PDAs and Shared Public Displays: Making Personal Information Public, and Public Information Personal

Saul Greenberg, Michael Boyle and Jason Laberge
Department of Computer Science and Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

This research is mainly interested in how people publicize their personal information and how do they take them back again.

It considers two new technologies (1999) that help with CSCW

• Personal Digital Assitants (PDAs)
• Single Display Groupware (SDG)

The whole idea is to use these devices as appliances based on Norman's idea of information Appliances:

...specialising in information: knowledge, facts, graphics,
images, video or sound. An information appliance is designed to perform a specific activity. A distinguishing feature of
infomration appliances is the ability to share information among themselves.

It distinguished between the meanings of Personalized and Public artefacts as things created and manipulated by one individual versus things that are created and maintained as a result of group work.

There is two issues to personal notes that become public
- There is the content itself ( the content)
- There is the mobility of the content

Mobile computing can be used for the following purposes

1. Mobile devices can serve as a means for people to augment real-time personal communications
2. The mobile device lets people download information, modify it, and upload it
3. The mobile device lets people gather personal information in the field which is then uploaded into a commercial database
4. The mobile person can be given access to one's workstation environment
5. Some mobile systems synchronize personal information across devices
6. More powerful are synchronization systems that let people synchronize both personal and public information across devices
7. Techniques for information sharing across devices delegate the notion of public versus private into low-level interaction techniques.
   

They developed a system called SharedNotes to support interaction for personal work, moving from personal to public, public arena, and between meetings.

concolusions:

• PDA should be considered an qual rather than subordinate partner
• Each device should be treated as a different entity enabling different but complementary acts (This is in contrast to what Gostner et al. tried to achieve out of their study. Their study has been just so wrong as they wanted people to consider the combination of the screen and the device as a unique entity)
• Based on their observations and findings it was easier to use the keyboard to interact directly with the public screen rather than to deal with the PDA as it is hard to enter stuff to the PDA. This is again against the initial assumption by Gostner et al.!)
• They tried to used PDA as the major place to create notes and the display as the major place to show the notes thus assigning separate personalities to different entities in their domain
• They don't allow people to have their notes back once they have them posted on the public display thus taking the right away from the original author to edit or remove the post he generates. It is however important and has mentioned by their participants too that your thoughts remain your thoughts even if you discuss it with other people. You should have the control over them, everybody should know how you have received them and everybody should know whether you are the one who owns the copyright for it or not. It is very easy to manage if you bind a username to the notes that are produced as then you can manage authentication and synchronization of notes that are appeared to the others
• Automatic publication denies users the opportunity to express personal relevancy, and discourages them from using the tool (VERY IMPORTANT)
• Each device should be designed to maximize its strengths and capabilities. Again what Gostner et al. have done is a complete rejection of this claim.