From: Mary Beth Rosson [rosson@vt.edu]
Sent: 28 January 2000 18:15
To: D.R.Morse@open.ac.uk
Subject: CHI2000 Workshop: The What, Who, Where, ...

I would like to participate in this workshop from the standpoint of what we
can learn from community networking and educational networking
infrastructures and applications. My work has been carried out in the
context of the Blacksburg Electronic Village, one of the prominent
community networking projects of the 1990s. In January 2000, more than 90
percent of the Blacksburg population (of about 36,000) have network access,
compared to about 40% nationally. Over 150 community groups and more than
450 local businesses maintain Web sites (more than 75%). There are many
unique community-oriented initiatives (15 community newsgroups, various
lists, a town chat, a senior's nostalgia archive, public-access kiosks).
The Town of Blacksburg makes extensive use of the BEV, providing on-line
forms for surveys, house check requests, and e-mail to town officials, as
well as electronic dissemination of schedules and other documents. All 20
county school have had T1 Ethernet for the past 4 years, compared to about
65% nationally. The BEV is a well-established community network, fully
operational for more than six years.

Our work has involved observing and assessing activities in the BEV, as
well as collaborating with various community groups on innovations in the
BEV infrastructure and in applications and services. Three of our projects
have been the Virtual School project (a networking infrastructure that
supports synchronous and asynchronous collaboration among science students
in four schools, and a participatory design collaboration now in its fifth
year ), MOOsburg (a Java-based MOO modeled on the geography of the town of
Blacksburg and the surrounding area that has explored direct manipulation,
map-based navigation and the support of novel community activities like a
virtual science fair), and Nostalgia (a Web-forum designed with the seniors
to support informal community history-building).

All of these projects involve sharing, creating, and maintaining contexts.
For example, high school students collaborating on a science project need
to have a sense of the state of progress of their remote collaborators, to
avoid duplicating or divergent effort and to ensure that subprojects are
adequately coordinated. These projects progress synchronously (in real-time,
within a class period) as well as asynchronously (across many weeks and
even months), thus collaborators need to be apprised of context at
different grains of detailing. Students also need to be aware of social
context - for example, who is currently present at another networked site,
who among a group of collaborators has read an email or reviewed a project
report. The Virtual School incorporates a variety of awareness mechanisms
to support these various senses of context. (Isenhour, Rosson, et al.,
submitted).

Context is uniquely important in community computing since the networking
infrastructures are implemented within the physical space of a real
coextending community. Thus, the database underlying our community MOO
project, MOOsburg, is a hierarchicy of maps - views of real spaces in the
community as well as conceptual spaces associated with real locations. We
have recently written an extensive overview of the MOOsburg project
(Carroll, Rosson, et al., submitted).

For community networks to be sustainable, they must be extensible by
community members (Carroll & Rosson, 1996).  This raises another
entirely different context-awareness issue -- ensuring that an arbitrary
piece of software fits into the collaboration context provided by the
community network infrastructure.  Much of our work on collaboration
toolkits has addressed collaboration-awareness issues of this sort
(Begole, Rosson, & Shaffer, 1999; Isenhour, Rosson & Carroll, submitted).

I think that community networking and educational networking are important
application areas for examining isues of context-awareness, and that our
current projects can provide useful examples for discussion and analysis at
the workshop.

References

Begole, J., Rosson, M.B. & Shaffer, C. A. 1999. Flexible collaboration
transparency: Supporting worker independence in replicated
application-sharing systems.  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human
Interaction, 6(2), 95-132.

Carroll, J.M., Rosson, M.B., Isenhour, P.L., Ganoe, C.H., Dunlap, D.,
Fogarty, J., Schafer, W., & Van Metre, C. Submitted. Designing our town:
MOOsburg. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

Isenhour, P., Rosson, M.B. & Carroll, J.M.  submitted.  Supporting
asynchronous collaboration and late joining in Java groupware.  Interacting
with Computers.

Isenhour, P.L., Rosson, M.B., Carroll, J.M., Neale, D.C. & Dunlap, D.R.
Submitted. The Virtual School: An integrated collaborative environment for
the classroom. Educational Technology and Society.