monde moderne, voir son interview et notamment ses inspirations (Une boite de thon, des coups de feu, les vêtements pour chiens, certains modèles de sacs d'aspirateurs, le phénomène de la vapeur, les micro-ondes…). Le gars est un génie précurseur de l'affaire de la vache folle. - la bande de la grosse boule : edouard baer, ariel vizman, francis von litsenborgh, gilles-gaston dreyfuss, ... : du visuel a donf, décalage, des enquetes sur des traffics de pain, sur des poseurs de moustaches dans des téléviseurs. Attention !!! - francois rollin : que dire de plus a propos du professeur ? cf un site - ...

Desktop Subversibles

Jonah Brucker-Smith, artist/researcher at Media Lab Europe (the MIT Medialab kind-of franchise, worth to check what is happening there :) proposes a collection of background awareness applications based on desktop ubiquity : Desktop Subversibles : - MouseTraces : a background graphical display of mouse movements between two people across distance. - ClipIt! : a networked sticky-note application that provides ambient glimpses of the copy and paste activity of other users - MouseMiles : a networked collective mouse milage indicator manifested in physical space. - Clicks : a distributed mouse click collector rendered as sound in public space.

WATCH IT !

Eva Saro-Nydegger a présenté lors d'un brown bag seminar a tecfa des outils pour interroger images et valeurs dans un contexte personnel ou professionnel. Venant des beaux arts, son approche différente (moins formalisée que les sémioticiens) est intéressante ! 3 sites : Watchit (see DEMOS) youwatchit.net (see ACT NOW or SPEAK OUT) and youwatchit.de (selection of workshop results)

SMS and WAP stats

Mobile Data statistics : difficile de trouver des choses exactes, il y a en effet pas mal d'approximations venant des cabinets de consulting (gartner, datamonitor, gfk...)

Regarder la aussi : http://www.mda-mobiledata.org/ SMS :

Global Mobile Users 1.3 billion SMS Sent Globally 4Q02 95 billion All SMSs Sent 2002 366 billion SMS sent Germany 4Q02 30 billion

1.4 billion SMS were sent in the UK in January 2002.

2002 : in Western Europe, SMS traffic is about 10 billion messages per month In Asia-Pacific, SMS traffic is about from 15 billion messages per month in 2002

During 2002, 430.8 billion mobile messages were sent globally, according to a report just released by Telecom Trends International. These messages were sent by an estimated 580.2 million mobile messaging users

All appearances indicate that SMS traffic in the U.S. has literally doubled in the first quarter of 2002, Within the past 12 months of 2001, SMS users in Europe have increased by almost 20% -- reaching

62% of all users with a mobile phone. About 90% of SMS messages are currently simple person to person messaging or voicemail notification, with mobile information services such as news, stock prices, sport, weather, horoscope, jokes and downloading of ring tones

WAP

WAP users in W. Europe 2000: 7 mill. M phones used for WAP (by 6.3 million persons) 2001: 18 mill. M phones used for WAP (by 16 million persons) 2002: 34 mill. M phones used for WAP (by 30 million persons)

Hits to WAP sites:

* Genie: 62.5 million hits in December 2001 (500% increase since Sept). * Digital Bridges: 15 million hits in 6 months (2001)

Only 24,000 WAP-accessible sites in the world, according to wireless resource Pinpoint.com. WAP is different than SMS in the sense that SMS is a persontoperson service as well as a push and pull service, wap is just a push and pull service...

In Japan there are over 10 million i-mode subscribers and a little over 3 million WAP users

As many as 80%-90% of corporate users that purchased WAP-enabled phones have abandoned the data capabilities of these phones and are using them for voice communications only. Up to 75% of corporate users in Europe and Asia have stopped using the Internet connectivity of their wireless phones. (Meta Group, 5/2001.)

