By Lalitha on Sunday, September 01, 2002 - 10:25 pm:

Welcome Rik Min for the discussion forum of 157.730

I have found your article "Parallelism in interfaces" quite interesting. The explanation of short-term memory with supporting examples and the application of the concept of Parallelism in user interface are convincing.

Parallel presentation of information would certainly be useful for learners, with short- term memory. The information that is required would be readily available without difficulty. This is analogous to a classroom situation where the students tend to understand the lecture clearly when provided with the handouts of the lecture that is being delivered in the classroom.

It would be really nice to have certain facts remain on the screen that would enable the learner to compare. However, I suspect how the designers, though aware of the short-term memory’, would be able to incorporate the required details. Even if they are able to incorporate then to what extent and on what basis will they be able to do? Wouldn’t there be a possibility of bogging down the learner with information overload?

Since the aim of Simulation as a learning tool is to help the learner to take an active role in learning by providing ‘Do, working and learning environment’, I would like to know whether the concept of Parallel Instruction refer to Intelligent Tutoring System?

By Alastair Tennant (Atennant) on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 11:54 am:

Rik

Some comments/questions regarding your paper on Parallellism in Interfaces - you mention that one of the problems with learning applications is the amount of time the user must take to learn how the application works before they start learning - would a series of 'global standards' for look/feel/navigation be useful to address this? If the majority of applications all worked in a similar way, then the learning time would be much reduced.

You also mention that you consider the PC monitor as not up to the task of allowing a user to effectively work with information - are there alternatives to the monitor that would work better?

Lastly, I always find that I learn very little from screen or book just by reading it (very short term memory). I need to physically write things down multiple times and do examples before it gets remembered (is this a transfer to long term memory?). Does the theory of parallelism address the long term memory area?

Regards

By Sam on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 03:17 pm:

Hi Rik, everyone

I was interested by the section of your article that compared hypermedia and web-media. Virtual parallelism was useful because lots of information was easily accessible using the scrollbar - yet I heard in an HCI (CHI?) course that scrolling in websites was something to avoid. Does this all come down to finding a fine line between displaying as much useful information as possible, whilst avoiding information overload?

To do with this problem of fitting information onto a PC screen, has anyone ever done any research into having several seperate monitors side-by-side (in a V shape perhaps)? That would seem a reasonably common sense, if expensive, solution to me. Just an idea!

Thanks,

Sam

By Peram on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 06:08 pm:

TO
Dear Rik Min ,Kinshuk and my classmates
Good evening to every one
Hope we all will be knowing lot of things from this discussion (from different prespectives of individuals in understanding the issues related to "Parallelism in interface") as we did in the first discussion with Ashok Patel.
Thank you
Peram

By Ramesh Lal on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 08:55 pm:

Hello Rik Min

The frames definately would be very useful in developing multimedia based learing software. Since learners learn differently, frames can be used to present the learning materials as text, visual, audio togather with problems which the learners can solve in order to learn the concepts.
We encounter parallelism if we use windows operating system software, for example when we copy a file from c dive to floppy. We have two windows open on our screen one for C drive and the other for floppy, side by side. In the case of windows OS , parallelism also enables to make the system user friendly.

By Lalitha on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 08:59 pm:

Hi Sam to your question “ that scrolling in websites was something to avoid”, I found some information on the Internet at http://webreference.com/greatsite.html and thought of sharing with you. This site provides some guidelines as to ‘what makes a Great Web Site’.

One of the good web design principles is to “minimize scrolling and display time. Users generally don’t prefer to scroll. But it appears that “the hits on Discovery Channel Online increased by 40% after they went from non-scrolling design to a scrolling design.

It depends on your application. If the application is content centered and captures the user’s attention the size of the page would not be an issue.

Even in such sites, I think, it may be a good idea to have all the important information in the screen and provide internal links so that the user can easily navigate to the information of his/her choice.

By Lalitha on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 09:38 pm:

Hi all,
Figures 1, 2 and 3 of the article, "Parallelism in interfaces", refer to first, second and third order parallelism. One of Rik Min’s articles, “The Parallel Instruction Theory for Coaching in Learning Environments for Computer Simulation” gives further information on the levels of Parallelism. This article is available at: http://projects.edte.utwente.nl/pi/Papers/EuroMedia96.htm

By Michael Verhaart on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 10:59 pm:

Hi and welcome Rik (and other class members)

It is good to be on-line again.

Many years ago I was developing software in a product called Turbo-DOS. We were able to run 4 sessions on a single monitor but only in full screen mode. I also had a second computer which was connected to a live system. I distinctly remember a client asking how I slept at night..
In a way I think you could call the multiple full screens as zero order parallelism!!. With the ability of the Mac and then Windows to display multiple windows first and second order parallelism became possible.
One of the most useful programs I have that manages my "short-term" memory problem is notepad!. It is actually a useful (and requires very little memory) tool for making notes, and available on every Windows PC. I encourage my students to use it to cut-and-paste web sites as they browse the web. (In fact I use it to type my notes to this discussion group - so I can remain offline and independant of the web until I am ready.)
Rik, reading your paper made me aware of just how much parallelism actually takes place. Example three (Students in a lecture theatre) is a common occurrence. Like Alistair I note several of my students write down procedures and processes to help encode what they are doing into long-term memory.
From reading books on gender differences, it is often concluded that women work naturally on parallel tasks, while men tend to focus on one task. Have you carried out any studies on whether parallelism in interfaces needs to be adjusted for gender differences?
It is also interesting to note how my students have evolved from having to have training material printed, to being able to work on-line. There are still a lot of students who print everything they see, but this seems to be diminishing. I have placed user guides in a web format and find students now interact with the user guide and the actual application on-screen. This I gather is a second order parallelism.
Do you distinguish between two windows that actually influence each other, and two windows that are separate but one provides instruction for another?
In regards to Sams comment, I see that your BRINE PURIFICATION simulation program involved multiple monitors. I too have often considered this a better option than just a larger monitor. My belief is that multiple monitors take up too much space. Do you believe that the advent of flat-screen monitors may make this more common?
Following up on Ramesh's comment, I have been reading a book by Carey & Blatnik on XML, and it appears that W3C recommend that frames be discontinued, to be replaced with absolute positioning of an in-page object. It would appear that they are going against some of the recommendations of PI?
With regard to the issue of scrolling in web-sites I have found an acceptible limit is that the page can be printed on an A4 page. I have not found any studies that indicate an acceptible length but find this has worked well.
Lalitha, there are many of Riks papers at http://projects.edte.utwente.nl/pi/Papers.These have provided interesting background reading.

Cheers
Michael.

By Michael on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 11:01 pm:

Woops.Looks like the URL for my last message has run into the next word. It should read http://projects.edte.utwente.nl/pi/Papers
Cheers Michael.

By Ramesh Lal on Monday, September 02, 2002 - 11:33 pm:

Hi to all

Just to add to Lalitha's comments on "that scrolling in websites was something to avoid".
Some web design guidelines actually suggest that scrolling to be kept to maximum of two pages to keep the users interested in the website they are veiwing. These guidelines in my veiw applies to e-commerce web sites. I actually see no harm in presenting detailed information on educational topics, which may require a bit of scrolling on the website or a web page. As pointed out by Lalitha the amount of scrolling should depend on the nature of the website or the application.

By Lalitha on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 12:11 am:

Thanks Michael, somedays back I have downloaded some of his papers for my project using the URL you advised on this forum.

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 12:16 am:

Welcome at this side of 'the line': in the Nederlands, subregion Twente, town: Enschede. It is 14.11 o'clock. At 15:30 we have an important meeting: the opening of our academical year. I will read your questions first. Than I try to give you the first comment and/or answers.

Rik Min
http://users.edte.utwente.nl/min
University of Twente, the Nederlands.

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 12:39 am:

1. Dear Lalitha,

Look for some examples in real life my web-page:
http://projects.edte.utwente.nl/pi/pictures/Sheets2.html

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 12:45 am:

2. Dear Lalitha,

Intelligent Tutoring systems (ITS) are important but not really exist in reality in schools or universities. There are some in some companies. So are not real intelligent or a good tutor. I haven't names at the moment of good working systems. In my opinion a ITS have to be parallel (on a screen); parallel to the problem they want to solve (on that screen). So an ITS is a kind of (parallel) help-system if you want to solve a problem in een open learning or working environment.

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 12:53 am:

Dear Alastair,

You write: "Lastly, I always find that I learn very little from screen or book just by reading it (very short term memory). I need to physically write things down multiple times and do examples before it gets remembered (is this a transfer to long term memory?). Does the theory of parallelism address the long term memory area? "

That is a very interesting remark. People want to write beside a book or a monitor. Beside a monitor is real parallelism as I define it. (If you want to solve a problem'.) Beside a book is more to abstract the problem. That is not really the same. But perhaprs. I shall thinking more about that... Interesting.

Your question about the long term memory:
I don't think so. Not directly. Only indirectly.

