Winter 2005 Syllabus
David McDonald
Office: MGH 330A
Phone: (206) 543-6429
Email: dwmc@u.washington.edu
Office Hours:
Wednesday 9:30-10:30am
By Appointment
Suzi Soroczak
Email: suzka@u.washington.edu
Office Hours: By Appointment
Wednesday and Friday, 11:30-1:20
Mary Gates Hall, 254
The course focuses on the design and use of
collaborative technologies to communicate, share information and
coordinate activities. Emphasis will be split between social aspects of
adopting and using collaborative technologies and technical
infrastructure to enable collaborative applications. The course will
include a discipline overview and history as well as a range of
selected topics. Several topics that are associated with CSCW include:
Only a few of these can actually be covered by this course. You might consider those not covered as possible places for in-depth work or a project.
Academic honesty can be confusing. As a community of scholars we hold to a set of standards about our academic conduct. Please take a look at the UW policy on academic honesty http://depts.washington.edu/grading/issue1/honesty.htm and make sure you understand these standards and norms. If you have questions the Instructor or TA will gladly work to clarify any aspects.
The grading for the course is made up of written and verbal participation in the course, examinations, labs and projects. The breakdown of the components for grading depend on whether the course participant is taking the course at the graduate or undergraduate level.
Undergrad Participants
| Discussion Participation | 10% |
| Weekly Reviews | 30% |
| Lab Assignment(s) | 10% |
| Mid-Term | 20% |
| Final Exam | 30% |
Graduate Participants
| Discussion Participation | 10% |
| Weekly Reviews | 20% |
| Lab Assignment(s) | 10% |
| Mid-Term | 20% |
| Project | 40% |
The course is primarily organized around reading and discussion. It is imperative that students read the assigned readings before class so that they can participate in the discussions. The thoughtfulness of a contribution is as (or more) important than the overall quantity of contributions.
All students will submit 2 weekly reading reviews. Each review should be no more than one single spaced page of 12 point Times (or equivalent) text. A single review should be focused on one of the readings; but a good review will probably compare the reviewed literature to other related literature – the weekly readings that you choose not to review are probably related. Each review should include: a) a brief overview of the main point(s) in the paper, b) the significance of the contribution and, c) personal interpretation or reflection (Did you like it? Did you agree with the findings? etcetera).
Lastly, each review should include a numeric score – a rating – on a scale of 1 to 5 following this scale:
1 – Remove this reading from the course syllabus, worthless mud
2 – Candidate for removal, gravel
3 – Could go either way, maybe keep, maybe remove, can’t quite tell
4 – Should probably stay on the syllabus, semi-precious
5 – Keep this reading on the syllabus, a real gem, diamond
Weekly reviews are designed to encourage you to complete all the readings. Please take them seriously, but they should not be an onerous burden. Reviews are due at the start of class on Wednesday of the week the reading is assigned. Reviews begin with the second week of readings.
Lab assignments are small excercises that you will perform outside of class. The idea of a lab assignment is to allow you to experience some type of groupware or become more familiar with some long standing CSCW problem. Lab assignments will generally be 'group' assignments and will require a single (group) submission. Assignment date and due date for lab assignments will be clearly noted in class, on the assignment handout and on the syllabus.
The mid-term exam will be a take home exam. It will be handed out Friday February 4th (Week 5) and will be due Wednesday February 9th at the beginning of class. Late exams will not be accepted unless prior arrangements have been made with the instructor.
The final exam will be a take home exam. It will be handed out the last Friday of class, March 11th (Week 10), and will be due Tuesday March 15th by 5:00pm. Late exams will not be accepted unless prior arrangements have been made with the instructor.
Students taking the class for graduate level credit will be expected to complete all reading assignments, weekly reviews and participate in class discussions. Students at the graduate level will be expected to complete a significant, publishable or near publishable quality research project. The research project can be an ethnographic study, systems development, or a literature survey that brings together some relevant set of CSCW and affiliated research. If you are having a hard time thinking of a good research project, talk with the instructor after class or make an appointment. Often there are natural extensions to existing research projects that would make them appropriate for a CSCW type exploration.
The research project must be approved by the instructor. Approval will be made through a short capsule description of the proposed project. This should describe the scope of proposed work, a possible research question, and a few pieces of related literature. Successfully completing a project in 10 weeks is often a matter of scheduling and time management. The prototypical schedule for a project, below, might help you think about how to organize your project.
| Possible Time Line | |
| Capsule Description | 1/19 |
| Initial Research/Fieldwork/Development | 1/20-3/4 |
| Draft/Follow-up Research | 3/4 |
| Final Draft | 3/15 |
All projects are due Tuesday March 15th by 5:00pm. Late projects will not be accepted unless prior arrangements have been made with the instructor.
