Generating visual imagery with audio
03.12.2005
This study investigates the role that audio plays in the generation of mental imagery. Utilizing a within-subjects design, participants in this study are exposed to a watch treatment and a listen treatment. In the watch treatment, participants view and hear a short video clip from a movie musical four times and then sort a sequence of 20 still frames from the video. In the listen treatment, participants view and hear the short video clip and then listen only to the audio. They repeat this sequence three times, viewing and hearing the clip a total of three times and hearing it two times. It is hypothesized that participants in the listen treatment will sort the still frames more accurately and quickly, even though they have seen the video clip fewer times. The hypothesized mechanism is that listening to the audio-only clips will assist participants in generating mental imagery to correspond to previously seen images in the video. Participants will then compare their generated mental imagery with that of the video in subsequent viewings of the short clip, leading to a more precise encoding of the video sequence. Findings suggest that participants in the listen treatment did sort the still frames more accurately and more quickly than participants in the watch treatment, supporting the study’s main hypothesis.

Different video analysis tools, different video analysis
12.12.2004
This study investigates whether using video analysis tools that afford different user interactions has an impact on video analysis conducted with these tools. Two video analysis interfaces with different levels of affordance for manipulation and creation of visual structure were used by participants to analyze and synthesize 16 short video clips. The amount of notes taken while using each tool and the number of clips viewed and re-viewed were also accounted for. Resulting analytic essays were compared. It was found that participants that used the video analysis interface that constrained manipulation and limited visual structure creation viewed more video clips, took more notes, and created more abstracted and sophisticated analyses. Participants using the manipulation oriented interface were more likely identify formal features of the videos as thematically relevant.

top

Group dynamics in mixed human | agent environments:
Betty, the Teachable Agent, is the next contestant on the Triple A Game Show!
03.19.2005
This paper is an exploration of the challenges and opportunities available when an educational technology system that accommodates one human and one embodied agent becomes a system that enables the interaction of many humans and many agents. Under the direction of Dan Schwartz , Stanford’s AAA Lab develops software that lets children teach virtual agents in order to learn scientific concepts and content. Based on the adage that one learns more when one teaches, the AAA Lab’s Teachable Agents (TAs) reason about academic tasks based on the instruction provided to them by their human teachers. Through watching their agents perform these tasks, students learn how well they have taught their agents and can address any gaps in knowledge their agents may have. Unlike pedagogical agents that are primarily demonstrative, such as intelligent tutoring systems, “a teachable agent…has little or no a priori knowledge to demonstrate. The interface between the agent and the user serves two purposes, that of allowing the user to teach the agent, and that of engaging the user’s attention through the agent’s personality and interactivity” (p. 27, Davis et. al.).

top

you with me? : observing an introductory statistics class
10.15.2005
This is a day like any other Monday, Wednesday or Friday at 11am in a room with no windows. Except for the gradual attrition of students, the room differs little from one lesson to the next. Near forty students sit in rows of computer workstations, facing towards a large projection of Power Point, mirrored once again in the forty smaller screens in front of each student. Occasionally one of the screens will meander to web-mail or the news like an errant minnow and then drift back to the Point with casual indifference. The professor gestures towards the projection, “These slides are really a draft. [The TA] hasn’t reviewed them so don’t trust anything on them.” And with this warning the class, ever timely begins....

Field notes: High School Physics Class, 1989
11.13.2004
Today is November 13 th, 2004 . I am seated at my laptop making observations of a high school physics class conducted some 15 years before. According to the timestamp on the video, the recording was made on January 19 th, 1989 . Ironically, I, too was in high school when this tape was made...

top

Step One: Making Sense of Insight
12.09.2004
The purpose of this paper is to provide foundational knowledge from which to explore the research question: How do groups and individuals approach and solve insight problems? Are there differences | similarities? As a first step in this exploration, this paper will primarily investigate the process of individual insight through an exploration of selected definitions, approaches, and methods of investigation used in considering the process of individual insight.

top

paper

Not the norm
spring 2005
The series of papers for this week’s class explore issues of social identity, norms and social impact. Spanning forty-seven years of research, these papers attempt to account for the ways that people affect one another. While the explication of norm development, social impact, group pressure and social identity represented in these papers forms a rich and diverse perspective on what norms mean for individuals, group, and intergroup relationships, there is value in considering what norms about norms these papers also represent. As a method of inquiry, I will explore how each of the papers deal with non-normative behaviors, when people do not perform within the boundaries of behaviors described and measured by these authors. This exploration will reveal additional opportunities to be investigated in the study of social norms, including differentiations between reactive and generative norm formation, the role of agency in identity formation and subsequent instantiations of agency such as code switching behaviors and fluid identities within and between groups.

What is a group/team?
spring 2005

What is group effectiveness? How would you know it if you saw it?
spring 2005

short critiques of papers:

Brewer, M. B. (1996). Intergroup relations. Pacific Grove, CA: Open University Press.
spring 2005

Cramton, C. D. (2001). The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences in geographically dispersed teams. Organization Science, 12(3), 346-371.
spring 2005

Gibson, C. B., & Vermuelen, F. (2003). A healthy divide: Subgroups as a stimulus for team learning behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(2), 202.
spring 2005

top