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 12:58 am:

4. To all,

Do you have read other papers (of me) about parallelism? We just finish a very complex study in a theoretical site on:
http://to-www.to.utwente.nl/TO/ism/course/mmsim/Exp/Experiment1.html

and the first results are on:
http://projects.edte.utwente.nl/pi/Papers/indexYu.html

Until tomorrow.
With regards.
Rik Min

By Xiao Huang on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 08:56 am:

Hi All
I also interested in what Alastair has raised on his message--"Lastly, I always find that I learn very little from screen or book just by reading it (very short term memory). I need to physically write things down multiple times and do examples before it gets remembered (is this a transfer to long term memory?)."--because when I try to learn something that I am not familiar with, I always prepare some paper and write down things that I think is important. This really helps!
As Rik has pointed out, write beside a monitor is a real parallelism, I think write beside a book is also parallelism. As this paper has mentioned, the problem of an interface of a software is how much/what information should it provide to the user(remain on the screen). Learning with books also has this problem, I often find that I studied one concept in the first chapter of the book and when I met it again in second chapter, I cannot use it because I forgot what it is. To write it down on a paper and refer to the paper next time I come to the concept, I can easily solve the problem. This is because the paper and the book now provide a parallel learning interface to me. As the paper has pointed out, "Our short term memory limits our possibilities.", to write things down on the paper helps because it keeps informations that our short term memory cannot hold.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 12:33 pm:

The important issue in presenting information whether it be web pages or from a book is the ability to locate the information quickly. A large pager that requires the user to scroll through lots of information that is not relevant to the task will be a negative. The same applies if the user has to follow through a series of links. Good web sites and systems will endeavour to allow the user to locate what they are interested in quickly. Personally, I avoid websites where I am having to follow lots of links to find what I am looking for or sites where I have to wait while a large page of information is loaded.

Coming back to the issue of parallelism. It seems to me that Microsoft in their applications are moving to a concept of parallelism. I have had my office machine upgraded and it nows has Office XP installed. In using Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, I have discoverd that Microsoft want to place a frame on the right of the application window supposedly with the tools that might be appropriate for the task that you are attempting to achieve. In previous versions, these were accessible via the right mouse button click.

Another use of parallelism in software is the way that help in Visual Studio.Net is displayed. The IDe window size is adjusted do that the users source code and the help explanation are displayed side by side. From a programmers perspective, this has made it easier to review examples while endeavouring to build your own code.

As I think Rik says, parallelism is used in lots of contexts. The distance between the parallel presentations makes a difference in the effectiveness. When I compare the on-screen help parallelism with that of a reference text beside the screen, I have a preference for the on-screen parallelism. Why? Head movement and loss of location in the materials. I find it difficult to retain both contexts when they are not both immediately visible.

As I write this, I can see how Michael's use of Notepad would help solve a parallelism problem in writing these replies. I hate this forum because I am continually scrolling back and forth through the messages. Having Notepad on screen at the same time would allow me to reference others messages while preparing my response with message and responce side by side. In Outlook, I use split screens, different windows or cut and paste to achieve a degree of parallelism.

By Shu yu on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 03:26 pm:

Hello everybody and Rik Min:

I am interested in how to solve the need of humans to be able to see things all at the same time. In the article Rik min said that the solutions of this problem was that people should have a large screen with many open windows (Figure 3). As a user, however, I don¡¯t like opening many windows. It is because too many windows look very disorder. I have to change the windows all the time. Therefore I don¡¯t believe that presenting many windows on the screen is a solution of this problem. I suggest that one screen just contains one or two windows. If one screen cannot contain all information we can provide some links. These links don¡¯t direct link to another page. These links just reveal a small part on the screen for explaining the meaning of the phrase or giving an example of the formula. When people finish reading this part they can close it and read the main pages that have never disappeared while they were reading the links.

By Ramesh Lal on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 07:49 pm:

Hi to all


yes, recent recommodation for using frames for web page design has been a no no thing, some reasons given are that frames are confusing for users and lose predictability of user actions. But if we design a web based tutoring software, imagine a students forgets some value which he had seen few web pages before, the student has to navigate back to that page to view that value again then navigate forward to where he was before. Using frames would ensure that everying is on one web page, so frames which enable parallelism would be helpful in this case.

By daya on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 07:54 pm:

hi,
it was an experience to read the article ... but i dont agree with the statement that only people with short term memory find hypermedia very useful ..cause when an indiavidual visits a web-page for any given reason he/she expects information ..this information is available to the user sometimes in long form and sometimes thru links ..hence it is convinient for an user to have the info on the screen to refer back to ... it saves the hassel of remembering and is easy to refer back to ... even with people with long-term memory, which i feel is a paradox, its convient ..and after all when a web-page or any site or application is designed its best to make it easy for any and every kind of user... as for tramission of entire information at one go is concerned i feel hypermedia allows u the leisure of having links and get only basic information first rather than all at one go ...i have not read a lot of articles on disadvantages of hypermedia but i feel, based on my experience with the net, that hypermedia should be the base for any development ..u may use diff interfases and adaptations over it though.
daya

By Ramesh Lal on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 08:05 pm:

Hi Rik Min
As you have said in your article that "web media have a form of parallelism where a page is larger than the browser screen", to avoid long scrolls contents could be transfered to another new web page using links. On this new page key values are carried forward from the previous page to aid the users memory. Can this be alternative to parallelism?

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 08:33 pm:

Hallo,

One of you says: "As Rik has pointed out, write beside a monitor is real parallelism, I think
write beside a book is also parallelism." My answer: Yes, both is parallelism. But in one case the notebook is the 'problem solving space' and in the the other case the monitor is the 'problem solving space'. Sometimes the book is the instruction medium and sometimes the monitor (with texts, pictures, linear animation or voice) is the instruction medium. (See the difference between 'A' and 'B' in figure 4 of the article.)

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 08:44 pm:

What Ramesh Lal says about frames (in browsers) and copy files from one to another device (on the desktop-way) is absolutly true. That is the way 30-50 procent of the users hate to copy files on the ms-dos way as copy a:xxx.aaa c:***.* (and other things on ms.dos)... Drag and drop-methods have the minimum cognitive (over-)load. Because copiing is a task (or a 'problem' in my terms). Solving that problem cost cognitive energy and that energy is limited because you want to save your cognitive energy (or your short term memory)
for real important problems (mathematics, biology, ..).

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 08:57 pm:

Lalitha writes about scrolling. That is a interesting point... Scrolling - now a days - cost such a minimum cognitive load (as driving a bike) that I prefer a few scrolling more than clicking and clicking (screen-by-screen)... Things are not so absolute as you sometimes think. (See figure 2.) One of my hypotheses is that screen-by-screen-media (as CD.i) fails because of cognitive load because: click next and forget the contents of the previous screen, ... click next and forget the contents again, ... etc. Then web-media are sometimes better because of the long pages and scroll-bars. Think about that. Perhaps you agree.

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 09:15 pm:

Micheal Verhaart writes about 'zero order parallelism' and his experiences with multiple processes. In my definition of parallelism, a number of full screens parallel is first order perallelism and a movie is zero order parallelism because it is a linear medium: '(video-)'frame' by (video-)'frame', stills, every 1/25 second). Overlapping windows are second order parallelism; also long web-page with scroll bars is second order parallelism (in my definition). Last situation is also called (in this article) virtual parallelism.
Operators (and I) like all the monitors in control rooms. That is a first step (or even a absolute condition) in solving their problems. As bookers like all information of all indices, prices of all stocks or stock markets in the world in their control rooms in Wallstreet.

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 09:21 pm:

Ramesh Lal writes: "Can long web-pages and scrollbars be alternative to parallelism?" My answer is: long web-pages can be important to solve problems (on screens). Because it IS a kind of parallellism: namely 'second order parallelism' or sometimes called virtual parallelism (by me; in this article).

Rik Min

By RikMin on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 09:33 pm:

Errol Thompson writes: "The important issue in presenting information whether it be web pages or from a book is the ability to locate the information quickly." Answer: I agree. And "A large pager that requires the user to scroll through lots of information that is not relevant to the task will be a negative. Anwer: I agree.

And: "Coming back to the issue of parallelism. It seems to me that Microsoft in their applications are moving to a concept of parallelism." Answer: YES, I have the same feelings. Microsoft has understands that the user wants to see a lot of thinks parallel and all in view. It is more simple to work; less cognitive load; less stress; and less searching. It looks sometimes that Microsoft understands that better then Apple. The menubar at the bottum is an example of what I mean.