Angier, Natalie (2002) Why We’re So Nice: We’re Wired to Cooperate. The New York Times, July 23, 2002.
Grudin, Jonathan (1994) Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: History and Focus. IEEE Computer, May 1994, pp. 19-26.
Kling, Rob (1991) Cooperation, Coordination and Control in Computer-Supported Work. Communications of the ACM 34 (12), pp. 83-88.
Ackerman, Mark S., and Leysia Palen (1996) The Zephyr Help Instance: Promoting Ongoing Activity in a CSCW System. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’96). pp. 268-275.
Erickson, Thomas, David N. Smith, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, John T. Richards, and Erin Bradner (1999) Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of "Babble". In Proceedings of the 1999 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’99). pp. 72-79.
Herbsleb, James D., David L. Atkins, David G. Boyer, Mark Handel and Thomas A. Finholt (2002) Introducing Instant Messaging and Chat in the Workplace. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’02). pp. 171-178.
Grinter, Rebecca E. and Margery A. Eldridge (2001) y do tngers luv 2 txt msg? In Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW’01). W. Prinz, M. Jarke, Y. Rogers, K. Schmidt, and V. Wulf (eds.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 219-238.
Laboratory Assignment - Teleconferencing
Bly, Sara A., Steve R. Harrison, and Susan Irwin (1993) Media Spaces: Bringing People Together in a Video, Audio, and Computing Environment. Communications of the ACM 36 (1), pp. 27-47.
Dourish, Paul and Sara Bly (1992) Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’92). pp. 541-547.
Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff (1991) Disembodied Conduct: Communication Through Video in a Multi-Media Office Environment. In Proceedings of the 1991 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’91). pp. 99-103.
Hollan, Jim and Scott Stornetta (1992) Beyond Being There. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’92). pp. 119-125.
Guest Presentation/Discussion by Jonathan Grudin, Friday 1/21
Recommended reading for guest presentation/discussion:
Grudin, Jonathan and David Bargeron (in press).
Multimedia Annotation: An Unsuccessful Tool Becomes A Successful Framework.
To appear in K. Okada, T. Hoshi, and T. Inoue (Eds.), Communication and
Collaboration Support Systems. Ohmsha.
Laboratory Assignment - Teleconferencing Due 1/21
Benford, Steve, Chris Greenhalgh, Tom Rodden, and James Pycock (2001) Collaborative Virtual Environments. In Communications of the ACM 44 (7) July 2001
Roseman, Mark, and Saul Greenberg (1996) TeamRooms: Network Places for Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’96). pp. 325-333.
Olson, Judith S. and Stephanie Teasley (1996) Groupware in the Wild: Lessons Learned from a Year of Virtual Collocation. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’96). pp. 419-427.
Muramatsu, Jack, and Mark Ackerman (1998). Computing, Social Activity, and Entertainment: A Field Study of a Game MUD. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 7: pp. 87-122.
Guest Presentation/Discussion by Steven Poltrock, Friday 1/28
Recommended reading for guest presentation/discussion:
Poltrock, Steven and Jonathan Grudin (2004).
Videoconferencing: Recent Experiments and Reassessment. In
Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on Systems
Science (HICSS-36)
Schmidt, Kjeld (2002) The problem with 'Awareness': Introductory Remarks on 'Awareness in CSCW'. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 11 (3-4). pp. 285-298.
Ishii, Hiroshi, Minoru Kobayashi, and Jonathan Grudin (1992) Integration of Inter-Personal Space and Shared Workspace: ClearBoard Design and Experiments. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’92). pp. 33-42.
Dourish, Paul, and Victoria Bellotti (1992) Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’92). pp. 107-114.
Fitzpatrick, Geraldine, Simon Kaplan, Tim Mansfield, David Arnold and Bill Segall (2002) Supporting Public Availability and Accessibility with Elvin: Experiences and Reflections. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 11 (3-4). pp. 447-474.
Cadiz, JJ, Gina Venolia, Gavin Jancke, Anoop Gupta (2002)
Designing and Deploying
an Information Awareness Interface.
In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW’02). pp. 314-323.
Guest Presentation/Discussion by JJ Cadiz, Friday 2/4
Recommended reading for guest presentation/discussion:
Please read JJ's paper (above) on the Sideshow application :-)
Mid-term handed out on Friday 2/4
Note that the "BusyBody" and "Lilsys" readings are short papers. For the purposes of your reviews, they count as one reading.
Horvitz, Eric, Paul Koch and Johnson Apacible (2004) BusyBody: Creating and Fielding Personalized Models of the Cost of Interruption. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’04). pp. 507-510.
Begole, James "Bo", Nicholas E. Matsakis and John C. Tang (2004) Lilsys: Sensing Unavailability. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’04). pp. 511-514.
