digital lyceum

We pulled off a successful symposium a few weeks back on the topic of mixed realities. At this symposium, we incorporated several digital backchannels to augment the physical audience’s experience, while opening up access to those not physically present. We adapted the backchan.nl tool developed by Drew Harry at the MIT Media Lab as the centerpiece of our backchannel suite. This tool provided audience members with the capability of asking questions and voting on others’ questions. We surrounded the backchan.nl with a flickr and del.icio.us feed as well as a video feed for those not present. In addition, the event was broadcast into Second Life. There were about fifty people present at the physical site at Emerson College, with the same amount present in Second Life. Both the physical and virtual participants were using elements of the backchannel suite provided.

So, the big question is: was this augmentation valuable? Did audience members, physical and virtual, enhance their experience in any way? Did they engage meaningfully with the content, while parsing their attention between “realities?” We conducted some preliminary surveys with audience members, but didn’t do anything approaching exhaustive. What we learned from user feedback was that people appreciated the opportunity to engage in this setting, but they also felt that it was distracting. This ambivalence seemed to be universal. And yet, coupled with that ambivalence was an enthusiasm for a new level of engagement. This enthusiasm has led us to conclude that further work in this area is important, primarily to parse out whether or not that enthusiasm stems only from novelty.

Continuous Partial Attention: this is a phrase often used to describe the experience of backchannel conversations in real space. For the entire time, participants are engaged partially in their laptop and in the live conversation. Does this partial attention take away from knowledge creation in any one area? Are they being spread too thin? Or does the partial attention allow them to stay engaged for longer periods of time? It is unlikely that someone can stay totally focused on a conversation for two straight hours anyway - does the ability to drift in and out actually serve to focus participants’ attention on related matters? The comments posted were surprisingly on topic. Of course, people were likely doing other things - email, Facebook, IM, etc. - but based on the number and frequency of the comments posted, there was considerable focus on the backchannel tools provided.

By providing the appropriate tools, is it possible to stave off the inevitable scattering of attention that will happen as digital technologies increasingly seep into physical interactions (mobile phones, wifi, etc.)? One way of understanding these efforts is an attempt at harm reduction. Distraction is happening: can we devise tools and practices to mitigate the effects of that distraction and even harness it for academic purposes? Let’s face it, there is a lot going on in our heads as we “focus” on a talk - formulating a question in our heads, trying to remember a reference long forgotten, thinking about what we did over the weekend. These tools provide opportunities to externalize that internal distraction - in most cases, towards productive ends.

Wisdom of Crowds: The audience has knowledge about what the speakers are saying. Backchannels provide an opportunity not simply to express oneself individually, but for the audience to express its collective wisdom. A collection of individual questions does not reflect the wisdom of the crowd, that happens in the kind of deliberation and resource sharing possible in backchannels. Distraction goes to produce a different kind of knowledge - one not possible with absolute focus.

We are in the process of writing a paper about these ideas - essentially rescuing distraction from the reject bin of academic life.

Last Friday, November 30, we assembled a great group of people at Emerson College to discuss the future of the Digital Lyceum project. The group includedDavid Bogen, Rebecca Nesson, Bill Seaman, Joshua Green, Drew Harry, Helen Thorington, Jo-Anne Green, Phil Long and Paul Stacey.   The day began with extended introductions from all the participants, which actually served to introduce the major discussion points to which we returned throughout the day. Those included: the intellectual work of barroom chatter, virtual people as active participants, and social interaction as spatial design. We concluded that there is a lot of experimentation taking place in the implementation of network technology in the live event (our conversation tended to focus on the conference or symposium), but little in the way of research. There is a need for some kind of relatively systematic document and analysis of this work. Do audiences gain anything from the technological addition? Does it change the nature of the event or the way knowledge is acquired? The day-long conversation, even though it meandered a bit through various topics, gave us some focus for the short-term goals of this project. As I understand them now, they are as follows:

• Create a site (blog, wiki) for people or institutions working on the production of mixed reality events to share experiences and learn from others.
• Design guidelines and train RAs to execute a qualitative study on ‘mixed reality’ events.
• Host open source tools for people to use in their own events (these will be freely available on the condition that they let our research team study their use).

That gives us more than enough to do over the next several months. We will continue to use this blog to report on project development and the interesting work of others.

This is the first in a series of posts surveying the people and projects involved in producing lecture-style mixed reality events. If you are involved in this work, we’d love to hear from you! Please visit our contact page for more information or leave a comment below.Over at the NMC Campus Observer blog, Alan Levine(aka, CDB Barkley) has posted a number of useful tidbits on the technical aspects of producing lecture-style events across virtual and physical spaces. In this post, I’ll point to a couple of these examples at this intersection of mixed-reality event production.Last month, Alan blogged about his experience streaming a video ofLarry Johnson’s talk in the Second Life during a Unesco conference in Barcelona. He wrote

“How truly flat-worldish it was to watch my NMC colleague, who lives in Texas, present in Spain, as I viewed it from a hotel room in Sydney, Australia. I missed out the last bits of the discussion, which I understood had a mixed reaction from the Barcelona audience on the potential of SL for education.” 

Earlier this year, Alan wrote about another mixed-reality event with Sarah Robbins, of Ball State University, presenting at the SLCC 07 conference.

“Sadly, with hotel internet connectivity issues plaguing the conference, the live audio stream into Second Life did not make it. We understood that as pluck in world residents that we have, people gathered in NMC Campus to tune into SLCC improvised and generated their own discussions.” 

I also found this Flickr pic uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg. It is a diagram of the technical set-up from a New Media Consortium event. The description includes an email response from Alan Levine about the set-up. In it, he writes:

“You could do some amount of streaming using an Apple XServe and QuickTime broadcasting– these are limited since each avatar accessing content in SL needs a sepearat connection, so you can run into bandwidth limitations– this is why we use a outside streaming service for audio– requests hit their network, not ours.” 

While we’re interested in learning more about the technical aspects of this style of production, we’re also seeking to learn more from those participants, and their experiences, attending these types of events. In particular, we’re interested to know if these types of technologies benefited, or distracted from, the participation of attendees. In addition, we’re looking at how this type of involvement “can help shape the tone and content of an event.” If you are one of these people, please consider sharing your experiences by leaving a comment on this post.In my next post, I’ll talk about a recent study conducted by the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham and what was learned about the participants involved in a mixed-reality lecture style event.