9978523
Community collective efficacy: structure and consequences of perceived capacities in the Blacksburg Electronic Village
Bandura's social cognitive construct "perceived self-efficacy" has been used widely to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. Collective efficacy is the extension of the self-efficacy construct to organizations and groups; it refers to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. Our research is investigating the use of collective efficacy in understanding attitudes and behaviors of members of proximal residential communities with respect to issues like attachment, engagement, and sociality, specifically as modulated by use of the Internet and community networks. This paper describes our analysis of the structure and external validity of the collective efficacy construct.
14643603
Making use is more than a matter of task analysis
I am pleased and honored that such an impressive group of commentators considered my book Making Use (Carroll, 2000) worthy of discussion and analysis. I would not expect, nor even prefer really, to have everyone agree with me. What would bother me, what would bother any author, is to not be read at all. Dan Diaper’s critical review and the commentaries by David Benyon/Catriona Macaulay, Tom Carey, and Fabio Paterno, will help to make that less likely! Many important themes are raised in Diaper (2002) review and in the commentaries. In this response I want to concentrate on refining a few of the main issues and distinctions. First, I briefly consider contrasts in values. I think that preferences for scenario-based design versus traditional task analytic methods reflect differences in the underlying world views and values of designers and researchers. To some extent, therefore, the issues in this discussion are not just technical, but paradigmatic and moral. Second, I consider the state of design practices in HCI and its implications for where onus lies in contemporary methodological argumentation and for what sorts of data are pertinent and required to address outstanding methodological issues. Finally, I consider the question of how task analysis, in the sense of structured task decomposition, might be reconstructed in the emerging paradigm of scenario-based design.
7723669
Better home shopping or new democracy?: evaluating community network outcomes
This is a perspective paper on community networks - socio-technical infrastructures supporting villages, towns, and neighborhoods. Community networking is well-established, world wide, and addresses critical societal issues, such as the “crisis of community” and the sociality of the Internet. However, community network projects have not emphasized evaluation. Relatively little is known about the economic, social, and psychological consequences of community networks for the individuals, groups, and communities served. Evaluating community networks is a momentous mutual opportunity for the development of CHI evaluation methodologies and for bringing technical CHI expertise to bear on societal issues.
5855338
The development of cooperation: five years of participatory design in the virtual school
During the past five years, our research group worked with a group of public school teachers to define, develop, and assess network-based support for collaborative learning in middle school physical science and high school physics. From the outset, we committed to a participatory design approach. This design collaboration has now existed far longer than is typical of participatory design endeavors, particularly in North America. The nature of our interactions, and in particular the nature of the role played by the teachers has changed significantly through the course of the project. We suggest that there may be a long-term developmental unfolding of roles and relationships in participatory design.
1921535
Interface design issues for advice-giving expert systems
Advice giving could become the first successful domain for intelligent interfaces.
148806746
Human-computer interaction: psychology as a science of design.
14571844
The process of ISD methodology selection and use: a case study
This paper provides empirically-based explanations for the observed low, and partial, use of information systems development (ISD) methodologies. The research reported in this paper examines the process of methodology selection and use in an intensive field study of the early stages of systems development and notes ongoing adaptation of methodologies in response to changing contingencies. The paper concludes that, in many circumstances, methodology adaptation is a necessary part of successful systems development. It also suggests that deeper understanding of the attitudes of different stakeholders to selecting and using ISD methodologies may help to explain this adaptation.
32981346
An Island Parsing Interpreter For The Full Augmented Transition Network Formalism
Island parsing is a powerful technique for parsing with Augmented Transition Networks (ATNs) which was developed and successfully applied in the HWIM speech understanding project. The HWIM application grammar did not, however, exploit Woods' original full ATN specification. This paper describes an island parsing interpreter based on HWIM, but containing substantial and important extensions to enable it to interpret any grammar which conforms to that full specification of 1970. The most important contributions have been to eliminate the need for prior specification of scope clauses, to provide more power by implementing LIFTR and SENDR actions within the island parsing framework, and to improve the efficiency of the techniques used to merge together partially-built islands within the utterance.This paper also presents some observations about island parsing, based on the use of the parser described, and some suggestions for future directions for island parsing research.
14287805
A Formalism and Environment for the Development of a Large Grammar of English
Natural language grammars with large coverage are typically the result of many person-years of effort, working with clumsy formalisms and sub-optimal software support for grammar development. This paper describes our approach to the task of writing a substantial grammar, as part of a collaboration to produce a general purpose morphological and syntactic analyser for English. The grammatical formalism we have developed for the task is a metagrammatical notation which is a more expressive and computationally tractable variant of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. We have also implemented a software system which provides a highly integrated and very powerful set of tools for developing and managing a large grammar based on this notation. The system provides a grammarian with an environment which we have found to be essential for rapid but successful production of a substantial grammar.
11544923
Unparsing RDF/XML
It is difficult to serialize an RDF graph as a humanly readable RDF/XML document. This paper describes the approach taken in Jena 1.2, in which a design pattern of guarded procedures invoked using top down recursive descent is used. Each procedure corresponds to a grammar rule; the guard makes the choice about the applicability of the production. This approach is seen to correspond closely to the design of an LL(k) parser, and a theoretical justification of this correspondence is found in universal algebra.
12738746
Software support for practical grammar development
Even though progress in theoretical linguistics does not necessarily rely on the construction of working programs, a large proportion of current research in syntactic theory is facilitated by suitable computational tools. However, when natural language processing applications seek to draw on the results from new developments in theories of grammar, not only the nature of the tools has to change, but they face the challenge of reconciling the seemingly contradictory requirements of notational perspicuity and efficiency of performance. In this paper, we present a comparison and an evaluation of a number of software systems for grammar development, and argue that they are inadequate as practical tools for building wide-coverage grammars. We discuss a number of factors characteristic of this task, demonstrate how they influence the design of a suitable software environment, and describe the implementation of a system which has supported efficient development of a large computational grammar of English.