Repartition SMS/EMS

In 2002, 95 percent of the users used text-based or Basic SMS (B-SMS). Messages based on services such as Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) and Smart Messaging constituting Advanced SMS

(A-SMS) was used by four percent of the users, while multimedia messaging (MMS) was used by only one percent of the users.

nielsen on wap : http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001210.html

wap sucess in korea : http://www.content-wire.com/Unwired/Index.cfm?ccs=116&cs=2297

wap technical faq : http://www.wapforum.org/faqs/technicalfaq.htm

EMC has been researching and publishing market intelligence on the wireless industry since 1985 http://www.emc-database.com/website.nsf/index/pr020527

http://www.mobilesms.com/main.asp http://www.forrester.com/search/1,6260,,00.html?squery=sms http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200009/un_09_20_00a.html http://www.caslon.com.au/emailprofile2.htm

The GSM Association claims that monthly SMS traffic in the EU mid-2000 was around

Germany 200 million messages Italy 150 million Finland 75 million UK 70 million Norway 70 million Sweden 70 million Portugal 60 million France 60 million Spain 60 million Denmark 50 million Belgium 25 million Greece 15 million

Afrofuturism

Jeudi dernier, j'étais au concert de Beans (ex- Anti Pop Consortium) à la Marquise (une péniche sur le Rhône) à Lyon. C'était très bon, Beans a mélangé slam et hip-hop chanté avec son petit discman. La gars ne paie pas de mine mais c'était excellent. Les textes sont très proche de l'afrofuturisme ("archeologists of the future..."), le flow énorme et le son électro minimal génial. Très proche du courant dark ambient de NYC pour la vibee, de dj spooky et de l'afrofturisme pour les textes et du hop-hop 80s pour le look. East Coast rulez

Evaluating Collaboration

Defining a method to evaluate collaboration is a hard and challenging issue. Billinghurst, Belchera, Guptaa & Kiyokawaa in their studies about Augmented Reality collaborative interfaces proposes three key points : - performance measures : typical performance measures include how fast a task can be completed, and the quality of the outcome of the collaboration. - process measures : objective communication measures that capture the process of collaboration extracted from transcriptions of audio and video recordings and notes made during the collaborative task : frequency of conversational turns, incidence/duration of overlapping speech, number of interruptions, turn completions, dialogue structure, back-channels... Gesture and non-verbal behaviors can also be analyzed for characteristic features. - subjective measures : based entirely on the users perception of their experience.

Defining an appropriate metrics to discriminate collaboration patterns is difficult and according to my Pierre Dillenbourg, each research group has his own metric or method of evaluation...

Below I put a discussion on the moo with Colin about that stuff. TO DO -> write a white paper about that and visit Amy Joller (Italy) and Martin Muhlenbrock (Xerox, Grenoble) >'colin tu as bosse sur les methodes d'evaluation de la collaborartion ? du genre discrimination of collaboration aptterns >'colin est-ce qu'il y a des methodes unifies, fondamentales ou c le fouilli, chaque equipe a sa metrics ? He pages, "non pas directement ... ma collegue Amy Soller a fait une these sur l'utilisation de Hidden Markov Models pour classer des sequences d'interaction en effective versus non effective" >'colin mais est-ce qu'il y aun bouquin la dessus ? genre une presentation de smethodes d'evaluation ? He pages, "pas a ma connaissance comme ca directement ... on a fait un workshop sur computational models of CSCL ... je peux te montrer les proceedings ... tetre y a des references dans les short papers" >'colin yes cool, c en version numerique ? He pages, "ca depend de ce que tu analyses, si c le dialogue y a des standards genre DISCOUNT" He pages, "http://sra.itc.it/people/soller/CSCL2002/workshop-program.html'coli" >'colin ouais merci ! He pages, "et si tu veux evaluer les patterns de qui parle a qui y a les sociogrammes" He pages, "et des metriques de p.ex. centralite d'un acteur dans le researu, des metriques de complexite etc ... Pierre a un book la dessus dans son bureau" He pages, "aka plein de formules" >'colin ok, une fois faudrais quon discute de ca et que je prenne des notes, genre que je fasse un peit white paper de synthese He pages, "oui ca serait cool de systematiser un peu" >'colin je me dis que ca peut servir, notamment pour le plan avec nokia >'colin et moi pour me fixer les idees, il faut kejecrive He pages, "sinon y a les efforts de systematisation de scripts CSCL ... DAniel K a qqchose la dessus ... mais ca c'est pas pour l'analyse c'est plus une description systematique des pratiques en XML" >'colin oui c different He pages, "Angelique Dimitracopoulou a l'approche la plus formelle je pense" >'colin et tavais pas ecris un truc la dessus avec un garsa de duisburg ? He pages, "ca c'etait plus sur les approches de regulation en CSCL ... He pages, "http://www.mmi.unimaas.nl/euro-cscl/Papers/197.pdf" >'colin ok alors c peut etre ce gars qui a ecrit un truc sur les collabraoion apatterns He pages, "un autre workshop ... mais j'y etais pas alors je peux pas dire ce qui est chaud :) http://collide.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/ecai-2000/" >'colin ok je prends note He pages, "probably ... Martin Mühlenbrock il est a xerox a Grenoble now" >'colin ca peut etre interessant daler faire un tour la bas pour voir ce qui s epasse tu pense ? He pages, "oui on devrait aller visiter ... et aussi Amy, elle est en Italie" He pages, "on va en causer a Pieeer et tetre organiser une tournee des Alpes CSCL ..."

