Conference Program

Tutorials

Jonathan Grudin and Steve Poltrock, chairs

CSCW 2006 will offer tutorials designed to give participants the opportunity to learn about CSCW concepts and techniques in intensive sessions. Tutorials must be registered for in advance.

Saturday Evening (1 unit, 18:30-22:00)

  1. A Whirlwind Tour of CSCW Research - Herbsleb & Olson (Shaughnessy)

Sunday Full-Day (2 units, 9:00-18:00)

  1. Collaboration Technology in Teams, Organizations, and Communities - Grudin & Poltrock (Beatty)
  2. Qualitative Data Analysis Tools - Neumann & Steele (McKenzie)
  3. Analyzing Social Interaction in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) Systems - Herring & Smith (Champain)
  4. Cancelled Bridging Paper and Digital Worlds - Guimbretière, Liao, Harper, Hollan, Klemmer, & Yeh
  5. Cancelled Design of the User Experience in Advanced Systems of Pervasive CSCW - Roibas

Sunday Morning (1 unit, 9:00-12:30)

  1. Hands-On Introduction to Synchronous Groupware - Dewan & Junuzovic (Frontenac)
  2. Collaboration for Fun - Pargman (Paliser)
  3. Fieldwork for Design - Randall & Rouncefield (Coleman)

Sunday Afternoon (1 unit, 14:30-18:00)

  1. Advanced Techniques in Real-time Collaborative System Design - Sun (Frontenac)
  2. Understanding Folksonomies: Technology and Trends in Collaborative Tagging - Lawley & Millen (Paliser)

T1. A Whirlwind Tour of CSCW Research

Saturday Evening (1 unit, 18:30-22:00)   Back to Top
Location: Shaughnessy

The most popular tutorial at CSCW conferences has been this evening overview of the field and guide to the conference to come, delivered by present or past conference chairs! - Steve and Jonathan

Instructors: Jim Herbsleb (Carnegie Mellon University) and Gary Olson (University of Michigan)

Description: We will provide an overview of the world of CSCW for newcomers to the field. We will offer a tour of some of the past, present and future key themes and contributions of CSCW. The design of computer technologies for the effective support of cooperative work has been CSCW’s traditional focus. However, in recent years many exciting new areas of CSCW research have emerged with the penetration of networked communication technologies into arenas beyond the workplace. We will therefore consider recent research and design initiatives with regard to communication technologies for the home, for communications between family and friends, and in the arts and entertainment industries. The tutorial will also highlight many of the items in the CSCW 2006 program, providing a context and a roadmap for navigating the conference. Accompanying materials will point attendees to major publications with CSCW and related research areas.

Intended audience: Both first-time attendees and CSCW veterans who want an overview of the CSCW conference, including Sunday’s tutorial program, and who want to learn more about contemporary CSCW research.

About the instructors: Jim Herbsleb’s research focuses on communication and coordination in distributed teams, as well as the design of collaboration technology for messaging and awareness. Gary Olson’s research focuses on the social and technical aspects of groups working together who are geographically dispersed. Jim and Gary were the conference co-chairs for CSCW 2004.

T2. Collaboration Technology in Teams, Organizations, and Communities

Sunday Full-Day (2 units, 9:00-18:00)   Back to Top
Location: Beatty

This continually evolving broad survey has been given at CSCW, CHI, and INTERACT conferences for 17 years. It has introduced more than a thousand practitioners, students, and researchers to key CSCW concepts, research and directions. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructors: Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft Research) and Steven Poltrock (Boeing Phantom Works)

Description: Learn about technologies being used to support groups, organizations, and online interaction. Hear about successes and problems that are encountered. See how different disciplines contribute to collaborative systems and how these technologies affect individuals, groups, organizations and society. The tutorial addresses support for small groups and for organizations, and emerging support for communities.

  • Discover the multidisciplinary nature of computer supported cooperative work
  • Discuss experiences with technologies that support communication, collaboration, and coordination
  • Understand behavioral, social, and organizational challenges to developing and using these technologies
  • Learn successful development and usage approaches
  • Anticipate future trends in technology use and global social impacts

Intended Audience: This introductory overview tutorial is for actual and potential users, developers, researchers, marketers, or managers of systems designed to support groups and organizations. Broad experience with collaborative technologies is not expected.

