The Informatics Seminar is held on Fridays at 3:00pm in ICS2 136 followed by a social hour at 4:00pm. See you there!

Abstract

In the past decade, digital technology has become widely integrated into many professional training settings, yet at present we lack a detailed understanding of how new technology alters networks of social and technology-mediated interactions present in such environments. I have been engaged in a multi-year ethnography-for-design study in a dental hygiene training program in San Diego, CA. During the project, I helped design a new clinical training laboratory, equipped with embedded digital media technology, such as flat-panel monitors, computer workstations and overhead cameras. Here, I detail the ethnographic motivations for the design of the technology integrated into the training program.

Decisions about the usefulness of a technology are socially constructed throughout the entire design and use cycles of a technology by the various actors who participate in communities of practice. Studying the cultural processes behind the appropriation of technology can help us understand how to design technology that is more likely to be appropriated and used by the community. Distributed cognition theory posits that cognitive processes extend across the traditional boundaries of the skin and the skull as various kinds of coordination are established and maintained between bodily, material, and social resources. Data from multimodal interaction can provide information about the underlying cognitive architecture. Moreover, larger patterns, like social organization and the context of activity may also be viewed as important parts of the cognitive ecology.

I will present an analysis of how a collaborative video blogging system (a ‘vlog’), used in an introductory clinical instruction course, affected the network of social and technology-mediated interactions in the training clinic. In particular, I examine how interactions with videos structured the way students and instructors worked with each other. Additionally, I report how the faculty’s appropriation of the vlog technology was influenced by the presentation of divergent methodology in the videos on the vlog.