Rik Min

By Michael on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 10:15 pm:

Hi all
Following up on Errol's and Rik's comment I too believe that Microsoft products have been built around parallelism. With the phasing out of paper based support material, their presentation on-screen now copes with presenting context sensitive help (especially in Office XP), ordinary help and reference help. With the redesign in XP it seems that Microsoft are preferring frames to multiple windows.
Following on from Riks site, I tried a few of the lessons that Tao Yu had constructed. The first a full scroll, was ok but difficult to work, the second (frames) was better. The third multiple windows I actually closed too many windows and shut down the browser! This is something I have come across before with multiple windows. I am interested in looking at giving feedback on whether a window is a dependant or a full application window. Maybe using a different background colour?
With regard to Shu yu's comments, I find I work with many windows concurrently (Some showing, some on the task bar) - I have 5 running at the moment! At work when I include email, this rises dramatically - I'll try to keep an eye on just how many over the next few days. When I think about it Windows actually "displays" a tremendous amount of parallelism.
Ramesh's comment regarding shorter web pages is ok, and in my lecture notes I provide on-line an Overhead like format. The problem starts when students want to print out the notes, where they print lots of pages with only a little bit of information on each. So I am looking into ways to consolidate the Overhead printouts.
One interesting use of parallelism is done in New Zealand with our Emergency services (e.g. Police), where two screen are used. When a call is received, one screen will display map information while the other a database showing relevant details.
Programming is one area I feel that dual-screen parallelism is really useful (This includes traditional third generation programming to Web page development). One screen for coding, and another for viewing the results. For those of you who have worked with Macromedia's Director 7, it is almost a necessity to have two screens.
Rik hope that your opening went well, we are now almost half way through our second semester, so it seems strange to find your year just starting.
Regards Michael.
PS. Would you consider Powerpoint a first order parallelism system.

By Yuanzhi Wang on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 11:16 pm:

hi, rik and all,
Nice to read so many discuss here.
well, according to me , the effects of different representation of the information in Website vary a lot for different people. Since the Internet only began to expand not long time ago, maybe people are not familiar with it, they face the challenge to change from the paper world to the net world. More source of information parallel to each other will definitely help them to understand the new screen-by-screen ways , dragged away from their conventional information gathering means.

However, since young generation could be easier to understand the digital media era than their elder generation, and they have better ability to accept and memorise the new information., should we reduce the redundancy of the information and exhibit as more information as possible for them to suit their needs? Of course, the cognitive overload will occur if the information is too much and irrelative, however, what I want to say here is that we should control the extent of the information parallelling to make the system more effective or even adaptive to different people.


AS to Rik and Xiao Huang¡¯s opinion about useful parallelism for screen and books, I agree since I also have the same experience, but what¡¯s a little different is that I sometimes fell into the hesitation that should I use the pen and paper to do it again just for future ¡°possible¡± reminder? which I sometimes think is a kind of waste, should we have better means of parallelismuse to save the time to explore more knowledge? Since internet and computer just save us from the burdon of paper seeking, should we find a better way to take the advantage and also avoid falling into "wider screen burdon"?

Errol ¡®s statement ¡°The important issue in presenting information whether it be web pages or from a book is the ability to locate the information quickly¡± is the first step of learning---Search and Locate, the second step is how people can better understand and organize it in their brain. Someone never feel comfortable when read article online, but someone can achieve better score when take the computer-based test instead of paper test. Someone like the HTML frame or frameless help system but someone like the PDF flowing paper like help system(just like the printing manual), Have you ever meet such kind of people or you happen to be? I think that's the reason why there emerges the trend of personalization or customisation in Internet nowadays. many people like My.Yahoo since they can change the content, color and layout of the rendered information according to their favourite. People are most likely to accept the way they are familiar with and that make best sense to them when understanding and memorizing.

I believe when we considerate the cognitive effect of the educative system, we should never neglect the difference between individual when acquiring concept and skill, which has been well developed in other traditional way since they were educated. Furthermore, we should take the intended attendance into consideration when discuss the factors affecting Website information representation , that is, the information is most likely to be provided for WHICH group of people.

At the same time, I totally agree that it¡¯s quite necessary to generalize the common effective and efficient method to organize and render the information in a better manner for most people, since the little improve to the common point will generate great effect among the crowd. That¡¯s why this paper interest me a lot since it pose a lot of issue maybe we have ignored for long time.

By J! (Jithen) on Tuesday, September 03, 2002 - 11:47 pm:

Hi Everyone ..

Good to hear from everyone again.

Just going through and catching up on everything that has been said so far, I must say a lot of valid points have been made.

When it comes to developing a website or application one of the major aspects that needs to be taken into consideration is that of the user interface. Many websites, these days are becoming more and easier to navigate and find information. Many web designers are following the standard HCI guidelines and users are finding this a great advantage. I personally do.

With regards to Alastair's comment, I am one of those people that do like writing things out many times, and find it that I tend to understand it better after doing do. Although referring to Rik's reply to Alastair where he says "beside a monitor is real parallelism as I define it". This might be a personal view, but has any researched been carried out in this area, to see if users prefer this or not ?. I personally, don’t like working out problems / reading from the monitor. I rather print the work out and then sit down with a book and work through it. So to me I don’t see a monitor as real parallelism, but I do see a book as being real parallelism, although you have said its more to abstract a problem.

Errol, your experience with Office xP, is also one of the attributes I really admire about the Microsoft product. It's great that Microsoft has taken this whole notion about parallelism into consideration and provide features in relation to this. One great thing I like is the way this parallelism ties in with the adaptivity of the program. For example, apart from displaying this menu on the side, it also adapts itself to show specific information requested by the user. In other words that panel is editable and I think this is a very big area in relating the concept of parallelism with adaptive systems. What are your thoughts on this Rik ?

Also continuing on from you message, yes you are very correct in showing your negative feelings towards this forum, I to hate it. Problem is, if you browse forums on the internet, you will notice most of them are structured in this way, so it's very hard to bring the parallelism into it. I suppose a solution could be having the names of people that have posted a message and clicking on there names, to invoke a pop up window. This to can't be regarded as parallelism fully, as once a users post has been read, most users, would have forgotten what the post was about. So it is a hard issue to deal with.

Your article that you currently reviewing is called Parallelism in interfaces, a search for cognitive overload with average users and ergonomic solution. After reviewing your other papers, I was just wondering how have you gone about in progressing your search ?. Were tests carried out with users ?. Someone mentioned if sex (male / female) was taken into consideration ? was age taken into consideration ?.

Since every user is different, with regards to there memory, the idea of linking parallelism up with an adaptive system / website wouldn’t be such a bad idea, where the user has the ability to choose this preference. If the user has a short term memory, a more parallel version of the website can be available, where more information is available and vice versa. Rik have your seen any applications / websites out there currently that have this implemented ?

By Pawan Arora (Pawan) on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 12:04 am:

A hard copy cant be dispensed at any time, this is what I could think of, it is still a tedious
process whenever I want some information on the net I have to cut and paste it on the notepad for
further refrence.And once you shut down the PC you still want to refer to the material what about
then. The parallel interface would help to ease the process of cut & paste and it has eased a bit
in the new Office XP to a certain extent.But what about other times?

By Sam on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 08:47 am:

Well... surely a hard copy can be dispensed as soon as it's printed off? I guess that may or may not be practical depending on the size of the document.

I think Lalitha made an interesting comment about the discovery channel website needing lots of scrolling. Now you mention it, the front page of media websites especially are often several pages long (if that's not some kind of contradiction). But I guess if you're familiar with the website, then the "scrolling to find information" overhead would be pretty minimal. Infact, it probably works out to be a much quicker way of accessing information than navigating through some hierarchical system of hyperlinks. So perhaps the familiarity of a user with an interface is an important issue - a bit like how some people used to swear that looking up mathematical tables was faster than using a calculator. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks Michael for pointing out the research about multiple monitors. As you say, perhaps they'd be much more feasible these days using flat-screens. Maybe they could fold out! Apparantly multiple monitors are already becoming reasonably popular for making simulation games more realistic, although perhaps that's a slightly different context.

I'm finding this discussion of books really interesting - the effectiveness of their simplicity really is quite impressive! For instance, the two pages of an open book could easily correspond to anything from 2-4 pages on your average website, depending on the book and the website. If you used a couple of bookmarks, then you could make that 6-12 web pages of easily accessible information. Put 3-4 books out on your desk, and the tally balloons out to anything from 18-48! Throw some pictures into the books, and hey presto, they're even multimedia. Not bad

Clearly what the world really needs are real books that can play audio and video, to make the most of the benefits of parallelism and multimedia. Not those make-believe e-books, but ones with real pages to turn!

Sam

By J! (Jithen) on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:11 am:

Hi Sam

Lalitha's comment about the discovery channel and how the how the hits on the site increased is very interesting. As we use the internet widely every day of the week, and as Sam has mentioned we become accustomed to that sort of format of a website, where that parallel effect is in place. Although, on the type of study carried out to find this information out. They say moving to scrolling increased the hits, but this could also be due to navigational issue, where sometimes, scrolling makes navigation a whole lot easier (although very rare) but it really all comes down to the site structure.

