Instant Messaging (IM) is being widely adopted by teenagers. In a study of 16 teenage IM users, we explore IM as an emerging feature of teen life, focusing our questions on its support of interpersonal communication and its role and salience in everyday life. We qualitatively describe the teens' IM use interpersonally, as well as its place in the domestic ecology. We also identify technology adoption conditions and discuss behaviors around privacy management. In this initial investigation, we found differences in the nature of use between high school and college teens, differences we propose are accounted for by teens' degree of autonomy as a function of domestic and scholastic obligations, the development of independent work practices, Internet connectivity access, and even transportation access. Moreover, while teen IM use is in part characterized as an optimizing choice between multiple communications media, practice is also tied to concerns around peer pressure, peer group membership and creating additional opportunities to socialize.

In recent years much attention has been paid to networkbased, distributed environments like text-based MUDs and MOOs for supporting collaborative work. Such environments offer a shared virtual world in which interactions can take place irrespective of the actual physical proximity or distance of interactants. Although these environments have proven successful within social, recreational and educational domains, few data have been reported concerning use of such systems in the workplace. In this paper we summarize in-depth interviews with 8 MUDders from a software research and development community where a MUD has been operational and actively used for a number of years. The interviews suggest that the MUD fills a valuable communication niche for this workgroup, being used both synchronously and asynchronously to enable the establishment of new contacts and the maintenance of existing contacts. These observations are discussed in the context of the organization under study. Keywords MUDs, distributed teams, collaboration, coordination, informal conversations, interviews, computer mediated communication 1

Computer and video games are a maturing medium and industry and have caught the attention of scholars across a variety of disciplines. By and large, computer and video games have been ignored by educators. When educators have discussed games, they have focused on the social consequences of game play, ignoring important educational potentials of gaming. This paper examines the history of games in educational research, and argues that the cognitive potential of games have been largely ignored by educators. Contemporary developments in gaming, particularly interactive stories, digital authoring tools, and collaborative worlds, suggest powerful new opportunities for educational media. VIDEO GAMES IN AMERICAN CULTURE Now just over thirty years old, video games have quickly become one of the most pervasive, profitable, and influential forms of entertainment in the United States and across the world 1. In 2001, computer and console game software and hardware exceeded $6.35 billion in the United States, and an estimated $19 billion worldwide (IDSA 2002). To contextualize these

An important way of making interfaces usable by nonexpert users is to enable the use of natural language input, as in natural language query interfaces to databases, or MUDs and MOOs. When the subject matter is about procedures, however, we have discovered that interfaces can take advantage of what we call Programmatic Semantics, procedural relations that can be inferred from the linguistic structure. Roughly, nouns can be interpreted as data structures; verbs are functions; adjectives are properties. Some linguistic forms imply conditionals, loops, and recursive structures. We illustrate the principles of Programmatic Semantics with a description of Metafor, a "brainstorming " editor for programs, analogous to an outlining tool for prose writing. Metafor interactively converts English sentences to partially specified program code, to be used as "scaffolding " for a more detailed program. A user study showed that Metafor is capable of capturing enough Programmatic Semantics to facilitate non-programming users and beginners' conceptualization of programming problems. Author Keywords Programmatic semantics, natural language interfaces,

this paper was presented at the International Network Conference 2000, 3}6 July, Plymouth, UK, and published in the proceedings of that conference (Carroll, Rosson, Isenhour, Van Metre, Schafer & Ganoe, 2000)

1 Situated Support for Learning: Storm’s Weekend with Rachael While much attention has been paid to the content of support for learning, less attention has been given to its context. This paper introduces the notion of “situated support, ” and argues that the identity of the source of support and the connectedness of that support to other elements of the learning environment are of primary importance. MOOSE Crossing is a text-based virtual reality environment (or “MUD”) designed to be a constructionist learning environment for children eight to thirteen years of age. A microanalysis is presented of the situated nature of support for learning on MOOSE Crossing over the course of one weekend where a twelve-year-old girl learned to write simple computer programs.

As a more diverse population of users moves online, understanding how to help those groups work together and leverage their diverse skills poses a significant challenge for human-computer interaction. This paper presents a case study of the design of an online community that supports kids interviewing elders to build up a shared database of oral history. Two pilot studies with existing technology are presented, and a software design based on those studies is described. In addition, a formative evaluation of the software is discussed, along with future work. This work shows the value of prototyping with existing technology in order to uncover user needs in an online environment. Keywords CSCL, online community, children, user-centered design

We live in a society where concepts of self, community and "what is right and wrong " are constantly changing. This makes it particularly challenging for young people to construct a sense of self and to identify their most cherished values. Therefore, there is an amounting pressure in schools and society to create learning environments to explore these issues. Two research questions are at the heart of the work presented in this paper: What kind of learning environment will afford opportunities for young people to naturally engage in reflection and discussion about issues of identity, in particular personal and moral values? And, how can technologies have an impact on character and moral education? I propose identity construction environments as technological tools purposefully designed with the goal of supporting young people in the exploration of these issues. I first describe the design principles that distinguish these environments from other learning technologies. I also specify the learning experiences they do afford _ namely the understanding of identity as a complex construction composed by different elements, including personal and moral values. Then I present the conceptual foundations and implementation of the Zora identity

Writing a book from which others can learn is itself a powerful learning experience. Based on this proposition, we have launched Science Online, a wiki to support learning in high school science classrooms through the collaborative production of an online science resource. Our approach to designing educational uses of technology is based on an approach to education called constructionism, which advocates learning by working on personally meaningful projects. Our research examines the ways that constructionism connects to collective models of knowledge production and learning such as Knowledge Building. In this paper, we explore ways that collaboration using wiki tools fits into the constructionist approach, we examine learning goals for youth growing up in a readwrite culture, and we discuss preliminary findings in an ongoing year-long study of Science Online in the classroom. Despite the radically open collaboration afforded by wiki, we observe that many factors conspired to stymie collaborative writing on the site. We expected to find cultural barriers to wiki adoption in schools. Unexpectedly, we are also finding that the design of the wiki tool itself contributed barriers to collaborative writing in the classroom.

One of the most important roles played by technology is connecting people and mediating their communication with one another. Building technology that mediates conversation presents a number of challenging research and design questions. Apart from the fundamental issue of what exactly gets mediated, two of the more crucial questions are how the person being mediated interacts with the mediating layer and how the receiving person experiences the mediation. This thesis is concerned with both of these questions and proposes a theoretical framework of mediated conversation by means of automated avatars. This new approach relies on a model of face-to-face conversation, and derives an architecture for implementing these features through automation. First the thesis describes the process of face-to-face conversation and what nonverbal behaviors contribute to its success. It then presents a theoretical framework that explains how a text message can be automatically analyzed in terms of its communicative function based on discourse context, and how behaviors, shown to support those same functions in face-toface conversation, can then be automatically performed by a graphical avatar in synchrony with the message delivery. An architecture, Spark, built on this framework demonstrates the approach in an actual