About the instructors: Steven Poltrock and Jonathan Grudin, co-chairs of CSCW’98, began collaborating in 1986. Steven Poltrock introduces, evaluates, and deploys collaborative technologies to support teamwork, knowledge management, and workflow management. Jonathan Grudin has worked as developer and researcher in this area.

T3. Qualitative Data Analysis Tools

Sunday Full-Day (2 units, 9:00-18:00)   Back to Top
Location: McKenzie

This wonderful tutorial, last given in 2002, will be a revelation to anyone unfamiliar with these tools and with professional ethnographic practice. Consists of a lecture overview and hands-on use of a qualitative data analysis tool, using data supplied by the instructors or your own. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructors: Laura Neumann and Nelle Steele (Microsoft Research)

Description: This tutorial will give a fun, honest overview of qualitative data analysis (QDA) tools which can help automate the (sometimes painful) tasks of sorting, analyzing, synthesizing, re-sorting, reporting on, and archiving qualitative data and analyses—not to mention doing these activities collaboratively. Participants will gain hands-on, working knowledge of a QDA tool, and a sense of the typical functionality in these tools. After experiencing this tutorial, students will be able to:

  • Make an educated decision on whether or not to use a QDA tool,
  • Decide which analysis package may be right for them, and
  • Begin (or keep) using a QDA tool in their research if they wish.

We will begin with a brief history of QDA tools; then review issues to consider when choosing to use (or not use) a QDA tool; how these tools may impact research design and / or data analysis design; features of qualitative analysis tools; a comparison of the most common qualitative analysis tools being used today; and finally have some hands-on practice with one QDA tool.

Intended Audience: This tutorial is intended for qualitative researchers who are fed up with copying, pasting, stacking and sorting data as piles of paper or lines in a spreadsheet. It will also interest those who are simply curious about qualitative data analysis software. This tutorial will assume that the audience has experience with some form of field research and qualitative data analysis; this is not a "how to do qualitative research" class. On the other hand, previous experience with QDA software is not expected. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop with their OWN qualitative data to analyze. Additional details and recommendations will be sent to those who sign up.

About the instructors: Laura Neumann has been working as a user researcher for 5 years, and has been using QDA tools for 10 years (mainly because she cannot keep track of many little slips of paper.) Laura’s work has focused on information workers in office settings, and more recently on people who use mice and keyboards. Nelle is an ethnographer whose work has focused on international computing practices, underserved populations, and small businesses. They share an interest in finding better ways to manage their data analyses, leverage the analyses (and data) over time, and work collaboratively with qualitative data and their respective teams.

T4. Analyzing Social Interaction in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) Systems

Sunday Full-Day (2 units, 9:00-18:00)   Back to Top
Location: Champain

This tutorial on the rapid advances in visualizing online interaction around community support, weblog use, and other social software is given by two leading researchers. The tutorial combines technical and social considerations. It was very successful when first offered in 2004. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructors: Susan Herring (Indiana University) and Marc Smith (Microsoft Research)

Description: Learn about social software systems and communication in social cyberspaces. Learn conceptual frameworks from linguistics and sociology that provide insight into online social interaction. Select and apply tools for mining and visualizing social information from computer-mediated communication (CMC) databases.

Features:

  • Overview of CMC systems and social software
  • Concepts for analyzing social interaction in CMC systems
  • Design tips to facilitate desirable outcomes
  • Application of CMC analysis and visualization tools

Intended audience: This introductory tutorial is for actual and potential designers, researchers, owners, managers and users of CMC systems like email, chat, IM, weblogs, and newsgroups. No background in sociology or linguistics is expected.

About the instructors: Susan Herring, professor of Information Science and Linguistics, is the creator of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, a methodological toolkit for analyzing online conversation. She is the editor of Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Benjamins) and Computer-Mediated Conversation (Hampton).

Marc Smith, a research sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities, leads the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research. He is co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), and the designer of the "Netscan" engine that enables social data mining of Usenet newsgroups.