With the multiple monitors, yes LCD flat screens suit this very well. Since I’m always working with multiple servers here at work, it’s the case I have to switch between them all the time and since desk space does become limited, I make use to two flat screen monitors to such of an effect as to how Micheal mentioned earlier about the emergency services. A good example is our web designer here at work, has two screens, one very big one for himself and another smaller one set at a lower resolution. He creates his pages on the big one and tests them out on the smaller one, to see the effect on a lower resolution. This can be regarded as parallelism since he doesn’t have to keep switching resolutions on his own machine.

Sam, I think it would be great to see those sorts of books, with audio / video and real pages that turn, but whether this will happen or not might be a totally different story.

By Alastair Tennant (Atennant) on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 10:46 am:

I too did the exercises from Rik's site and found I had a definite preference for one method over another in terms of usability - I also found that in three of the exercises I had to write the answer down on paper in order to transfer it to the 'write' frame. I also read what was available of Tao Yu's paper. One thing I couldn't identify was the results of the exercises i.e. what were the measures that were being applied and were there any conclusive answers as to whether one form of screen display achieved a better "result" than the others.

Previous people have mentioned the ability to configure screens by User "preference". If we use the example of Rik's exercises could we then have a generic application 'front end' that would allow a user to preview various options available for how information would be displayed. Once the user had tried out the options and selected their display choice then the learning application could be parameter driven to display all data in the User's preferred format of parallelism. I guess from our earlier block course this is a form of selectable adaptability. It would also move all/most of the cognitive load to the 'front' where the user would learn how the application worked and remove that load from the actual learning part of the application. Essentially much the same principle as the tutorial concept of MS Project for example.

Regards

By Yuanzhi Wang on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 02:38 pm:

hehe.. it seems that the more screens, the better. have we ever suffer from the desire to upgrade the monitor from 14 inch to 18 , and even want bigger? the screen can be enlarged to bigger , if not enough , can even use 2, 4, or 16 monitor at the same time. However, that's not the point, the point is how to make every dimension in the screen be utilized more efficiently. should we measure such effect with how much information be represented per unit area?

Another thing I am thinking is that the way of paralemism. Once we have a project to display the game video in four screen, and each one have the recording from different angle, that will help the people to watch clearly about the details. Along with the example from Jithen that use two screens to show effect on different resolution, I think, the parallelism with diffenreces should have better effect than the simply replication of the information, because they relate to each other tightly and show some difference at the same time. that will help the brain to construct the cognitive network to enforce each other.

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:05 pm:

Michael wrote: "Would you consider Powerpoint a first order parallelism system". Answer: Giving a PowerPoint presentation - for my - the problem is that I can't see what is coming next. So for me that isn't parallelism. That is the reason that I call that: 'zero order parallelism'.
Most linear presentations are zero order parallelism. But your voice is a kind of parallel instruction besides the powerpoints... With these two things (voice and powerpoints) together, you can 'solve the problem': understanding the lecture... Clear what I mean?

Rik Min

By Lalitha on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:07 pm:

Following the discussion since my last message, I would like to thank Rik Min for the URLs.

One of Rik Min’s papers say that ‘users need to have things parallel in order to be able to compare'. It would be interesting if ‘parallelism’ enables the user to note things while they work..

Rik Min’s remark that ‘copying is a task/problem’ appears valid. To me ‘copying’ besides being a task/problem is a time consuming activity, specially, if what was copied do not serve the intended purpose.

We (probably ’I’) cannot be decisive /selective while reading for the first time. While on the Internet, I copy quite a lot of information, which seems important at that time only to discard most of it later. If two screens (just like Michael’s example of Emergency services-Police) could be opened parallel to each other, one of which allows the user to make notes (rather opening Notepad separately) while reading would be quite helpful. This would save the user (at least me) from the ‘loss of location in the materials’(Errol’s comment).

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:11 pm:

What Yuanzhi Wang wrote "the effects of different representation of the information .. vary a lot for different people" is absolutly true. We think about 30-40 % of the users needs (some) parallel information because he/she is lazy or has a bad working memory.

Rik Min

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:14 pm:

Besides my mail on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:05 pm, I have a beautiful picture about that on the URL:
http://projects.edte.utwente.nl/pi/Sheets/lineariteit.jpg

Rik Min

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:24 pm:

Michael Verhaart wrote that a bigger screen is sometimes also a solution instead of two or more screens. That is absolutly true. That was my point in our schools in the Nederland in discussion with my gouverment about small monitors for children and problem solving with simulations etc.. Real problem solvers as programmers and designers like SUN computers because they have bigger monitors.

My solutions are always: thinking about bigger or more screens. Better or more frames (I call them always 'viewports') or sometimes longer web-pages, in web-based software, specially if it is educational sofware of courseware, and childeren want to solve problems.

Rik Min

By Ramesh Lal on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:25 pm:

Hello Rik Min

About the Sun workstation with large screens with many windows are better able to support parallelism. If future application software such as microsoft products include this concept more , how would this affect portable micros. In my view portable micros should become more and more popular in future, how would manufacturers of portable micros adopt this concept with their hardware?

By Michael Verhaart on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:25 pm:

Hi all,

Yuanzhi's comment regarding customisation of the web interface is an example of what I like to think of as creating a sense of ownership. Any interface, whether parallel or synchronous will have a greater chance of success if the user can create an environment they are comfortable with. For example, it is amazing to see some of the colours and interface layouts that some people can comfortably work with. A look at any teen magazine/web site shows this clearly.
Regarding the written word, and following Sam's comment, I have a favourite quote."Someday, when I am too old to be a warrior, I will write a book about humans and their strange habits and speech and technology. For example, did you know that humans invented books before computers? Because of this they believe computers to be superior, despite the very obvious fact that it takes one of their computers as much as thirty seconds to "load" a page, while a book page can be accessed with zero effective delay." K.A.Applegate, (1998), Animorphs#18 - The Decision, p37. Which I guess is why we like to write things down!!
To add a new thread, one technology that Sony are playing with is the glasstron glasses, where a huge screen can be simulated by the glasses. This leads to another thought, the parallelism that we have been discussing is in two dimensions, Rik have you conducted any research into 3-d space parallelism!!
Further to an earlier post I looked at my work screen today and had 9 applications open, at present I have 7, so it looks like parallelism occurs quite naturally for me!
Rik,If I added a comment on the bottom of each Powerpoint slide that indicated what was coming next, would that make it first? Also many people printout the slides (usually at six to a page or three with notes), and deliver the projection with the notes. From your comment this would make it first order?
Cheers Michael.

By Lalitha on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:30 pm:

Hi Rik Min,the above URL( posted just now)is quite illustrative of what you said about Power Point Presentation.

"Giving a PowerPoint presentation - for my - the problem is that I can't see what is coming next". :-)

By Michael Verhaart on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:44 pm:

Hi All
Since we are adding a slightly lighter note here, you may like to look at a cartoon I drew on one of my web sites
http://members.tripod.com/mverhaart/ of intense parallelism when delivering a lecture!
Cheers Michael.
PS.Apologies in advance for the pop-up advertisement.

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 09:47 pm:

Shu Yu wrote that he/she "don't like a lot of open windows". Answer: I also don't like much than two open windows. But very often I like them only to 'open' them in the menubar on the bottom of the screen. There, you can click on it for immediate open it on top of you need the information in that window.

But windows are so helpfull that the disadvantages are not 'the' real problem. (Only a small problem.) Moving windows, just on the place you can see the important information, parallel to 'a problem' (on your screen), is the most powerfull instrument we have; and that is the reason most of the people likes windows. An example is that most of the people in companies has always open their mail-program window, their browser-window and a lot of icons for immediatly switching between them. Sometimes they makes four or five small windows, parallel, to see what happens in them. I strongly believe in such designed or created working environments. What good is, and normal there, is also good in complex learning environments.

Rik Min

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 10:01 pm:

Michael wrote: "if I added a comment on the bottom of each Powerpoint slide that indicated what was coming next, would that make it first? Also many people printout the slides (usually at six to a page or three with notes), and deliver the projection with the notes".

Answer: That is all parallelism, YES, because your memory is limited, and you don't like to remember everything, and you don't want cognitive overload on important moments. Sometimes printing material during a lecture is fine, but never forget the distance 'x'. When you head is turning and turning around, from paper to screen and back, it is a heavy cognitive load also. I don't like it always. In such cases, I prefer sometimes two overhead projections: one with the powerpoint and one with a reference list on a overhead projector. Or I have a paper in my hand and my eyes are in the same direction as the screen. So 'x', the distance for my eyes (between my 'A' and 'B'), is as small as possible.

Rik Min

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 10:09 pm:

Dada's discussion sept 3, 2002, 7:54 pm, was interesting. Thanks for these points, you mentioned.

For me also: web-based media forever! Also: use always everywere web-technology (as html, javascript, java, XML), even on cd-rom. But let's try to make it better.

Rik Min

By Lalitha on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 10:10 pm:

One of Rik Min’s paper says that ‘a user in an open learning environment can only work and learn if the environment has been designed in such a way that all relevant information to take decisions is 'visible' or can be immediately 'retrieved'.’

