Communication in Groups and Organizations

2-4 page paper due Jan 27, 2009

Assignment type: Individual or group (maximum of two people)

The goal of this paper is to better understand how people use a shared visual space to coordinate a performance. You will get an opportunity to examine the mechanisms for conversational cooperation and grounding in more detail. You will be comparing clips taken from Kraut, Gergle and Fussell's (2002) paper on "The use of visual information in shared visual spaces." In this experiment, pairs completing a puzzle were more efficient when they shared a common view of the work area than when they had no view or a view that was delayed. The shared view helped more when the task was more complex.

Your paper should have two parts:

1. Describe one way people use the shared visual space (SVS). What function is it serving for either the task or the conversation? Use Clark and Brennan's "Grounding in communication" article as a guide, to identify one important way that the shared visual environment allows the pair working in the shared space condition to perform the task more efficiently from pairs working in the audio-only condition. You should be trying to explain and document how the use of the shared visual space changes a pairs costs of gounding.
   
   1. Explicitly state a hypothesis about how pairs are using the SVS to change the costs of grounding.  You might start this with the claim, "The director (or pair) is using the shared visual space to ....  The director (or pair) does this by ..."
   2. Document through examples from one or more pairs working in the SVS condition how they using the shared visual space in ways that are consistent or inconsistent with your hypothesis. That is, you are going to present data relevant to your hypothses.  In documenting your examples, you will need to transcribe snippets of the dialog and and annotate the transcript with descriptions of task and behavior. It will behelpful to organize this part of the transcript in your paper as a two-column table, with quotes in the left size side and annotations in the right, in which you explain what is happening.
2. Consider what pairs in the audio-only or the delay condition are doing to accomplish the same converational goal without a SVS. Why is this less efficient?Again, document your hypothesis about how this function is accomplished without a shared visual space?  It would be best to select sample in the non-SVS condiction in which pairs have achieved (or fail to achieve) the same conversational goal you documented in part 1.2, above.

You will be viewing clips in mpeg format. The slips are available here. The file names associated with each clip tell you what condition the file representes.

Grades will be based on three components:

1. A demonstration that you have understood and can apply the Clark and Brennan framework in interpreting behavior in this referential communications task.
2. Non-obvious observations about the link between the theory and the data.
3. Good writing. The structure of your essay is most important, but syntax, word choice and spelling also count.

Due date: 2-4 page paper, 1/27/2009.