T5. Bridging Paper and Digital Worlds

Sunday Full-Day (2 units, 9:00-18:00)   Back to Top

Cancelled

The greatest concentration of expertise ever assembled for a CSCW tutorial is enlisted to present this first-ever CSCW tutorial on paper-augmented digital documents. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructors: François Guimbretière and Chunyuan Liao (University of Maryland), Richard Harper (Microsoft Research), Jim Hollan (University of California, San Diego), and Scott Klemmer and Ron Yeh (Stanford University)

Description: The boundary between the digital and physical world is becoming increasingly permeable. One instance of permeability results from technologies that enable facile interaction with documents in both their paper and digital versions. In this tutorial we review studies of the affordances of paper and digital documents, survey recent research projects exploring paper-augmented digital documents, and demonstrate open-source software to support development of digital pen applications to better bridge the digital and paper worlds. The first part of the tutorial compares and contrasts affordances provided by paper and digital documents, introduces a paper-augmented digital document (PADD) approach, and summarizes research activity in this rapidly developing area. The second part surveys current digital pen technology and demonstrates an open-source software environment designed to enable exploration of PADD applications.

Intended Audience: This tutorial is intended for people interested in understanding applications of new digital pen technology. This includes researchers, developers, managers, and end users.

About the instructors: The instructors are leading researchers in the transition to digital documents, and they are organizers of a workshop that precedes the conference.

T6. Design of the User Experience in Advanced Systems of Pervasive CSCW

Sunday Full-Day (2 units, 9:00-18:00)   Back to Top

Cancelled

This tutorial is a first for CSCW. It has been presented at European conferences by the author, who co-organized a successful related CHI 2006 workshop. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructor: Anxo Cereijo Roibas (University of Brighton)

Description: This tutorial explores the issue of designing future scenarios of pervasive interactive multimedia for nomadic users. More specifically it aims to generate debate about the design and development of new pervasive applications for mobile devices and other distributed interfaces, which will make it possible for mobile users to be content creators and consumers of self-authored content facilitating leisure and social activities and, at the same time, encouraging CSCW during mobility.

The tutorial will also explore how innovative ethno-methodologies such as living labs, on-the-field enactments, 'Cultural Probes', Participatory Design approaches and advanced in-situ evaluation techniques can lead to the creation and representation of feasible and relevant future communications scenarios.

Features:

  • An analysis of mobile technology potentialities and its intersection with other platforms;
  • An exploration of the future of HCI design in advanced pervasive communication scenarios;
  • An overview of applications for ubiquitous contexts and why they imply a specific design approach

Intended Audience: This tutorial is intended for practitioners of the interactive-TV, web and mobile industry, as well as HCI educators and researchers interested in CSCW systems.

About the instructor: Anxo is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, the University of Westminster, Politecnico di Milano, and NID in India. He also collaborates with the Nokia Research Center and is a consultant at Vodafone and the European Commission. He has coordinated a research program addressing new uses of mobile phones supported by the Vodafone Group Foundation and the British Royal Academic of Engineering. He has been a BT Research Fellow with a research program entitled ‘Pervasive interactive multimedia: the user experience & new forms of digital content in new scenarios of mobile and pervasive i-TV’. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the British-HIC Group, European Commission Expert Evaluator for IST research projects, and a member of the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College.

T7. Hands-On Introduction to Synchronous Groupware

Sunday Morning (1 unit, 9:00-12:30)   Back to Top
Location: Frontenac

This is a new, updated tutorial by a team that includes one of CSCW’s most prolific researchers who in past years presented well-received tutorials that organize, explain, and illuminate technical material. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructors: Prasun Dewan and Sasa Junuzovic (University of North Carolina)

Description: As the research world continues to debate the usefulness of synchronous groupware, industry has been quietly creating a range of products in this area, which include SIP, Webex, LiveMeeting, Groove, OneNote, SubEthaEdit, and JSE 7. This tutorial will use some of these products as the basis for a hands-on introduction to the use, design, and implementation of synchronous groupware. It will consist of a mixture of collaborative exercises and lectures. The exercises will allow students to compare face-to-face, single-view and multiple-view collaborations. In addition, they will involve design and implementation of a collaborative application. The lectures will provide application taxonomies, present scenarios in which different kinds of synchronous applications are useful, and overview basic implementation techniques and infrastructures. They will not look at advanced implementation techniques such as operation transformations that are covered in Sun’s afternoon tutorial.