In this context “Make the system more effective or even adaptive to different people”(Yuanzhi Wang,Sep 3rd) sounds good to me too

Since the users differ very much in their attitude towards perceiving things (I think Yuanzhi Wang also has similar opinion) what would be the measure to determine which information is relevant to each user?

By RikMin on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 10:18 pm:

Ramesh Lal wrote that "sometimes a serie of small pages with links are better than longer pages". Answer: YES, sometimes. BUT, in my opinion, sometime long pages are better; longer than the browser's screen is. Because all the information is within arm's reach !! A lot of people likes that more than clicking to a new page and the information every time disappears... To find information back it cost somtimes more time than scrolling back. Especially af a (previous) web-page contains a lot of (big) pictures, animations, (complex) applets, flash- or cosmo-player-stuff.

Rik Min

By Lalitha on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 10:41 pm:

Dear Rik Min, I could see you responding to our postings one after the other.
I guess, I should stop sending further messages at the moment and go through what is being posted.

Thanks for responding to each of our queries individually.

By J! (Jithen) on Wednesday, September 04, 2002 - 11:09 pm:

Hi Rik

I was just browsing through some of your examples from the links you have provided above. The parallelism is very much in effect. This is a very good thing as removes the need for the user to be remembering a lot of information.

One thing I did notice though was that, there is a lot of information on a single page for a user to cope with, especially with the parallelism in effect. Sometimes, you just have to sit back and think about what exactly is going on before moving on and I think this is where parallelism can be a bad thing ? (maybe you can correct me here Ric). Yes the parallelism helps the user in one sense but I think in the other sense I can overload the user. And browsing through just before this is just the exact impression I got. There's a lot on the page to find out what's going on. Isn’t it better sometimes to have less and allow the user to understand the content without parallelism, or have parallelism and have more and for the user to cope and understand ?

By RikMin on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 01:07 am:

Greatings from Tao Yu, the writer of the report about the PI theory...

Rik Min

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 04:54 am:

Shu Yu, I actually get frustrated when others use my machine insist on or software insists on openning in full screen mode. I use multiple windows frequently especially when preparing learning resources. I want access to my database of references, maybe a graphics tool, a word processor, and any tools used in learning such as the software development environment. If I couldn't have the on screen parallelism, I would be printing material and using the screen as my problem space and the printouts as the reference resources. Parallelism is my default way of working.

My teaching focusses around object-oriented systems development and especially the design and programming. In this context, I am finding that to help students understand design issues, I want to be able to show the model (a UML diagram) alongside the code. Infact in the classroom, I often what to have a projected image plus whiteboard space side by side so I can work through an example while displaying key concepts or reference information. Unfortunately classroom designers here seem to want to have the screen come down over the whiteboard.

When testing, the combination has to include the output and a debugging window. Consuming the full window for one of these functions removes the ability to associate model components with code segments or output with a specific section of code.

I would extend this further and argue that until a programmer is able to identify small chunks of code with specific execution results, they often can not find the problems with their code. When introduced to the possibility of having a view of what code is being executed and the results along side, most will not return to zero parallelism.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 05:45 am:

I notice that we are eager to present our views of how we interact with systems. The goal of research on interface design and hypermedia especially from the perspective of parallelism would be to discover how well it works for the user population. The problem with many web sites is that they are actually designed without reference to the body of research on good user interface design. The designer has their view of how it should work and that is the way that it is created. It is never tested other than possibly recording a page hit count. In my view the hit count doesn’t tell you whether the person accessing the page found what they where looking for or found the page attractive.

We should be asking on what basis could we evaluate the effectiveness of our web sites? What level of parallelism is effective for our users? What degree of separation or distance between parallel resources is most effective? (This is a question that Rik raises).

Yuanzhi Wang, search and locate, I would argue are limited in their usefulness. I need to know the precise terms that the author of the page has used. I have often known that a particular web site has information relevant to what I am looking for and never been able to find it using search or locate. After scrolling the site for a while, I find it and discover that they are using a different term to what I was looking for. The same issue occurs in the use of library catalogue systems.

I never read large articles on the screen. I always print them. In fact, I am frustrated by one publisher’s news site because they insist on breaking their articles into multiple pages. Each page has insufficient information and I find I am stepping through from page to page to read the article.

There is a secondary issue her as well. Some years back, I completed a speed-reading course. I believe although I have no firm evidence that online information actually hinders speed-reading. I find that I read articles faster in printed form than in online form. Does anyone have know of any research on reading rates of online materials verses printed materials?

Materials broken into too small a chunks slows the reading rate further as I have to wait for the next page to download. Sam, your comment on the equivalence of books to web pages is relevant here. If an open book corresponds to 2-4 web pages then how quickly can I scan those two book pages compared with scanning the equivalent information on a web page?

Jithen, I am glad to see that someone else dislikes web-based forums. I would argue that it is an issue of design and not the medium that causes the problem. It is now possible to open a secondary window in a browser in which to type a reply and to allow easy linking back to the original message. In theory, it should be possible with this tool since each message has a target associated with it. I would argue that most forum software is poorly designed including that in WebCT. I do have a vision of what I would like to see but this media is not an appropriate one for communicating that vision.

By Xiao Huang on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 10:52 am:

Hi all
As the paper pointed out, it is important for the software designer to know what and how much information to be presented to the user simultaneously. I think another important issue regarding parallelism is how these information be presented, first order parallelism or second order parallelism. I think the advantage of first order parallelism is all informations are reachable on the screen without any user action. On the other hand, second order parallelism is more flexible, more information can be presented on one screen using second order parallelism, and allowing overlapping of windows may help achieveing smaller 'x'(in Figure 4).

By J! (Jithen) on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 03:04 pm:

Xiao, yes i think you are very correct in saying that it is important for the software designer to know what and how much information to the user simulteneously, but how does the software desginer know this ?. Every user is different, in the way they like things displayed on screens, and like ive said before, some users, might not even like the concept on paralellism, and rather substitute this for less information to be presented on the screen.

But maybe this notation of paralellism can be linked with an adaptive system, to cope with the users demands. Rik does any such system exist at the moment ?

By yuanzhi wang on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 04:38 pm:

I have the same habit to have more windows on the bottom of the screen just in case that I need to take a look at it. Because of the information Parallemism provided by the related windows, it makes the work easy and handy when you need more reference but can't remember them.
However, think about the fact that we continuous need to expand our computer's memory to support such habbit.(it's true if you need to open the delphi and rational rose and Word and...... ). Does this raise a problem that the parallelism sometimes cause more demand for more hardware ,software or layout resource. The abuse use of it could be a waste if it can't bring more benefit.

Coming from Lalitha 's question: "what would be the measure to determine which information is relevant to each user? ", I am just thinking of should we introduce the concept of Learner Model here too? to create and update the learner model to correctly reflect their preference and use the better effective way to represent the information.for example: article in single page or several Pages in sequence . that could be a good way to suit different demands. eg., Errol's frustration of "stepping through from page to page".

and when think about the short time memory, it's true that everyone have the same problem of forgetting, what's different is just the time the shorttime memory will keep in mind for everyone. the way to solve the problem of forgetting is to convert shorttime momory to long term memory. we can achieve that with frequent repeat of the information, which can recall and strenghen the fading memory. I think a good control to the frequency of repeat will help the users to develop long term memory without Sacrificing the efficiency of the informatino representation. Rik, do you think such kind of repeat is also a kind of information parallelism in time sequence.
if we think about the parallelism both in Sapce and Time, that will better help to overcome the information overload.

By Ramesh Lal on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 07:53 pm:

Jiten as you have said that the "software designer to know what and how much information to the user simulteneously but how does the software desginer know this", The software designer would know the target audience and would have some sort of knowledge of the target users knowledge, skills , competencies etc.

By J! (Jithen) on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 07:59 pm:

Ramesh,

Agreed, but in developing application or web interfaces the target audience can be basically anyone. A website for example is browsed by a various number of people and each person has his / her own preferences. I still dont think the little knowledge the designer would have would be efficient enough to cope with what each user would one. They would have to be some other system in place, to cater for the users preference for parallalism

By Ramesh Lal on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 08:03 pm:

Hi Rik Min

The idea which i am getting by reading the arcticle on Parallelism in Interface and from discussions is that Parallelism aids users short term memory. If something useful is to be derived from whatever is shown on screen, it has to go in the long term memory. Because parallelism aids short term memory, can we also say it helps users retain information for a long period of time.

By Ramesh Lal on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 08:09 pm:

Hi Jiten
I see your point, but again a wedsite is designed based on the target audience. You sort of know and have an idea who are the likely users of the website, and you have the contents to match your expected audience.

By J! (Jithen) on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 08:17 pm:

Hi Ramesh

Yes, but in what we are talking about here, just isnt developing a normal website. We are talking about bringing in the whole notation of paralellism into an application / website. The focus changes slightly, and the web designer, has to go back and rethink of what he is going to include in the site to make it paralell will be appealing and adequate for the users. And as i have mentioned before, some users, might say they would like not like to see the paralell side of the website, due to the amount of information it displays, and they rather sacrifice this for a much more simple site with fewer content on the screen at one time.