Discussion with my phD director

Few notes of a discussion with my phd director (messy and in french sorry) Il faut pour ma thèse quelqeu chose de visionnaire mais pas casse-gueule, il faut une application précise

Objets situés physiquement dans l'espace

Réfléchir à des contextes professionels dans lesquels la frontière entre formation et training est moins marquée qu'ailleurs

Device : pda + gsm, wifi ... phone c pas terrible. cela depend aussi de la distance entre les gens, cela peut avoir une incidence sur la technologie utilisée

Navigation sociale : concept à employer mais dans un environnement physique et non virtuel. Lire des choses la dessus. On anvigue dans l'espace et on fait un rating de ce que l'on voit. Asynchrone donc.

Imaginer des contextes professionels dans lesquels il y a collaboration entre personnes/équipes dispersées et pour lesquels l'espace/contexte est meaningfull (fait sens) : santé hopital (collab entre +ieurs personnes soignant un gars ?), ski teacher, agriculteur, militaires, TCS, cicr, GN, course d'orientation, équipe de secours en montagne, agent de sécurité

TrUC bien : field study comme géologie, archéologie, plongeurs...

CHECKER DOC ARMEE AWARENESS DECISION

La représentation de la position spatiale de l'autre devrait avoir une incidence sur la réalisation de la tâche (facilite la tâche mais n'en est pas la composante principale, on retrouve le pb que l'on avait avec spaceminers pour lequel l'indication d'awareness ne doit pas etre obligatoire pour realiser la tache). Il nous faut une tache dans laquelle la position (et le contexte spatiale) dans lequel est situé lautre) soit utile. COntexte : quand on raisonne sur la position de l'autre, on peut inférer sur ce qu'il sait, les info qu'il a collecté... La clé du pb est de trouver une relation entre espace et tâche... marquer d'une couleur ce qu'un collegue a vu, pour aps refaire par exemple ? Il faut que raisonner sur l'espace ce soit raisonner sur le problème

Etudier les impacts sociaux et cog des location-based awareness tools, voir aussi comment cela peut modifier la tache et la collaboration ???? Etude sur location based awareness SYNCHRONE et ASYNCHRONE ????

Les urbanistes de l'epfl ???

TO DO : - trouver terrain, tache : les géologue ca semble pas mal - lire sur relation space/cognition, braistormer sur en quoi savoir la position de l'autre peut aider à la représentation de l'autre ? en quoi... - lire sur social nav - lire doc sur houria FT

Weblogs, awareness and transactive memory

How come weblogs, awareness and transactive memory are related ? As a matter of fact, weblogs, by presenting somebody's thought, references, activities, plans and so on, is a kind of asynchronous awareness tool. Dourish and Belloti (1992) gave one of the best-known definitions for awareness: “awareness is an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity”. Asynchrouns means that information is presented in an historical perspective. It can be a summary of the whole information collected after a period of time (compile function) or a differentiation between recent information and past ones (decay function). Information presented in weblogs in a longitudinal/historical way provide users with a context for their own activities.

Transactive Memory is a theory proposed by Wegner (1987). This theory examines the process by which individuals determine who knows what and who knows who knows what. Information presented in weblogs are a way to enable transactive memory within a team

Mobile Phones Profiles

Marketing people try to categorize people by building profile in order to sell them the most appropriate stuff. I've listed below few so-called "profiles" : 'balanced enjoyers', 'inside explorers', 'cool followers', 'status seekers', 'asian aspirers', 'trendsetters' (this one is too simple :), 'fun loving youth', 'professional pioneers', 'selective pioneers', 'practically phoners'... Jacques Chirac is the prototype of a cool profile : 'grandfather's phone' as told him the swedish prime minister, so cool !

