"I felt more of a member of this class": increasing students' sense of community with video commenting

ABSTRACT

Public displays are typically situated in strategic places like town centers, and in salient positions on walls within buildings. However, currently most public displays are non-interactive and are typically used for information broadcasting (TV news, advertisements etc). People passing by pay little attention to them. As a consequence, public displays are under-utilized in the everyday world. We are investigating whether use of interactive public displays might increase people's interaction with one another, with a resulting increase in sense of community. In this paper we describe the design and first deployment experiences of a platform-independent, interactive video commenting system using a large public display in two sections of a large-enrollment university class. Our preliminary evaluation suggests that students enjoyed the activity of commenting, that they participated a great deal, and that their sense of community was greater after using the system. We discuss lessons we have learned from this initial experience, and describe further work we are planning using this and similar interactive activities.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ballagas, R., Rohs, M., Sheridan, J.G. and Borchers, J., BYOD: Bring Your Own Device. in In Proc of the Workshop on Ubiquitous Display Environment, Ubicomp, Springer(2004).
• 2: Elizabeth F. Churchill , Les Nelson , Laurent Denoue , Jonathan Helfman , Paul Murphy, Sharing multimedia content with interactive public displays: a case study, Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, August 01-04, 2004, Cambridge, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/1013115.1013119]
• 3: Adam Fass , Jodi Forlizzi , Randy Pausch, MessyDesk and MessyBoard: two designs inspired by the goal of improving human memory, Proceedings of the 4th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, June 25-28, 2002, London, England [doi>10.1145/778712.778754]
• 4: Matthias Finke , Anthony Tang , Rock Leung , Michael Blackstock, Lessons learned: game design for large public displays, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, September 10-12, 2008, Athens, Greece [doi>10.1145/1413634.1413644]
• 5: Saul Greenberg , Michael Rounding, The notification collage: posting information to public and personal displays, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.514-521, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365339]
• 6: Elaine M. Huang , Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Semi-public displays for small, co-located groups, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642622]
• 7: Andrew J. Maunder , Gary Marsden , Richard Harper, SnapAndGrab: accessing and sharing contextual multi-media content using bluetooth enabled camera phones and large situated displays, CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2008, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1358628.1358677]
• 8: Peter Peltonen , Esko Kurvinen , Antti Salovaara , Giulio Jacucci , Tommi Ilmonen , John Evans , Antti Oulasvirta , Petri Saarikko, It's Mine, Don't Touch!: interactions at a large multi-touch display in a city centre, Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2008, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1357054.1357255]
• 9: Peter Peltonen , Antti Salovaara , Giulio Jacucci , Tommi Ilmonen , Carmelo Ardito , Petri Saarikko , Vikram Batra, Extending large-scale event participation with user-created mobile media on a public display, Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia, p.131-138, December 12-14, 2007, Oulu, Finland [doi>10.1145/1329469.1329487]
• 10: Peterson, N.A., Speer, P.W. and McMillan, D.W. Validation of A brief sense of community scale: Confirmation of the principal theory of sense of community. JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, 36 (1). 61.
• 11: Sanders, C.E., Basham, M.E. and Ansburg, P.I. Building a Sense of Community in Undergraduate Psychology Departments. Observer, 19 (5). 291--300.
• 12: Corina Sas , Alan Dix, Designing and evaluating mobile phone-based interaction with public displays, CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2008, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1358628.1358962]
• 13: Jürgen Scheible , Timo Ojala, MobiLenin combining a multi-track music video, personal mobile phones and a public display into multi-user interactive entertainment, Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, November 06-11, 2005, Hilton, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1101149.1101178]
• 14: Jürgen Scheible , Timo Ojala , Paul Coulton, MobiToss: a novel gesture based interface for creating and sharing mobile multimedia art on large public displays, Proceeding of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia, October 26-31, 2008, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/1459359.1459532]
• 15: Tuulos, V.H., Scheible, J. and Nyholm, H. Combining Web, Mobile Phones and Public Displays in Large-Scale: Manhattan Story Mashup. LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, 4480. 37--54.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Video (e.g., tape, disk, DVI)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Collaborative computing

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
public display, sense of community, video commenting