By Feng Dai on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 09:23 pm:

Dear Professor Rik, Dr.Kinshuk and all,
I just got times from my other block course today.I am so happy to see a lots of interesting points from the Rik's article "Parallelism in interfaces" and the other classmates'discussions.
I think the effective interface is important issue for the successful educative software. To attract people to use educative softare or to vist web sites, the interface can do the outstanding job for that.
From my experience, I think the Parallelism in interface is very useful for me to learn something, i like to open more windows at the same time when i seach the informations on the web,and it is very convenient when i need to compare some things.Before i didn't take some attention about that. After i read the article, i know it is so natural that Parallelism can halp to make the interface more powerful.
The others thing is that just like Rik mentioned in his article, "the point is :what and how much information or instruction do i need when working on a computer in view, flat, simultaneously, in order to work well or do a task or learn something in an iteractive, dynamic learning environment." I think it is the criterion to how to use the Parallelism in interface. it is not just simple to say that the more screens, the better.Sometimes it does, but sometimes not.I think we need to do more study for this.But i know it is hard to make common standard for all of the cases. Just like Errol said:"We should be asking on what basis could we evaluate the effectiveness of our web sites? What level of parallelism is effective for our users? What degree of separation or distance between parallel resources is most effective? (This is a question that Rik raises)." actually this is the same questions that i like to ask Rik.
The last question for Rik that is now we understand that the Parallelism in interface can impact the people learn from the educative sofware or web sites, what else issues do u think that still can impact interface design?

By Sam on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 10:18 pm:

Rik,

I'm a little bit confused about something you said in an earlier post: "Most linear presentations are zero order parallelism. But your voice is a kind of parallel instruction besides the powerpoints... With these two things (voice and powerpoints) together, you can 'solve the problem': understanding the lecture".

The bit I don't get, is that a powerpoint presentation is an example of zero order parallelism because you can only see one slide at a time. An accompanying voice (on it's own) would also be regarded as zero order parallelism, because you can only hear one instant of sound at once. So how is it that the two put together can be descibed as parallelism, when the user is still limited to only a rather restricted set of information at any given time?

Something I really like about this concept of parallelism, is the way it allows users to make mental connections between pieces of information by seeing more than one context. I'm thinking along the lines of neural networks etc. For instance, if I see a mathematical formula in one window, and a related word problem in another window, then I'm obviously going to make a mental connection between that type of word problem and the formula that will be helpful. Hence the parallelism has helped me forge a neural link between two inter-relating pieces of information - which I think could be really beneficial. Isn't that how people learn? Does anyone have any thoughts?

Sam

By Sam on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 10:22 pm:

About what Ramesh was saying about long term memory - basically information makes it into long term memory on the basis of repetition in short term memory. So perhaps the longer information remains on screen (due to parallelism), the more likely it is to be "repeated" in short term memory, and thus more likely to be remembered long term? So I'd suggest that in some cases, the longer some information is presented parallel-ly, the less useful/relevant it becomes, since the user remembers it anyway.

But that would only apply to a subset of applications of parallelism, as often long term memory is of no concern. For instance, if I'm utilising parallelism to help debug a program, I can fairly safely assume that I won't have to remember the values of particular variables for the final exam!

Am I right in saying this?

By Feng Dai on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 10:40 pm:

Hi Errol,
It is true that the most peole like u never read large articles on the screen. But there is the other case. For me, because i installed the electronic dictionary in my compute, so when i read the article written by foreign language, i alway try to find it on the web, and i can use electronic dictionary by putting the cursor on the vocabulary that i don't undersatand., then i got the explanation. This is much faster than to compare to use normal dictionary, and it improves my reading speed. I think this is the other advantage from the e-learing.

By Lalitha on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 11:19 pm:

“Isn’t it better sometimes to have less and allow the user to understand the content without parallelism have parallelism and have more and for the user to cope and understand ?”( jiten, September 04, 2002 - 11:09 pm)

Quite interesting questions Jiten. You probably find answers for them in the forum itself. Just have a look at the URLs posted by Rik Min( September 04, 2002 - 09:05 pm) and Michael (September 04, 2002 - 09:44 pm) I am convinced with the picture and the cartoon. you might probably agree too.

‘Too much’ or ‘too little’ information would rather confuse the learner. There is a need to offer a slightest hint/clue to understand.

Large amount of relevant information’ is acceptable (to me) because I believe in what Rik Min stated in ‘SIMULATION AND DISCOVERY LEARNING IN AN AGE OF ZAPPING AND SEARCHING: LEARNING MODELS’ that, humans are capable in making/taking decisions - ‘what , when and how much they/we need’. Their/our short term memory however make them/us rely on some support. ‘Parallelism’ could be an effective tool to help humans overcome this problem. This argument appears to be quite reasonable from a practical point of view.

By J! (Jithen) on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 11:30 pm:

Hi Sam ...

With your example to powerpoint.
A couple months back, we done a presentation to a company regarding our database services.
The way i done the presentation was what i called a virtual presentation. And this will answer you question as to how you get parallelism. Apart from making the slides all fancy etc etc. We recorded our voices, to play at specific points and used the agent as a pointer to show / explain diagrams for us. Basically we just sat back and watched like a tv. This was good example of parallelism i thought of. The user was presented with 2 sets of information and was in no way restricted, as the user was presented to both of these at one time. When a diagram was on screen the agent explained it, providing the user not only with a diagram but a parallel link to help (agent). So this is the way i would see how you could regard it as paralellism.

By Michael Verhaart on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 12:08 am:

Hi all
As this is a web based course, it is worth a look at how the browsers have already got parallelism built in.
1. Multiple browser instances can be opened on the screen. A common use for me is to start a download from one web page then open a new window and surf while the download is happening. If it crashes, then the download page has not vanished.
2. Using [Shift]+[Click] on a link to open the destination page in a new window.
3. On the CoverCD of NZ PC World June 2002 (pg 45), was a 3D web browser add-on to Internet explorer called Browse3D. Basically two "walls" are created on the left and right of the browser screen and you can display an small snapshot of pages on the left where you have been and auto-crawl the right wall. I haven't tried it but it does add another dimension to our parallelism debate.
Coupled with windows we actually have an increadible amount of parallelism at our disposal.
Maybe there are others?
Further I see some pretty advanced parallelism in some of the games my kids enjoy. To name one, Age of Empires shows a working map, with a small map of the whole environment at the bottom of the screen. There are also windows containing building information and status information. One wonders at the levels of parallelism the up-and-coming generation will be able to cope with.

Cheers Michael.

By Xiao Huang on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 09:02 am:

Hi Michael
You wrote: "3. On the CoverCD of NZ PC World June 2002 (pg 45), was a 3D web browser add-on to Internet explorer called Browse3D. Basically two "walls" are created on the left and right of the browser screen and you can display an small snapshot of pages on the left where you have been and auto-crawl the right wall. ", that is very interesting!
One problem with Internet explorer (maybe windows, I don't know) is that when you open a new link at new window, initially the new window is opened at the same position of the screen. If you open multiple windows at one time and wait for download, all old windows is covered by the newest one! You cannot find out if the download of one web page has finished unless you click on it to put it on top of other windows. The 3D browser add-on provides the facility for viewing a snapshot of web pages, thus the user can find out more information about download easily. I think that is another use of parallelism.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 09:50 am:

Ramesh,
You commented that the "designer would know the target audience". Is this really true other than possibly in a smal organisation? However, the designer can design the application with a flexible range of options from a parallelism perspective. Take this environment, I have use open link in window to be able to keep your message on screen while typing a reply.

On the surface the web forum doesn't provide parallelism but it is there if you use the browser facilities.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:06 am:

Sam,

Any degree of parallelism will be composed of a number of zero-order parallelism techniques. A single window with no frames is zero-order parallelism. As soon as I add a second window or a frame, I am introducing a level of parallelism.

A presentation that I make available to students in the labs is zero-order. If I use it in a class and talk to the slides, I am introducing parallelism. Use whiteboard sopace as well, and I am introducing further parallelism.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:14 am:

Sam,

In reference to your comment on repetition causing transition to short term memeory, I was wondering whether the degree of parallelism might also influence the rate of transfer to short term memory.

I understand that some of the studies talk about being able to retain 7+/-2 items in short term memory or coscious focus. I wonder whether there is a similar limit to the degree of parallelism.

In part, I say this because I am currently in a WebCT course so I can learn how to set up my course better in WebCT. At one point, I had a number of windows open and began to lose track of what I was doing with each window. Did I exceed the capability of my short term memory to track the degree of parallelism that is occuring. I sould emphasise that not all the windows were focused on the same task. This may be the difference between parallelism in learning and parallelism in a work setting.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:20 am:

Feng,

I can see what you are saying here when reading material in an unfamilar language. I wonder whether it would still hold true if you are reading articles in your more familar language or languages.

