Course Organisation
- This is the last week of Questions and Comments, and the last week I will be teaching you
- The Quiz will cover Weeks 2-5, and what you need to study are the things listed under “Remember” in the Learning Outcomes
- If you have further questions about the Usability Report, I will announce Office Hours on Monday April 16.
- For the last two weeks, we will be in the Psychology Building, S1 (7 George Square, second floor), and you will have guest lectures on information retrieval and data visualisation
Themes from Questions and Comments
For each theme, I am giving you a paper that shows how the concept can be used to analyse collaboration using technology.
Articulation Work:
Grant, S., Mesman, J., & Guthrie, B. (2016). Spatio-temporal elements of articulation work in the achievement of repeat prescribing safety in UK general practice. Sociology of Health & Illness, 38(2), 306–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12308
Attribution Theory:
Diamant, E. I., Fussell, S. R., & Lo, F. (2008). Where Did We Turn Wrong?: Unpacking the Effect of Culture and Technology on Attributions of Team Performance. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 383–392). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1460563.1460625
Attribution theory focuses on why people think something happened. It is much more satisfying to blame people for errors than to look at aspects of the system that may have contributed to it, but that’s not how highly reliable organisations work:
Reason, J. (2000). Human error: models and management. BMJ, 320(7237), 768–770. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.320.7237.768
Activities
These are exercises in qualitative analysis and analysis of text data. Do these alone or in groups.
- Looking for keywords: Go to the TopHat activity Museum 1 and determine how many people asked a museum employee. Alternatively, go to the TopHat activity Museum 2 and look for the number of people mentioning the exhibition Down to Earth.
- Tabulating mentions of relevant things: Go to the TopHat activity CSCW 2 or 3, and make a list of the solutions that were mentioned, and how often they were mentioned. Is there any information you miss when you just list the solutions?
- Going deeper: What do people talk about? Look at one of Museum 4, 5, and 6. What do students mention? The gallery, the exhibit? Do they mention their reaction to the exhibit, social context, usability issues? What else is mentioned?
- Analysing Reasons: Look at one of CSCW1, CSCW2, or Information Architecture 2. What types of reasons do people give for their choice? Can you categorise them? If you have chosen IA2, do people give reasons without having been prompted by the question?
