Narcissus
Kimberley Upton, Judy Kay
School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney
Contact Person
Judy Kay
judy@it.usyd.edu.au
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Project Description
Narcissus was designed to help turn groups into more effective teams.
Working effectively in groups is hard, particularly for projects that span long
periods of time; months or years.
Groups can be derailed by a range of problems including poor leadership,
poor communication, failure to monitor progress, and social loafing.
Groups using electronic support tools generate huge amounts of trace data,
which has the potential to provide the group with insights into the effectiveness
of their own operation.
The Narcissus project exploits this data to support the groups.
The approach is to use an interactive visualisation to mirror the
activities of the group members, which gives them the opportunity to see the
dynamics and progress of their group.
Narcissus has been implemented as a plugin for
trac,
a state-of-the-art tool for supporting groups.
Narcissus has an additional side-benefit: it provides a new way to navigate a
trac site, via a time- and person-centred view of the large number of wiki pages,
files and versions and tasks.
What does the user see?
The screen shot at the top right shows a Narcissus display for 5 people (anonymised).
Each block of three lanes shows one person's activity.
Each square is for one day, with time starting at the bottom of the display.
For each sqaure, the brighter the colour, the more activity for that person
on that day.
As indicated in the legend, purple is the wiki activity,
blue is actions on the version control repository and
green is for tickets which are used to define tasks to be done.
Clicking on the square, provides details at the right.
Clicking on links in these goes right to the actual contribution, making Narcissus
a handy way to review a person's work on a particular day.
We have found it can really help the group facilitator identify potential problems
in group operation before and to do this early enough to avert many problems.
User control and scrutability.
In line with much CHAI work, Narcissus has been designed to ensure user control
and it enables the user to determine just how it determines its activity model.
The user can decide what level of activity is associated with each displayed
activity level.
Narcissus was designed as a way for people to reflect on their own activity.
That means that in different situations, different people will want to make
their own activity level settings.
Narcissus is available at the
trac hacks site.
Source code is available at
http://vandor.it.usyd.edu.au/hg/narcissus-plugin/
Key Publications
P. Reimann and J. Kay. Learning to Learn and Work in Net-Based Teams: Supporting Emergent Collaboration with Visualization Tools, pages 143-188. Designsfor Learning Environments of the Future. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. [View Details]
K. Upton and J. Kay. Narcissus: interactive activity mirror for small groups. In UMAP09, User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalisation, pages 54-65, 2009. [View Details]
S. Bull and J. Kay. Metacognition and open learner models. In The 3rd Workshop on Meta-Cognition and Self-Regulated Learning in Educational Technologies, at ITS2008, pages 7-20, 2008. [View Details]
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