Human-Centred Software Engineering: Third International Conference, HCSE 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland, October 14-15, 2010. Proceedings

International audienceBook Front Matter of LNCS 640

Evaluating barriers to and impacts of rural broadband access

The lack of adequate broadband infrastructure persists in many rural communities. Beyond funding, additional barriers persist, such as digital literacy and community-level self-efficacy. As a result, the first contribution articulates barriers at the organizational level. This work proposes a framework based on the Theory of Planned Behavior to highlight stakeholder dynamics that have constrained Regional Planning Commissions from advancing broadband infrastructure in rural areas. One approach to address these barriers is to provide stakeholders with analytical tools to evaluate the benefits and costs of various broadband options for their community since there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. To this end, there are three contributions that provide guidance for evaluating improved broadband access. The first solution proposes a benefit-cost analysis at the county-level where changes in tax revenue are used to monetize the impact of rural broadband for a hypothetical Midwest county. The second solution demonstrates a method for evaluating the benefit of broadband in terms of social impact on education, employment, and healthcare in a small under-served community in northwest Missouri. Pre- and post-survey data were used to conduct comparisons between the targeted community, which received faster internet, and control communities. The third solution describes a socio-technical reference architecture to support the development of community-driven wireless broadband projects. By providing analytical tools for evaluating the impact of broadband solutions for rural communities, this research increases the capability of local communities to identify and advocate for broadband solutions that fit their needs --Abstract, page iv

Designing the Sakai Open Academic Environment: A distributed cognition account of the design of a large scale software system

Social accounts of technological change make the flexibility and openness of interpretations the starting point of an argument against technological determinism. They suggest that technological change unfolds in the semantic domain, but they focus on the social processes around the interpretations of new technologies, and do not address the conceptual processes of change in interpretations. The dissertation presents an empirically grounded case study of the design process of an open-source online software platform based on the framework of distributed cognition to argue that the cognitive perspective is needed for understanding innovation in software, because it allows us to describe the reflexive and expansive contribution of conceptual processes to new software and the significance of professional epistemic practices in framing the direction of innovation. The framework of distributed cognition brings the social and cognitive perspectives together on account of its understanding of conceptual processes as distributed over time, among people, and between humans and artifacts. The dissertation argues that an evolving open-source software landscape became translated into the open-ended local design space of a new software project in a process of infrastructural implosion, and the design space prompted participants to outline and pursue epistemic strategies of sense-making and learning about the contexts of use. The result was a process of conceptual modeling, which resulted in a conceptually novel user interface. Prototyping professional practices of user-centered design lent directionality to this conceptual process in terms of a focus on individual activities with the user interface. Social approaches to software design under the broad umbrella of human-centered computing have been seeking to inform the design on the basis of empirical contributions about a social context. The analysis has shown that empirical engagement with the contexts of use followed from conceptual modeling, and concern about real world contexts was aligned with the user-centered direction that design was taking. I also point out a social-technical gap in the design process in connection with the repeated performance challenges that the platform was facing, and describe the possibility of a social-technical imagination.Ph.D

Modelling a conversational agent (Botocrates) for promoting critical thinking and argumentation skills

Students in higher education institutions are often advised to think critically, yet without being guided to do so. The study investigated the use of a conversational agent (Botocrates) for supporting critical thinking and academic argumentation skills. The overarching research questions were: can a conversational agent support critical thinking and academic argumentation skills? If so, how? The study was carried out in two stages: modelling and evaluating Botocrates' prototype. The prototype was a Wizard-of-Oz system where a human plays Botocrates' role by following a set of instructions and knowledge-base to guide generation of responses. Both stages were conducted at the School of Education at the University of Leeds. In the first stage, the study analysed 13 logs of online seminars in order to define the tasks and dialogue strategies needed to be performed by Botocrates. The study identified two main tasks of Botocrates: providing answers to students' enquiries and engaging students in the argumentation process. Botocrates’ dialogue strategies and contents were built to achieve these two tasks. The novel theoretical framework of the ‘challenge to explain’ process and the notion of the ‘constructive expansion of exchange structure’ were produced during this stage and incorporated into Botocrates’ prototype. The aim of the ‘challenge to explain’ process is to engage users in repeated and constant cycles of reflective thinking processes. The ‘constructive expansion of exchange structure’ is the practical application of the ‘challenge to explain’ process. In the second stage, the study used the Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) experiments and interviews to evaluate Botocrates’ prototype. 7 students participated in the evaluation stage and each participant was immediately interviewed after chatting with Botocrates. The analysis of the data gathered from the WOZ and interviews showed encouraging results in terms of students’ engagement in the process of argumentation. As a result of the role of ‘critic’ played by Botocrates during the interactions, users actively and positively adopted the roles of explainer, clarifier, and evaluator. However, the results also showed negative experiences that occurred to users during the interaction. Improving Botocrates’ performance and training users could decrease users’ unsuccessful and negative experiences. The study identified the critical success and failure factors related to achieving the tasks of Botocrates