PDAs and shared public displays: Making personal information public, and public information personal

Abstract

We are investigating how people move from individual to group work through the use of both personal digital assistants (PDAs) and a shared public display. Our scenario of this work covers the following activities. First, mobile individuals can create "personal" notes on their PDAs. Second, when individuals meet in real time, they can selectively "publicise" notes by moving them to a shared public display. Third, the group can manipulate personal and public items in real time through both PDAs and the shared public display, where the notes contained on both PDAs and public display are automatically synchronised. Finally, people leave a meeting with a common record of their activity. We describe our SharedNotes system that illustrates how people move through this scenario. We also highlight a variety of problematic design issues that result from having different devices and from having the system enforce a rigid distinction between personal and public information.

The personal cockpit

“…Our framework could be extended by taking into consideration the large body of research on multi-surface environments. The modified framework should include aspects pertaining to the movement of content between surfaces and consideration of public vs private content [75].…”

Handheld CSCW in the Meeting Environment

“…Another project, developed at the University of Calgary, is the SharedNotes prototype [1]. Shared Notes is a meeting system that uses PDA to integrate public and private artifacts.…”

“…In this perspective PDA must support two fundamental requirements of collective artefacts. One is fluidity between public and private contexts [1]. The other requirement is flexibility.…”

“…PDA play an important role as mobile devices that support personal information [1]. In that context, PDA allow one person to create and manipulate personal information away from the desktop and plug in to remote information sources to upload, download or synchronize specialized information.…”

Pervasive Web Access via Public Communication Walls

“…The Notification Collage (NC) [8,11,12,23], developed at University of Calgary, Canada, is a groupware system that provides ways to post media elements onto a realtime collaborative surface (display). It is inspired by the metaphor of a bulletin board containing a collage of randomly positioned and possibly overlapping visual elements like sticky notes, video (used for providing virtual "presence" through Webcams), slideshows, or activity indicators to provide a means of indicating the amount of activity at a persons site through collected (proximity sensoring) movement data in the appropriate users room.…”