The style of reading also influences whether on-screen is better than printed. For reference material such as a dictionary or glosasry, I would prefer an on-screen tool.

By J! (Jithen) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:25 am:

Speaking of applications and the way they display paralellism. One thing ive noticed for those that make use of Microsoft Windows xP. A very good example is the taskbar. The new feature in xP is that it will group like windows. So if you have 6 explorer windows open, it groups them into one to clean up your taskbar. Now for some people this is a good thing as it cleans up your taskbar allowing you have more open. But on the other hand, some people can see this as a disadvantage, since they cant easly view the windows.

I thought this was quite of a good example. Microsoft have put this in windows, and alot of people of actually liking it. But its removes that parallel effect. I guess for certain things having a parallel effect is good, but for others, i rather have it how it is.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:30 am:

Lalitha on Thursday, September 05, 2002 - 11:19 pm,

I see that you are like me looking for better ways to link messages in this forum. I like your adding of the date and time as a way of identifying the appropriate message. I discovered that each message actually has an anchor tag that by copying the shortcut and then using the html a href construct, I can build a message change. It can be frustrating because you have to know how to construct the html and that isn't readily available in my short term memory and is really lost somewhere even in my long term memory.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:41 am:

Michael Verhaart on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 12:08 am, I am glad you refered to games. Most players that I have observed in such games always use the parallelism options. At least they have the main game window and map displayed. When I played an Internet game at my daughter and son-in-law's in England, there was also a chat area and a few other items displayed.

I like the idea of Browse3D. Having a way to see where I have been and possibly other paths on screen appeals. If I remember correctly, one of the early hypertext systems implemented this concept as a part of the standard environment. Unfortunately, at that time, I wasn't involved in research and didn't bother to keep track of the references. Yes, I did use some of the early hypertext/media systems (Early to mid 1980's, I think). Apple's Hypercard was one that we experimented with. The other was Owl.

By Ross on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 11:09 am:

Hi Rik, Kinshuk & 157730 colleagues,

I have found the conversation so far to be quite interesting. I am sure we have all
experienced the benefits of parallelism in interfaces when done well and the
negative effects of poorly developed 'systems' or educational environments.

I have experienced parallel work and education environments over the years (but would not have called them this)
and would agree that when done well and that the different ‘modes’ are complimentary and have reasonably
synchronisation that productivity is increased and/or learning cognitive load is reduced.

The following comments have a technical flavour since I think it is important to
consider how technological developments have influenced the development of stand-
alone and web based multimedia interfaces and associated research.
The increasing interest in utilising information technology to deliver information
and educational material has caught the attention of researchers, developers and
academics from a diverse range of disciplines.

While web panes have the potential to improve functionality and reduce cognitive load, but are seen as unfavourable
by some groups, users are familiar with their functionality. A consistent interface even if sub-optimal may be preferable to the user compared to multiple interfaces. Interestingly, commonly quoted guidelines for browser based ‘sites’ include the advice that the window should scroll in one direction only and not two – I agree that a larger than the physical screen ‘window’ permits related information to be displayed, I believe that many users may have increasing navigational cognitive load to work with the environment.

A number of years ago I investigated the development of interfaces and icons in particular. The trend of developers at the time was to use ‘new’ icons that were complex and often multi-coloured with no direct or indirect assistance on-line. Studies have shown that the human brain can recognise black and white shapes that are simple more
rapidly than more complex coloured ones. It took a number of years for developers to understand
what users required including placing text in the users language either below the icon or as a pop-up
balloon windows on roll-over. The majority of applications in the windows environment have adopted a
common (ex MS products and others) set of icons that the majority of users already use and understand which
reduces the cognitive load when using a new product or one rarely used etc.

I therefore believe that for parallelism in interfaces to be successfully utilised in the common environments
that users and students work in, that common windowing libraries and/or OS functionality is available. The pervasive
web browser, html and other technologies have allowed new systems to be built that can be used across multiple
platforms in a similar way that reduces development and training costs. While web browsers and associated ‘systems’ that utilise the browser’s technology permit multiple windows and ‘workplaces’ that are larger than the screen viewport, the technology could be further developed to permit virtual screens.

Many years ago when I was studying for my Bachelor's degree, a significant number
of the faculty staff provided notes / overheads of their lectures which allowed the
students to prepare for the lecture and to listen to the lecturer and ask questions
(when appropriate) rather than utilising the majority of the lecture effort on copying
copious amounts of text and formulae/diagrams. When the spoken component of the
lecture was learning congruent to the written material provided, the potential for
understanding was enhanced.

The wide-spread provision of tools such as MS Powerpoint and increasingly affordable colour
printers in academic environments has provided an opportunity for busy academics
to progressively re-assess the teaching material and consider alternative
presentation ‘formats’. The ability to print out slide sheets that allow the student to
prepare for the lecture and make notes / draw diagrams during the presentation that construct
meaning and understanding is increasingly been adopted.

One technology aspect that does not appear to have received any attention to date is
the use of virtual desktops - which effectively increase the usable screen real estate.
These have been available in implementations of Unix/Linux X-Windows 'type'
graphical interfaces for many years and have allowed users to group similar tasks (or
whatever makes sense to them) together on a virtual screen (which can also contain
multiple windows).

Similar technology is making its way into mainstream desktop computing either through the direct provision of such functionality within the OS / Windows environment or by third party tools. I have not seen any educational
products that natively provide such virtual screens – the current level of computing resources available in educational settings should be able to provide the necessary infrastructure to develop this functionality. However, I suspect that development will more likely trail the provision of such tools within the OS or windowing libraries.

While such virtual screens can be seen as sequential screens in certain circumstances, they provide a technique to expand the screen workplace and group related info together and maintain position.

While SUN workstations provided a large high resolution monochrome screen (initially) that permitted the display of multiple windows, I believe that the success of such technology was also due to the state of other OS / window development, greater processing power on the desktop, graphic subsystem, multi-tasking / multi-processing and the applications that were developed for the architecture. The development of enhanced window environments (X-windows, Motif, NEXT, etc) especially in the Unix marketplace was many years ahead of what was available within PC environments which also lacked computing resources to deliver such environments. In the workplace, I have found that the majority of users have upto 4 windows on a single virtual screen and utilise the multi-virtual screen technology that is provided natively to reduce clutter (and cognitive load ?).

There is an increasing uptake of hardware in the PC environment (as cost decreases) that permits the use of more than one screen (typically two today but upcoming products will natively allow up to three to provide a 'flight deck' type view).
While such technology has previously been the preserve of high end workstations (for tasks such as CAD) due to the very high cost it is slowly appearing in business and academic environments. In the home environment such technology will most likely be utilised in game technology to provide flight-deck type views.

There is always the question – is bigger always better ? Is a bigger screen better than two smaller ones ? Should the information be constrained to a physical screen my scaling or should the 'window' be allowed to extend past the physical boundaries of the computer monitor (and utilise scroll bars) ? These are interesting questions and the answers will often be application specific. It would be beneficial if the user could control how an application presented the information that fitted the way they liked to work and previous experience.

Developments such as MS Intellimouse with the ability to scroll in one or two directions (without having to use the conventional (side of screen) scroll bars) with 'enabled' applications makes the use of scrollable windows more user friendly.

I would be interested in whether there has been any research into the ergonomics of larger screens vs multiple screens with respect to eye / head movement vs scrollable screens. Many users of multiple screen installations (anecdotal evidence) report increased neck / eye fatigue - this may be in part due to the use of different sized screens and/or text size. Is there any research into motion problems with users who scroll in one or two directions. Many web sites are not user friendly for people with impaired vision, medical conditions such as epilepsy or increase physical interface demands. Understanding such issues will be important when developing products that utilise such concepts if they are to be successful.

The ability to directly or passively open 'child' windows in web browser based 'systems' provides a technique to store important subsets of the 'information'. However, as the number of open windows increases during the session, the ability to
remember which window contains the required information diminishes (especially when the text of the closed windows on the tasks bar shrinks (even if it was useful to start with - which is not always the case).

VR / 3D glasses that are mainly used in business due to the high cost and processing power to render images may provide another technology to explore large virtual landscapes.

There is also the issue of laptops that generally have a small screen compared to those deployed in desk setups. Virtual screens and scrollable windows provide a mechanism to deliver ‘connected’ information. Such ‘PC’ equipment may become the norm as technology advances and costs reduce.

As a concluding remark, it is amazing what power a pencil and paper (or similar tools) provide the user / student. Is this due to familiarity, cost, portability and parallelism ? I suspect that it is due to all these factors. I remember years ago that NASA was trying to determine how to fold a large antennae into a space vehicle that could auto-extend when deployed into orbit. A large group of scientists, engineers, mathematicians and enormous computing power were unable to solve the complex 3D problem. However, a professor in Japan who was also an experienced origami ‘user’ solved the problem by using knowledge of the problem domain and his knowledge of origami. We should never under-estimate the power of simple, familiar tools such as a piece of paper (and pen) when working and learning.