Intended audience: The target audience is practitioners interested in state-of-the-art and future groupware, and researchers unfamiliar with some of the strides taken by industry. The tutorial will assume that the audience understands programming but will make no assumptions about their familiarity with the field of CSCW. Thus it will be accessible to beginners in this field. The audience will acquire an understanding of a wide range of issues and approaches in the field of synchronous groupware.

About the instructors: Prasun Dewan is a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina. His interests are in infrastructure for implementing groupware, collaborative software engineering, and user-interface tools. He has been associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems; and is currently associate editor of ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction and Journal of CSCW.

Sasa Junuzovic is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina. He has interned several times at Microsoft Research and Microsoft’s Real Time Collaboration group. He has published two papers in the CSCW field.

T8. Collaboration for Fun

Sunday Morning (1 unit, 9:00-12:30)   Back to Top
Location: Paliser

We are extremely pleased to have convinced Daniel Pargman to offer this tutorial at CSCW. For over a decade, Pargman has been a leading games researcher, choosing it as his field of study before it even was a field of study. His knowledge of the topic spans Europe, Asia, and the Americas. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructor: Daniel Pargman (Royal Institute of Technology)

Description: CSCW has traditionally focused on the design and use of technologies to support collaboration in the workplace. With the spread of computers and networked technologies to areas beyond the workplace, CSCW has lately opened up to include situations where people use collaborative technologies in their free time for pleasure, leisure and fun. In this tutorial, you will learn about the use of computers to support cooperation in areas beyond the workplace. As perhaps the most advanced and exciting uses of communication technologies nowadays happens in computer gaming, special emphasis will be placed on state-of-the-art computer-mediated cooperation in online (e.g. World of Warcraft), competitive (e.g. Counter-Strike) and pervasive/location-based gaming (e.g. using the city as a game board).

  • Discover the long - but to a large extent unknown - history of using networked computers for fun.
  • Learn about major research issues and the wealth of published research in CSCW-related fun-centric areas (e.g. computer game studies and entertainment computing).
  • Understand the intense driving forces and the enormous investments in effort, time and money that goes into harnessing the latest technologies for social and gaming purposes.
  • Discuss points of contact between CSCW, social software, online communities and game research as well as various academic disciplines

Intended Audience: This introductory tutorial is for actual and potential designers, researchers, marketers and managers who want an overview of fun-centric uses of computer-supported cooperation. Or for people who just want to know more about what their children are doing. Scarce personal experience of using collaborative technologies for fun and games is expected.

About the Instructor: Daniel Pargman, assistant professor in Media Technology as well as Computer Game Development, has done research on social phenomena in online games and virtual communities for 10 years. His research focuses on the interplay between technical systems/computer code and social systems/human behaviour with a focus on various forms of computer games.

T9. Fieldwork for Design

Sunday Morning (1 unit, 9:00-12:30)   Back to Top
Location: Coleman

Fieldwork is essential for understanding collaborative work, and it requires skills that are not easily learned from books. This tutorial offers the opportunity to learn from two highly experienced and entertaining instructors. Their previous tutorials at CSCW and ECSCW conferences were highly rated. - Steve and Jonathan

Instructors: Dave Randall (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Mark Rouncefield (Lancaster University)

Description: The tutorial has the objective of developing an appreciation of the various and practical issues that arise during the conduct of ‘naturalistic’ enquiry. Competing perspectives will be examined, compared and contrasted. The tutorial will assess competing claims concerning the relevance of the ‘social setting’ in which work takes place and the consequences for system development. We argue that the study of socially organised cooperation is central to new generations of systems in both organisational and domestic contexts.

