### Small Group Discussion over the Access Grid: A Case Study

Emilee Patrick

epatrick@labs.mot.com

Applications Research Lab

Motorola Labs

# Introduction

Researchers from a variety of disciplines have published many studies
attempting to assess the effectiveness of video-mediated communication.
Nearly all of these studies use systems with different technical
specifications, and also vary on their criteria for successful task
completion, and even on the tasks themselves \[1\]. The video-mediated
communication (VMC) literature is fraught with contradictory evidence
and unclear conclusions. The present study does little to clear up this
morass of data and interpretation. Like other systems before it, the
Access Grid is different in one crucial way from most other VMC systems:
it was designed to enable group-to-group interaction. The question under
consideration in this paper is "so what?" What is the real benefit of
the capability to connect many people in one location to many people in
another location? Does the Access Grid (AG) support or hinder
interactive discussion among distributed groups, as compared with a
similar face-to-face group discussion?

A study was conducted to try to answer these questions. It consisted of
a "naturalistic" observation of Distributed Rap Sessions (DRS) --
informal small group discussions -- on the AG. It was expected that
communication over the AG would be characterized by communication and
coordination breakdowns that do not exist in a co-located, face-to-face
setting \[4\].

# Method

The DRS meetings were modeled after face-to-face sessions held each
semester at Northwestern University. The face-to-face sessions create a
sense of community among isolated minority graduate students in computer
science and engineering; this was also one of the goals of the DRS
meetings. A second motivation for arranging the DRS was to try and
discover why minority grad students tend to go into industry rather than
academia. Four Distributed Rap Sessions were conducted on the Access
Grid, and one face-to-face session was conducted by Motorola Labs
researchers, for comparison.

Undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and engineering
were recruited to participate in DRS meetings through flyers posted at
their university. Each session involved 2-4 AG nodes, and the number of
students at each site ranged from 1 to 8. Free pizza was provided for
participants. At the start of each session, the purpose of the study was
explained and permission to videotape was obtained. Data collection
consisted of notes taken during the DRS, and videotape of projected
video feeds that were involved in each meeting.

Because all of the sessions were very different from each other in both
the number of sites and number of students participating, a rigorous,
quantitative data analysis was not conducted. Instead, the analysis
consisted of the examination of "critical incidents" -- occasions where
an event interesting to the focus of the study occurred. Critical
incidents were transcribed and analyzed in great detail. In addition,
20-minute segments of each DRS were transcribed and surface features of
the interaction were analyzed \[3\].

# Findings

As expected, interaction over the AG differed from face-to-face
interaction in many of the same ways previous studies had uncovered. For
example, speaking turns tended to be longer in VMC, and there was less
speaker overlap at speaking turns -- presumably due to a reduction in
the visual feedback that is essential for coordination of speaker
changes.

A more interesting finding came from a comparison across the AG
sessions. Group size had a large impact on the interaction between AG
node sites. Conversation during a session involving three nodes with one
participant at each node was much more relaxed and natural than during a
session involving three nodes and up to 8 participants at each node. The
role of the discussion leader also changed between these two DRS
meetings; as the number of participants increased, their role became
more formal and controlling.

Another constraint on the interaction seemed to be whether or not
Distributed PowerPoint was used to present slides consisting of
discussion questions. Using the presentation tended to turn the session
into a more formal occasion, and participants relinquished more control
over the conversation to the discussion leader. However, the use of
PowerPoint varied systematically with group size (smaller groups went
without the slides, or referred to them only minimally) and because this
was not a controlled study, no concrete conclusions can be drawn from
this observation.

Finally, unfamiliarity with the system did not impede participants' use
of the AG. They were able to interact with remote sites immediately upon
entering the room, and with little self-consciousness. Overall, they
reported that they were very satisfied with the AG as a tool for
distance communication. One participant even commented, "When can I have
one of these in my house?"

# Implications

The AG was designed to support "group to group" interaction, but data
from observations of Distributed Rap Sessions indicates that the system
supports conversations involving a single person at each node more
naturally. Similar functionality is more readily and cheaply available
via desktop videoconferencing. It is curious that a system designed to
enable interaction between multiple groups simultaneously seems so
optimized for individual-to-individual interaction. There are two
possible explanations. One is that it is a problem of scale -- more
cameras and better resolution will eventually correct the system's
current weaknesses and eventually, interacting over the AG will seem
just like face-to-face communication. The other is that holding the AG
to the standard of face-to-face communication is unproductive, and
instead effort should be concentrated on adding other capabilities that
build on the strengths of the system \[2\]. Instead of progressing as a
medium of visual communication only as fast as the next greatest camera
or video codec, why not make the AG into a medium that affords work in
addition to talk? The incorporation of tools to manipulate the objects
of work instead of just talking about them would turn the AG into a
truly new medium for collaboration.

# References

1\. Finn, K.E., Sellen, A.J. and Wilbur, S.B., eds. (1997).
*Video-Mediated Communication*. Computers, Cognition and Work, ed.
Olson, G.M., Olson, J.S. and Curtis, B. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates:
Mahwah, NJ. 570.

2\. Hollan, J. and Stornetta, S. (1992). *Beyond being there*. In the
Proceedings of *ACM Computer Human Interaction conference on human
factors in computing systems*.

3\. Jordan, B. and Henderson, A. (1995). *Interaction analysis:
foundations and practice.* The Journal of the Learning Sciences,
**4**(1): 39-103.

4\. O\'Malley, C., Langton, S., Anderson, A. and Doherty-Sneddon, G.
(1996). *Comparison of face-to-face and video-mediated interaction.*
Interacting with Computers, **8**(2): 177-192.