OUR EVENTS

The Center for Technology and Social Behavior hosts a monthly speaker series that brings internationally renowned speakers to Northwestern University to meet with our researchers and present on a topic relevant to technology and social behavior. This year's lineup includes a brilliant collection of guests from around the world. You can also visit our CTSB Speaker Series Google Calendar for a complete listing of times and locations.

CTSB Lecture Series

Oct 27, 2009, 12pm
Barbara Rogoff, UC Santa Cruz
Cultural Aspects of Learning: Observation, Collaboration, and Multimodal Conversation
Frances Searle 1-483

Oct 29, 2009, 4pm
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University
It's Not You, it's Me: Automatically Extracting Social Meaning from Speed Dates
Frances Searle 1-421

Nov 12, 2009, 4pm
Shinobu Kitayama, University of Michigan
The Social Self and the Social Brain: A Perspective of Cultural Neuroscience
Frances Searle 1-421

Dec 10, 2009, 4pm
Cynthia Breazeal, MIT Media Lab
Robots as Social Learners
Ford 1.350 (ITW)

Jan 21, 2010, 4pm
Pamela Hinds, Stanford University
Situated Knowing Who: Why Site Visits Matter in Global Work

Feb 18, 2010, 4pm
Fernanda Viégas, IBM Research
Visualizing the Inner Lives of Texts

Mar 11, 2010, 4pm
Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo! Research
TBD

Apr 29, 2010, 4pm
Matthew Kam, Carnegie Mellon University
MILLEE: Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies

May 13, 2010, 4pm
Jenna Burrell, UC Berkeley
Evaluating Shared Access: Social Equality and the Circulation of Mobile Phones in Rural Uganda

Pamela Hinds
Stanford University

Situated Knowing Who: Why Site Visits Matter in Global Work

Abstract:
Distributed work is often characterized by long periods of time working apart, punctuated by face-to-face meetings and site visits. Little research, however, has explored the interplay between distant work and these collocated intervals. In an ethnographic study of 143 members of 9 software development teams, we explore the interplay between site visits and distant work and its effects on interpersonal dynamics and the coordination of work. Our findings suggest that site visits promote situated knowing who knowledge about distant colleagues that is situated in context and intertwined with practice. During site visits, people observed and interacted with their distant colleagues in these colleagues' context, thus gaining a deeper understanding of their behavior within the social and physical context in which they were situated. As they interacted, they reconstituted collaborative practices which further facilitated knowing who and contributed to higher levels of interpersonal trust. After team members returned to their home site, some of these new collaborative practices carried over to their work with distant colleagues and additional new practices evolved as a result of the situated knowing who generated during site visits.