“Is this what you meant? Promoting listening on the Web with Reflect. Travis Kriplean, Michael Toomim, Jonathan Morgan, Alan Borning, Andrew J. Ko”
“Lessons form ThoughtSwap-ing: Increasing participant’s co-ordinative agency in facilitated discussions. Margaret Dickey-Kurdziolek, Matthew Schaefer, Deborah Tatar, Ian P. Renga”
The first paper examines how Active Listening can be facilitated and improved. The paper discusses the lack of active learning on online web discussion platforms/forums. There is no form of structured grounding to establish mutual understanding and facilitate empathy. The authors propose a framework to encourage active listening on web interfaces and contribute a novel interface called ‘Reflect’ which adds a second dimension to comment sections online and provides a channel for backchannelling.
Reflect was employed in Community Discussions and Community Deliberation. However being published in 2012, certain assumptions or facts may have changed now in 2019.
Firstly, the viability/feasibility of such a system must be discussed when scaled up to deal with the volume that online forums have in 2019. It may also be prudent to have likes, reactions, dislikes and perhaps an “I’m Listening” button along with the Reflect-Restatement provision if audience has to be correctly judged. Furthermore, text may not necessarily be the best way to restate or re-iterate complex concepts, where the adoption of different media (images, audio, video and other infographics) could be considered. Reputations could be displayed to bolster credibility and Lastly, some thought on how this system could be abused and kept resistant to trolling.
What’s different between 2012 and 2019? I would be curious to know. I feel like the online forum thing is somewhat similar.