Equally, I see that the understanding of parallelism of interfaces (PI), split attention theory, cognitive load theory and other developments will be crucial as we develop interfaces that reduce cognitive load on the user / student and improve the learning experience. To improve the productivity of using computing resources, many aspects of the human – computer interface still require further development and I believe that the issues and challenges raised in your research (and related researchers) will (hopefully) stimulate development of the way information is presented and used.


Regards


Ross

By Lalitha on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 07:15 pm:

Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:30 am

>>It can be frustrating because you have to know how to construct the html and that isn't readily available in my short term memory and is really lost somewhere even in my long term memory>>

Hi Errol.This is a test posting. If successful then I consider it as Discovery learning. :-)

By peram on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 08:33 pm:

Dear Rik Min and Kinshuk
I am sorry for not taking active participation in this discussion.I am doing 4 papers this sem.It is Unfortunate for me for having a intencive block course session(paper 157.751)from 2nd to till now i.e 6th sep. we had one onblock project, few courseworks and laboratory sessions for the past 5 days.Though I gone through some redings related to"parallelism in interface" as a part of preparation for online discussion.... because of my short term memory...
when ever I tried to involve in discussion I was unable to come out with a good issue.Inspite of my tight shedule I was unable to maintain parallelism between my block sessions and discussion session. But I am browsing the discussion forum. after going through all the postings of my classmates and your answers to them,I got some for my doubts cleared.Your article is very clear with simple and good examples.its interesting.
thank you
peram

By Yew Ming Chew on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 08:39 pm:

Hi Mr Rik.

I am very interesting in the article of memory and figure 3.
First about window, sometimes we do or need to open couples of window either for research purpose or entertainment. If user using Internet Explorer, they may having some problem about illegal operation pop up menu or IE wouldn¡¯t function. For example, user open two to three windows (IE) for research if one of the windows is not respond or hang. User will click on Ctrl + Alt + Delete and intend to close the particular window, end-up close all the windows. I do believe this is one of the problem that user facing. Beside, when user visit particular site and it always pop up new menu or whatever we called advertisement banner. It does slow down the Internet speed and memory resources.

For those users, who are using Netscape, they might not facing this kind of problem as only the particular window wouldn¡¯t respond and it still can use other windows¡¯.

I do recommend users¡¯ using TV for output and it wouldn¡¯t cause so much of problem of word letters are small and the output is perfect. Beside, technology is advance and in the future monitor may similar to cable TV and have many small windows on your screen without causing any problem to users plus memory problem.

While come to the memory¡¦ it is very important for every user. No matter what kind of software you are using or running, you do need memory for your pc function.
Insufficient memory, it will cause your pc running slow or sometime freeze like traffic jams. Now and these days, 3D graphic or multimedia software do need quite a lot of memory to perform plus if user using few softwares at the same time and softwares do need memory to operate and perform well without slow down the pc performance. When we boot up the pc and if the users install firewall and antivirus software, it does take some of your pc memory in order for software to perform.

Regards,
Yew Ming Chew

By Yew Ming Chew on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 09:37 pm:

Hi Rik,

This website is using 3D and virtual reality for education purpose and it is pretty cool for children to learn online and you can download free software for testing.

By Yew Ming Chew on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 09:37 pm:

Hi Rik,

This website is using 3D and virtual reality for education purpose and it is pretty cool for children to learn online and you can download free software for testing.

http://www.activeworlds.com/

By Sam on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:24 pm:

Earlier I suggested that fully multimedia capable books might be quite cool, but wasn't really being that serious.

However, check out this link! http://www.universaldisplay.com/foled.php

Bind 100 of these displays together, and then there's a real "electronic book". Anyone like to fund my doctorate?

By Sam on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:43 pm:

Errol

Thanks, silly question I guess, but better out than in. But it makes me wonder whether the "paralliscity" of information necessarily has that much to do with whether it's presented linearly or not. (See here) Correct me if I'm wrong, but linear presentation doesn't seem to be the issue here.

Sam

By RikMin on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:54 pm:

Dear people,

I have a problem in time. And a problem to be online. I am two days now in Den Hage, the 'capital' of Holland, to demonstrate my work; also parallelism and the PI theory (and the programs on which it is/was based). I do my best to communicate and otherwise I do it monday. You have beautifull remarks and questions. I like them.

Rik Min

By Sam on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 10:57 pm:

Jithen

Just briefly, I hate the way XP groups like windows together!! Actually, I think it's even a step away from parallelism because every time you want to reopen a window, you first have to click on the taskbar to raise the menu, and then select the window from there. This takes about another second longer, which is what I find so annoying.

Evidently, we live in a very impatient world...

By Michael Verhaart on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 11:34 pm:

Hi Rik & Class

From our discussion over the week, I have become more aware of how parallelism has become part of the way we all use computers. In the early 80's MS-DOS only allowed one full screen window to be displayed, and I recall how difficult it was to teach parallelism once Windows became the accepted Operating system. I was fortunate to be introduced to Turbo-DOS and Concurrent CPM (anyone remember these?) very early on so have pretty well be brought up with parallel interfaces.
How much parallelism will be available in the future? As I stated earlier ( and was supported by Errol) young users are being exposed to increasingly advanced levels of parallelism. I to observe how my kids can play a sophisticated game, and run a chat session with relative ease. These chat sessions are advancing into voice and video.
I was discussing on-line courses with a colleague. In it we agreed that the ability to create a community - a bit like what happens in a real class setting - will ultimately determine the success of the experience. So increasing levels of real-time parallelism will probably be featured in the near future.
Does this mean that the Professor/Lecturer will need to be available 24 hours a day - or do we work shift work? As the physical location does not matter, the Prof/Lecturers could be in different parts of the planet.

Multimedia has played a strong role in the advancement of parallelism. Riks research has used the movement of a graphical element (e.g. graph) to demonstrate parallelism. I use a CD that introduces multimedia to my class that contains pop-up videos, where the person in the movie points to things on the screen (in other windows). This I feel is true computer based parallelism, and one day - if I can find another 5-10 hours in a day will try something similar!
On a different vein, I concur with Ross's quote that familiarity of screen elements (e.g Icons) reduces the cognitive load and increases the usability. I am seeing some previously staunch Microsoft/Windows supporters changing to Unix derivatives as a Windows front end presents the operating in an environment we are all used to.

As it's nearly 11:30 on the 6th this will probably be my last post to this discussion. So, I would like to thank Rik (and class) for your participation in the discussion, and know how busy Rik must be with the start of the new semester and paper presentations. Will check next week to see if any further replys are posted, but for now many thanks.

Cheers Michael.

By Ramesh Lal on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 11:46 pm:

Yes Ross i think big screens would definately rise some health issues for people who use PCs alot. With big screens it would mean head movement and most likely effect would be neck and back pain. Some sort of research had to be carried out to find out suitable size screen to adopt the parallelism concept without any health issues.

By J! (Jithen) on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 11:55 pm:

Hi Everyone ..

As this discussion draws to a close very soon, i was just wanting to say that being introduced this whole concept, has made me think alot. Specially about designing interfaces for websites and applications. Since this is part of my job, its made me reconsider, the way i go about designing an interface. Knowing and understanding this concept of paralellism, makes me put myself in the shoes of the user, and see if what im creating is really a parallel interface.

I would like to thank Rik, some answering the many questions we have asked over the week, and we you well as you reasearch further into this very intresting topic.

Regards

Jithen Singh

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Saturday, September 07, 2002 - 05:12 pm:

Ross on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 11:09 am said "I would be interested in whether there has been any research into the ergonomics of larger screens vs multiple screens with respect to eye / head movement vs scrollable screens."

I am not aware of any research related to screen size and multiple screens. However, in research on reading speeds, there has been work done with respect to the width of vision of the reader and the width of columns on reading speed. I can not recall the precise figures but something like a width of six words rings a bell. The idea is that the reader should be able to focus on the middle of a column of words and scan straight down the page rather than focussing on individual words. This reduces eye movement and increases rate of reading. There is also a number oflines depth as well so that a reader reads a block of material without moving their eye. In a speed reading course, we practiced reading this way with amazing results.

I suspect that the same issues would apply the reading from a computer screen. Certainly, I use the same practice to read from the screen. In fact reading these messages, I notice that I have the width of the browser set so that I focus twice on a line to take in the full word width (approximately 15-18 words).

It would seem logical therefore to have two windows side by side that allowed me to focus on the full width of text in each window with only one eye movement. Certainly an experiment option for someone.

I should stress that there is a certain amount of training of the reader to use these techniques and not simply an issue of enforcing some window width standard.

By Errol Thompson (Ethompson) on Saturday, September 07, 2002 - 05:17 pm:

Lalitha on Friday, September 06, 2002 - 07:15 pm discovered my secret. It seems to work well.