Last night at the VoxPolitics event I used Hydra to take notes with Tom and Euan amongst others, Tom has posted the notes we wrote along with a brief reaction to the event. Unlike Euan I wasn't sharp enough to actually blog from the event, instead concentrating on IM and Hydra.
Hydra does give rise to some interesting challenges, I have a somewhat patchy memory of the actual talks, as I was writing notes. Writing, listening and watching what the other 3-4 people are typing stretches ones attention quite thin, if you add in a bit of iChat, then you get quite narrow and selective attention. The trade off is that I have a better set of notes than I'd have made by myself. Glenn Fleishman notes using iChatAV and Hydra, very successfully, to do collaborative book editing.
Donald Broadbent in 1957 proposed a psychological model of attention, which states that we can filter the stumili around us and attend to one at a time with any quality. The model is a bit old, but still is a reasonable way of thinking of how we can try to multitask. The act of writing and reading seems to disturb the transfer from short term to long term memory of the actual speaker talking.
Still, using Hydra is a great experience and it is a very useful tool for this kind of collaborative note taking experience at conferences. Natural rules or behaviours do develop, a sort of turn taking with the points that are being made by the speakers and it is the best place for a quick joke, just as quickly deleted. It is the replacement for the notepad and the passed bit of post-it pad. I need to be able to type faster though.
WiFi and Hydra at Westminster
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Take one onion has a more detailed and very interesting notes about the VoxPolis Event at the British parliament yesterday. Tom Coates posted the Hydra document of the meeting.... Read More
interesting stuff.
reminds me of a few things (in no particular order).
One is the research being done at places like Nottingham psychology dept around childrens collaborative (or more often competitive) use of computers. So if there are two children sitting at a computer how do they negotiate sharing - does one type and the other use the mouse. I think there are gender differences here too. I guess some of this research would be worth looking at for people who are developing tools like hydra.
Another is how frustrating I find it to look over your shoulder when you are surfing the web, even scrolling down a page of google search results. Everything seems to go at the wrong speed as you each focus on different parts of the page.
Finally your mention of Broadbent reminded me of meeting him once in the coffee bar in Oxford EP dept. He was a very nice and gentle man, seemed to be as happy to chat to a lowly undergraduate as to a great professor. Again, I think the work of some of these folk in 'basic psychology' should be better known by inventors and designers of new technology. Often they seem to be re-inventing the wheel, or making mistakes which could be avoided by a quick study of undergrad level psychology. We really know quite a lot about the processes of attention, memory and cognitive processing and all this stuff is relevant. Maybe it just needs to be available in a more accessible format.
Eysenck and Keane might be a good place to start.
Lucy