I don't know whether their marketing studies takes into account the real practice/use of the mobile devices by potential users but those categories sounds too good to be relevant :(

J'ai lu un texte très intéressant de Gilles Deleuze (dans Pourparlers, 1990) : "Post-Scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle" qui traite du glissement qui s'opère actuellement des sociétés disciplinaires apparues au XVIIIème (famille, école, usine, hopital, prison). Ces institutions sont finies, seule leur agonie est gérée. Deleuze rejoint ainsi Foucault, Virilio et Burrough en parlant de société non plus disciplinaire mais de contrôle : l'entreprise remplace l'usine, la formation permanente remplace l'école... Contrairement à la société disciplinaire où on n'arretait pas de recommencer dans chaque institution différente (et ou chaque individu était défini par sa signature et son matricule), la société de contrôle n'en finit avec rien (l'essentiel étant alors le password -> qui renvoit à l'accès cf. L'âge des Accès de Jeremy Rifkin). De plus, à chaque type de société correspond des machines exprimant les formes sociales capables de leur donner naissance et de s'en servir : les vieilles sociétés utilisaient leviers, poulies, horloges voire machine énérgétiques; les sociétés de contrôle : machines de troisième espèce, machines informatique et ordinateurs. On passe donc d'un capitalisme de production à un capitalisme de surproduction dans laquelle les entreprises ont une "âme", révélation terrifiante s'il en est : le marketing est devenu l'instrument du contrôle social. "Ce qui compte n'est pas la barrière mais l'ordinateur qui repère la position de chacun licite ou illicite, et opère une modulation universelle." "Les anneaux d'un serpent sont encore plus compliqués que les trous d'une taupinière"

Cognitive functions tu support Collaborative Work

I've made a brief review of the cognitive functions that should be fullfilled for collaborative work:Group memory/Storing the context/Group mirrors/Conflict/disagreement/Explanation/Internalization/Appropriation/Shared cognitive load/Mutual regulation/Social grounding/Division of labor/Building a shared understanding of the situation. In order to augment collaboration with mobile technologies, we should provide effective tools to support those functions. For instance, a collaborative weblog (where two or more users could post messages) is a way to support group memory.

Misceallanous Stuff

I was thinking of innovatives ways to use mobile devices for educational purposes. We could propose a kind of game in a city where players have to collaborate (different roles could be assigned), performing a joint acivity where they need to negotiate. Maybe I could use something like that to test the effects of location-awareness on collaborative processes ! Thanx JJ for the reference about microdocuments. It is definetely the trend nowadays. Smoogle defines it as documents made up of microcontents : "no less than three words and no more than 1,100 words in length, has a title, text body, a single topic, and links to other documents on the Internet or within a network environment, and has a url or semantic means that can be addressed through a link any body following that link can find the document" : from sms to blogs entry. Knowledge management benefits from this trend : those documents represent a very efficient way to deliver information. The content in itself is also reduced to the focused information. Using microdocuments is a good way to eliminate noise around the information. This makes me think of the actual trend : reading reuters headlines instead of reading press articles : you got the info and just the facts.

Another term for microdocument is nanopublishing.

Submitted Paper for International Conference on Groupware

I have written a paper for the International Conference on Groupware in Autrans, France (Sunday 28, September - Thursday 2, October 2003). Here is the abstract : The Impact of Awareness Tools on Mutual Modelling in a Collaborative Video-Game

This paper describes the findings of an experimental research concentrating on collaboration in a multi-player video game. The overall goal is to study the cognitive impacts of the awareness tools. The focus is in finding an effect on performance as well as on the representation an individual build of what his partner knows, plans and intends to do (i.e. Mutual Modelling). Using an awareness tools has a significant effect by improving task performance. However, the players who were provided with this tool did not show any improvement of their mutual modelling. Further analysis on contrasted groups revealed that there was an effect of the awareness tool on mutual modelling for players who spent a large amount of time using the tool.

This research was conducted for my MSc dissertation. I still want to work on the very issue of studying the socio-cognitive impacts of awareness. I think my focus will be directed towards context-awareness or location-awareness and thus relations between space and cognition.

Stuff about Social Space

Social Space is a crux issue. It should be considered as the cornerstone of joint activities and hence to collaborative work/learning. This space is build considering the traces left in the environment (virtual or not) by people. We all send signals into social space that can be decoded by others as trace for a potential use. For instance, "following the leader" to the baggage claim is an action we often perform : in this case, we see somebody (the first guy who jump off the plane :) following a certain path (this is the signal). We decode this signal as a cue : this guy may be aware of the way one should follow to get to the baggage claim. According to Per Persson and Fredrik Espinoza's talk, there is to kind of social spaces :

- direct social space : synchronous interaction like one-to-one communication (face2face, chat), copresence of people, mutual awareness, use of shared artefacts... We don't really need to decode the trace since there are some "conventions" like verbal language, signs... - indirect social space : we need to decode the signal : following the leader as I explain above, fingerprints, others were here, public crowds, recommender systems, traces of group identity (uniforms, brands), tags and graffiti, annotations...