  • Participants will learn the relevance of theoretical perspectives to the practice of fieldwork, and to the problem of capturing social complexity.
  • The practical problems, strategies and choices of the fieldworker in performing observational studies will be discussed.
  • Experiences gleaned from a range of studies in commercial and industrial settings, domestic environments and public spaces - will be examined.
  • Technologies for supporting analysis, especially the use of video, will be evaluated.
  • Problems of method, communication and comprehension in collaborations between ethnographer and system developer will be presented.

Intended Audience: The tutorial will be of use to those who are intending to embark on observational studies themselves, and to system developers who wish to become familiar with issues arising from the adoption of observational methods.

About the Instructors: Dave Randall, a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, has been involved in a range of projects including; Air Traffic Control; retail finance; museums and domestic environments. Mark Rouncefield, a Senior Research Fellow at Lancaster University has conducted fieldwork investigations of financial services; managerial work; healthcare and domestic environments. Richard Harper is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He has spent twenty years developing tools and techniques for understanding user behaviour in workplaces, mobile settings and the home.

T10. Advanced Techniques in Real-time Collaborative System Design

Sunday Afternoon (1 unit, 14:30-18:00)   Back to Top
Location: Frontenac

Highly recommended! This technical tutorial by a leading researcher and system builder received extraordinarily high reviews from a large CSCW 2002 audience. Steve and Jonathan

Instructor: Chengzheng Sun (Nanyang Technological University)

Description: Real-time collaborative system design involves significant technical challenges in multiple areas of scientific exploration and engineering, including Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, distributed systems, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. Consistency maintenance, group undo, group awareness, and interaction control are some of the major technical challenges in the design of real-time collaborative systems, such as collaborative editors, collaborative office applications, collaborative CAD and CASE systems, network-based multi-player games, and collaborative virtual environments. Another major technical challenge is how to integrate advanced collaboration techniques invented from research with existing commercial-of-the-shelf single-user applications. This tutorial provides an overview of the technical issues and solutions in real-time collaborative system design, and the transparent adaptation techniques for leveraging existing and new single-user applications for collaborative use. In this tutorial the attendee will learn about the key technical problems facing collaborative system researchers and developers, state-of-the-art techniques for resolving these problems, approaches that are successful in practice, and the research issues, puzzles, and new directions that are open for future exploration.

Intended Audience: Collaborative application designers seeking innovative technical solutions to system design problems, single-user application designers interested in leveraging existing and new single-user applications for collaborative use, and researchers and postgraduates seeking interesting, challenging, and relevant research topics at the frontier of collaborative computing systems.

About the instructor: Dr Chengzheng Sun is a full Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current research focuses on Internet-based collaborative computing technologies and applications. Since 1994 (when working at Griffith University, Australia), Dr Sun has been the leader and chief investigator of the well known REDUCE, CoWord, and CoPowerPoint projects (http://reduce.qpsf.edu.au/coword), which have made important contributions to the theory and practical implementation of collaborative editing systems. Dr Sun has published extensively and delivered well-received seminars and tutorials on collaborative editing techniques widely at major international conferences and research institutes/universities.

T11. Understanding Folksonomies: Technology and Trends in Collaborative Tagging

Sunday Afternoon (1 unit, 14:30-18:00)   Back to Top
Location: Paliser

Instructors: Elizabeth Lawley (Microsoft Research & RIT) and David Millen (IBM)

Description: A growing number of collaborative web-based systems have begun to provide users with the ability to add their own keyword tags to items. Some examples include the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, the photo sharing site Flickr, and the movie rating site MovieLens. The aggregation of those user-generated tags within a given system into a bottom-up taxonomic representation of user-defined categories has been called a folksonomy. In this tutorial, we will provide an overview of current live implementations, highlighting the differences and similarities in approaches. We will also talk about the range of uses that user-generated tags can support, including resource discovery, network discovery, and vocabulary expansion and refinement. An overview of research to date in this area will be included.

Intended audience: This introductory overview tutorial is intended for actual and potential users, developers, and researchers of collaborative information management tools. Prior experience with user-generated tagging systems is not required.

About the instructors: David R Millen is a research manager in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. His group develops new social software applications, and explores the social, business, and technological implications of these new tools through field research. Elizabeth Lane Lawley is an associate professor of information technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, where she also directs the RIT Lab for Social Computing. She is also a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research.