Organizations facing high risks and operating in purely digital domains, such as computer security and many financial services, must meet two, contradictory goals: they need to identify digital threats at scale and speed while also avoiding errors that result from automated processing. Research on high-reliability organizations has identified multiple challenges in reaching these goals simultaneously, because automation often renders organizations' operations "mindless" and unable to cope gracefully with changing, complex situations characteristic of high-risk domains. In digital operations, a special challenge arises from the "frame problem" connected with the inability of algorithms to adapt to environments not identified within their developers' initial cognitive frames. An exploratory, theory-generating case study was conducted within a computer security company (F-Secure) to examine how organizations acting in digital domains may achieve high reliability by mitigating the frame problem. This article examines digital organizing of the epistemic and pragmatic features of operations, along with arrangements of these features that respond to the frame problem. Collective mindfulness is identified as emerging in such a sociotechnical setting via a carefully layered, systemic constellation of (human) mindful and (digital) mindless operations while the organization's core operations remain digital and algorithmic. The findings point to heretofore unexplored reliability challenges associated with digital organizing, alongside several relevant ways to overcome and/or mitigate them.
Enrollment in online courses has sharply increased in higher education. Although online education can be scaled to large audiences, the lack of interaction between educators and learners is difficult to replace and remains a primary challenge in the field. Conversational agents may alleviate this problem by engaging in natural interaction and by scaffolding learners' understanding similarly to educators. However, whether this approach can also be used to enrich online video lectures has largely remained unknown. We developed Sara, a conversational agent that appears during an online video lecture. She provides scaffolds by voice and text when needed and includes a voice-based input mode. An evaluation with 182 learners in a 2 x 2 lab experiment demonstrated that Sara, compared to more traditional conversational agents, significantly improved learning in a programming task. This study highlights the importance of including scaffolding and voice-based conversational agents in online videos to improve meaningful learning.
Traditionally, mobile media sharing and messaging has been studied from the perspective of an individual author making media available to other users. With the aim of supporting spectator groups at large-scale events, we developed a messaging application for camera phones with the idea of collectively created albums called Media Stories.The field trial at a rally competition pointed out the collective and participative practices involved in the creation and sense-making of media, challenging the view of individual authorship. Members contributed actively to producing chains of messages in Media Stories, with more than half of the members as authors on average in each story. Observations indicate the centrality of collocated viewing and creation in the use of media. Design implications include providing a "common space" and possibilities of creating collective objects, adding features that enrich collocated collective use, and supporting the active construction of awareness and social presence through the created media.
Most large public displays have been used for providing information to passers-by with the primary purpose of acting as one-way information channels to individual users. We have developed a large public display to which users can send their own media content using mobile devices. The display supports multi-touch interaction, thus enabling collaborative use of the display. This display called CityWall was set up in a city center with the goal of showing information of events happening in the city. We observed two user groups who used mobile phones with upload capability during two large-scale events happening in the city. Our findings are that this kind of combined use of personal mobile devices and a large public display as a publishing forum, used collaboratively with other users, creates a unique setting that extends the group's feeling of participation in the events. We substantiate this claim with examples from user data.
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