Skip to main content

Theories and Frameworks

Presence and Telepresence​

Presence - Sensation of being in a particular setting Telepresence - Sense of presence via a digital medium

![[3010_01.png]]

Strength​

Interactivity - The degree to which users of a medium can influence and change the form and content of the environment Vividness - The representational richness of a mediated environment

Interactivity​

Range (of control)

  • The number of different elements they can control
  • The amount they can be varied Speed (response time)
  • direct control over the environment
  • important for transparency of control Mapping
  • Between the interaction and the affect
  • Good intuitive mapping promotes interactivity
  • Must be customisable by the user

Vividness​

Breadth - Number of senses being stimulated Depth - The resolution/quality of those modes

Task​

  • Minecraft = Control everything, change version, change time, dimension, what you can do. Good mapping, being able to interact, and can customize by the user. The user is in control, can visually see
  • Teams = Specific time, limited control. Streamline actions/processes. Low amount of variance. Environment is lacking, basic view, control basic features. Wysiwyg, transparent at what you can do, as you can see. There's no hidden features. Get instant feedback, and response. Intuitive mapping. Change profile and theme., and basic settings, notifications, sounds i/o.

Common Ground Theory​

  • People rely on a shared basis of knowledge, belief and suppositions
  • The grounding process - process of how people use communication to produce/identify common ground between them

Why Common Ground

  • Produces mutual belief that they share a common understanding
  • A common ground encourages trust
  • A common ground relaxes the relationship, where possible

The Process

  • Conversational understanding
    • Acknowledgments (often non-verbal)
    • Relevant responses (verbal - shows understanding)
    • Continued attention (often non-verbal)
  • Anticipating what the other person knows
    • Shared background/experience
    • Previous parts of conversation
    • Physical environment
  • Should ideally be easy

Establishing common ground

  • People generally do this unconsciously, but it is affected by effort, which is affected by medium of communication
  • Being unfamiliar with a medium makes it hard to establish common ground

Task​

Technical issues and needing common ground, continuing tension. Lose the interactivity of physical environment as environment hasn't changed. Interactivity with I/O, not everyone always has their own, so can reduce participation.

Distance Matter Framework​

Factors affecting remote collaboration:

  • Common ground
  • Collaboration readiness
  • Collaboration technology readiness
  • Coupling of work
  • Organizational management

Common Ground​

Difficult when the risk of misunderstanding is high

Mutual knowledge problem

  • failure to communicate and retain contextual information
  • unevenly distributed information
  • difficulties in understanding the salience of info
  • difference in speed of access to information
  • difficulties in interpreting the meaning of silence

The more common ground people can establish, the easier the communication

Collaboration Readiness​

Whether participants are ready to engage with others

  • Captures the motivational aspects of collaboration
  • Related to incentive structures that reward participants based on their engagement with others
  • Other important aspects: trust, commitment and transparency

Collaboration technology readiness - Refers to the difficulties faced in adapting, adopting, and brining collaboration technologies into use

  • Advanced collaboration technologies should be introduced in small steps

Coupling of work - Refers to the characteristics of the collaboration work itself

  • Tightly coupled work is difficult to accomplish remotely so ambiguous, tightly coupled work should be collocated

Organisational Management - Management practices and context which shape the conditions for the collaboration across distance

  • Effective leadership establishes the collaborative culture, ensures that the plans are in place, and sets the tone of inclusiveness

Outcomes​

  • Common ground and collaboration readiness are still important analytical dimensions of distributed work
  • Collaboration technology readiness is an issue of organisational practices and unstable technology rather than lack of knowledge about technologies
  • Closely coupled work supports participants working remotely
  • Managerial practices of finding ways to routinely rotate mediators or boundary spanners, are critical in retaining and building up pools of experts who can collaborate across geographical, temporal, and cultural distances