This year I had a full paper accepted into CSCW, titled “Lessons from ThoughSwap-ing: Increasing Participants Coordinative Agency in Collocated Discussion”. In the paper we discuss the design evolution of ThoughtSwap, which is a piece of software I dreamed up and implemented with fellow graduate students at Virginia Tech. ThoughtSwap was first implemented and evaluated 2.5 years ago, and its nice to be able to see it evolve into a research project that is worthy of publication and consideration by a larger community.

The aim of ThoughtSwap is to facilitate meaningful collocated discussions by (1) reducing barriers to participation, (2) requiring minimal participation from everyone, and (3) giving participants the obligation of re-presenting another participant’s thought. ThoughtSwap does this by allowing participants to enter their thoughts into the system anonymously, the thoughts are then tossed into the “hat” (which is our metaphor for the “swapping” part of ThoughtSwap), and each participant pulls another thought from the hat. Now at this point in the activity, I am depending on someone else to present my thought for me, and someone else in the room is depending on me to discuss their thought for them.

The tool is pretty simple in design and mechanism, but man, that one little feature of swapping thoughts is a powerful one. When users first pull out a thought from the hat, they first have to interpret it and then figure out a way to bring it up for discussion. They also get to hear their own thought articulated by someone else. From our evaluations, I can tell you this is hard. We’ve used it with middle school science classrooms, college level writing classes, and informal graduate student reading groups. It doesn’t matter who you are, trying to really, truly represent someone else’s thought is difficult, but it almost always brings out a new, more interesting, issue to discuss.  I could go on and on with examples...but I wont do that here. (You can email me if you want to swap some thoughts, though!)

Feedback from the ThoughtSwap-ing Talk:

I practiced practiced and practiced my talk. I was still a bit nervous when I gave it, but it went really well and got some interesting questions.

Question 1 : “Right now ThoughtSwap users anonymously enter their thoughts, which may reduce barriers to participating in the discussion. But what if it is important for members of marginalized groups, (like women or minorities in a CS class, for example), to have their identity associated with their own thoughts?

This was a fantastic question. I had been spending some time thinking about how important thoughts are, how important identities are, and how important it is for us to have them tied together. It may be incredibly beneficial for a great thought to be recognized and associated back to a person who may otherwise feel like an outsider and that their ideas aren’t usually heard in the same ways as other participants’. At the same time, because there is this feeling of being different and not being heard in the same way, there is some apprehension in expressing yourself as you truly want to.

What is interesting about the ThoughtSwap evaluations though, is that the system is not stopping you from jumping up and declaring “that thought you just said was mine”, but it absolutely never happens in our evaluations. Also, there have been moments when participants have asked, “who’s thought is this?” and no one has ever fessed up and claimed it! Furthermore, you can sometimes get your own thought back from the system (the “swapping” is purely random), and participants will sometimes go on and discuss it as if the thought they entered and received back is not theirs at all! Its like once that thought is tossed into the hat, the identity has been stripped. That is the perception at least. Whether that is a good thing all the time or not, I really don’t know. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about it and reading literature. I’ll let everyone know once I’ve run some more experiments and have a better answer.

Question 2: “Right now you’ve done a lot of evaluation of ThoughtSwap in classroom settings, but how do you see ThoughtSwap working in other contexts like the work-place?”

I think ThoughtSwap could be useful anywhere deep meaningful discussions are wanted and warranted! Of course that was my answer ;-) We hope, in the future, to use ThoughtSwap with different groups of people. Such as, work place discussions, negotiations, or on “hot topics” that could be controversial. Its hard to get into a deep, sticky, but important debate sometimes. ThoughtSwap has been designed to scaffold that type of activity.

I had a great time talking about ThoughtSwap at CSCW this year. Thank you to everyone who attended my talk, I really appreciate it!