Fisher, Danyel, and Paul Dourish (2004) Social and Temporal Structures in Everyday Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’04). pp. 551-558.
Begole, James "Bo", John C. Tang, Randall B. Smith and Nicole Yankelovich (2002) Work Rhythms: Analyzing Visualizations of Awareness Histories of Distributed Groups. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’02). pp. 334-343.
Reddy, Madhu and Paul Dourish (2002) A Finger on the Pulse: Temporal Rhythms and Information Seeking in Medical Work. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’02). pp. 344-353.
This is an optional reading. It is not to be 'reviewed.' It's just one page, but has an interesting early perspective.
Wild, Helga, Chris Darrouzet, Ted Kahn and Susan U. Stucky (1995) Rhythms of Collaboration. In Communications of the ACM. Vol. 38, No. 9 p. 45.
Mid-term Due Wednesday 2/9
Note: For this week only you can submit your weekly reviews on Friday 2/11.
Knister, Michael J. and Atul Prakash (1990) DistEdit: A Distributed Toolkit for Supporting Multiple Group Editors. In Proceedings of the 1990 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’90). pp. 343-355.
Neuwirth, Christine M., David S. Kaufer, Ravinder Chandhok, and James Morris (1990) Issues in the Design of Computer Support for Co-Authoring and Commenting. In Proceedings of the 1990 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’90). pp. 183-195.
Mitchell, Alex, Posner Ilona, and Ronald Baecker (1995) Learning to Write Together Using Groupware. In Proceedings of the 1995 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’95). pp. 288-295.
Kirby, Andrew, and Tom Rodden (1995) Contact: Support for Distributed Cooperative Writing. In Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW’95). H. Marmolin, Y. Sundblad, and K. Schmidt (eds.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 101-116.
Guest Presentation/Discussion by David McDonald, Friday 2/18
Recommended reading for guest presentation/discussion:
McDonald, David W., Chunhua Weng and John H. Gennari. (2004)
The Multiple Views of
Inter-organizational Authoring In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM
Conference on Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work (CSCW'04), November 6-10 2004. pp. 564-573
Grinter, Rebecca (1995) Using a Configuration Management Tool to Coordinate Software Development. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing Systems (COOCS’95). pp. 168-177.
Grinter, Rebecca (1998) Recomposition: Putting it all Back Together Again. In Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’98). pp. 393-402.
de Souza, Cleidson R.B., David Redmiles, Li-Ti Cheng, David Millen, and John Patterson (2004) Sometimes You Need to See Through Walls - A Field Study of Application Programming Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’04). pp. 63-71.
Gutwin, Carl, Reagan Penner, and Kevin Schneider (2004) Group Awareness in Distributed Software Development. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’04). pp. 72-81.
Churchill, Elizabeth F., Les Nelson, Laurent Denoue, Jonathan Helfman and Paul Murphy (2004) Sharing Multimedia Content with Interactive Public Displays: A Case Study. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’04). pp. 7-16.
Tollinger, Irene, Michael McCurdy, Alonso H. Vera, and Preston Tollinger (2004) Collaborative Knowledge Management Supporting Mars Mission Scientists. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’04). pp. 29-38.
Brignull, Harry, Shahram Izadi, Geraldine Fitzpatrick Yvonne Rogers, and Tom Rodden (2004) The Introduction of a Shared Interactive Surface into a Communal Space. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’04). pp. 49-58.
Huang, Elaine, Daniel M. Russell, Alison E. Sue (2004) IM Here Public Instant Messaging on Large, Shared Displays for Workgroup Interactions. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’04). pp. 279-286.
Guest Presentation/Discussion by Joe McCarthy, Friday 3/4
Recommended reading for guest presentation/discussion:
McCarthy, Joseph F., David W. McDonald, Suzanne Soroczak, David H. Nguyen, Al M. Rashid.
Augmenting the
Social Space of an Academic Conference
In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work (CSCW'04), November 6-10 2004. pp. 39-48
Bodker, Susanne & Ellen Christiansen. (1997) Scenarios as Springboards in CSCW Design. Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide. Bowker, Leigh Star, Turner & Gasser (eds.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 217-233.
Martin, David, Tom Rodden, Mark Rouncefield, Ian Sommerville & Stephen Viller. (2001) Finding patterns in the fieldwork. In Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW’01). W. Prinz, M. Jarke, Y. Rogers, K. Schmidt, and V. Wulf (eds.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 39-58.
Grudin, Jonathan. (1994) Groupware and Social Dynamics: Eight Challenges for Developers. Communications of the ACM 37 (1), pp. 92-105.
Moran, Thomas P. & R. J. Anderson (1990) The workaday world as a paradigm for CSCW design. In Proceedings of the 1990 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’90). pp. 381-393.