Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Did the facilitator affect the collaborative process?
Related to a balanced participation some observations can be done. Based in the personal
messages responded by the target member, some members corrected their participation rate.
For example, in Group 2, SA received three messages encouraging his participation, one of
them was rejected, and then he received two messages asking him to involve more his peers,
a clear change in his rate of participation. This type of change can be also observed, in
Groups 3 and 4. Unfortunately, not all members corrected their participation rate, in that
same Group 2, SS received two messages encouraging his participation and by the end
received other two with the same advice.
A more concerning part could be regarding to the stages. Only four messages were sent, one
to Group 1 and three to Group 4. The Group 1 received a message suggesting them to settle
a plan before starting the implementation, members SS and SA agreed, but member SB who
was the one who started the implementation, disagreed with the message and continued
with it.
Group 4 received two messages suggesting to agree on decisions as a starting point. The
group answered until the second one and agreed with it, but instead of having a discussion
period as expected, they started the implementation. Thus, the facilitator sent a third
message encouraging them to get an agreement before implementing, and even that the
group agreed with the message, they kept moving furniture instead of having a discussion
period as expected.
3.2.3 Learned lessons
As mentioned, the pointing mechanism can be used to monitor whether participants are
talking about the task, to understand their involvement on it. In this case, the participants
were video recorded and physically observed while they were carrying out the sessions;
therefore, they were involved in the task no doubt. In these trials, the intention was its
observation in order to incorporate data coming from it to the facilitator in the future, same
as gazes.
In the accomplishment of a task like the one presented here, a mechanism to point objects or
some areas is an advantage to identify them quickly; deictic gestures during collaboration in
real life are more likely to appear during Planning and Reviewing phases. Although, we are
completely aware that this is a very small data sample, in Table 13 can be observed that the
Group 2 used it the most during these stages, and it is the one with the better scores
regarding the task accomplishment and a more proper use of the collaborative stages. A first
thought is to suggest its use during the collaborative session, especially during the Planning
and Reviewing stages.
The change of gaze direction was used in a very particular way, see Tables 9, 10 and 11, a
number of them (4.02 in average) usually preceded a talking turn, 81% of the times. This
behavior may correspond to the fact that people try to get feedback from facial
expressions when speaking or listening, but the avatars in the environment do not have
them, then the users' change of gazes seem to be as an “announcement” that they were
about to speak.
