The growing Information Technology (IT) international workforce in the US has diverse social and professional needs. Organizations offer support structures such as Affinity Groups (AGs) and Communities of Practice (CoPs) to provide social support, learning and mentoring opportunities for their members. In this paper, we examine an emerging form of a grass-root inter-organizational groups that provide such support for Korean IT employees. The paper reports on the preliminary findings of a case study of Changbal (CB), a professional and social community that combines the characteristics of AGs and CoPs. Our research examines the characteristics of CB, how the community supports employees to transition to the US workplace, and differences between CB and other AGs or CoPs. The paper reports on the implications of this new form of community on our understanding of CoPs and AGs and practical implications of the IT industry.
Virtual reality (VR) offers potential as a collaborative tool for both technology design and human-robot interaction. We utilized a participatory, human-centered design (HCD) methodology to develop a collaborative, asymmetric VR game to explore teens’ perceptions of, and interactions with, social robots. Our paper illustrates three stages of our design process; ideation, prototyping, and usability testing with users. Through these stages we identified important design requirements for our mid-fidelity environment. We then describe findings from our pilot test of the mid-fidelity VR game with teens. Due to the unique asymmetric virtual reality design, we observed successful collaborations, and interesting collaboration styles across teens. This study highlights the potential for asymmetric VR as a collaborative design tool as well as an appropriate medium for successful teen-to-teen collaboration.
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