Furthermore, human beings are definetely social animals. We love living in social space and we're all observers (yeah this is linked to Piaget's constructivism :) who interprets others' signals.

The VCR watches TV for you !

I really like this quote from Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency : "Take the VCR, for example. Not only can it watch TV for you, it can watch more channels and watch them better than you can. Similarly, the Electric Monk does your believing for you. Instead of having to wade through mountains of propaganda, you'd tell your Electric Monk to pick a few random hopeless causes each week."

The book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (written by Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroeder and published by Alpha Books)seems to be a good reference... a starting point to write something during my spare time :)

Additionally (I don't know if you notice that this post is total chaos), I've discovered that the "copyleft" concept I fancy exists : The Creative Commons "is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share" CC proposes to share creative works, different licenses are opened. Cory Doctorrow's book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is a cool example.

Does WiFi technology suck ?

There is nowadays an interesting debate about this trend of putting WiFi hotspot everywhere to provide users with a permanent connection to the Internet. Accoridng to mobitopia and francois planque, there are several limits to the WiFi utopia :

- WiFi's achilles heel: WiFi's spectrum which is high frequency is hence highly susceptible to interference. - It's difficult to move faster than 74km/h, above that limit, there will be too much packet loss. - Users gotta buy an access coupon for each place (whereas you keep your phone with 3G stuff). - WiFi internet access is not that fast ! it strongly depends on the hot spot. If it's just ADSL and you have 10 users it could be slower than you think !

However I still think WiFi could be an interesting and relevant technologies for limited areas, mostly indoors and where activities do not require high bandwidth : e-mail, chat, forum, even collaborative writing !

Sleep is for the weak. I'll sleep when I'm dead. ;)

Graffiti of Otaku Generation

I think the title of this post (directly taken from a GAINAX animated movie released in the 80s) absolutely covers the idea of SocialTexting !!! The topic of social navigation takes into account the very concept of Schelling Point. It is an essential element of every city's life (for instance : time square in new york) coined by sociologist Thomas Schelling. When there is an advantage in coordinating, but people can't communicate, how can they coordinate? A Schelling point is a solution that people will tend to converge on in the absence of communication, because it seems natural or 'special' to them.

The topic of SocialNav is linked to urban planning. I should read Akira Suzuki, 'Do Android Crows Fly Over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo?' but this book is really hard to find... This books explains and analyzes how new mobile technologies re-shape today's (as well as tomorrow's) cities. Tokyo is presented as an example (Is Japan still the future ? asked Wired one year ago, I would say yes...

Yesterday...

Yesterday was the inauguration of CRAFT (Centre de Recherche et de d'Appui à la Formation et ses Technologies, Center for Research on Education and its Technologies), the new epfl lab directed by Pierre Dillenbourg, my phD director. I've met interesting people, in various fields like architects or urban planners as well as guys from the Etat de Vaud who were obvioulsy looking for consulting about mobiles devices and integrated classrooms.

I realized that I should develop my own philosophy about educational technologies. So far, I propose two tracks (two "lignes de fuite" would say Gille Deleuze):

- superhigh tech stuff : beyond the desktop/laptop computers there exists a wide range of new devices : logitech I/O pen, PDA, mobile phone (the new device pupils should have after a calculator), tablet PCs, wristwatches... Thanks to that kind of devices, artefacts become more and more pervasive/invisble/transparent (from the user point of view). This is termed "calm technology". - low tech devices : I am convinced that pedagogical scenario that considers old devices could be imagined (cf. bruce sterling's dead media project)

Today's todolist :)

Gosh ! here's the first to do list... another use of a blog I should add to the list posted yesterday ! - Write something about social navigation (a quick'n dirty state-of-the-art) - Write a paper for CRIWG'2003 ! - Meet Pr Edoerda Charbon on tuesday (at Pearl Pu's course), introduce myself and talk to him about possible collaboration - Find possible use of his context-aware technologies for collaboration

invent the future classroom's killer app !!!!