Analyzation of hw16 by Nick Joseph

Everyone in the class found the article to be rather interesting, the only complaint being from most people that the article was very technical and hard to read. The topic of interest to many people was the idea that in order to be effective the human, it's culture and enviornment must all work together as one cognitive unit. There was also much discussion revolving around the simplicity of user interfaces and how people tend to only use them for the information they represent instead of making them more powerful by customizing them to their own needs.

There was really no one thing that anybody really agreed on as being uninteresting. The concensus was that the article was interesting but that people sometimes lost interest once the article began to get too wordy and technical, (some mentioned that the examples given helped clarify some of the more difficult concepts). A complaint that I steadily agree with.

The main message of the article was rather universal among the readers; that we need to change HCI so that users don't just "use" their computers as a helpful tool but rather interact with them as one cognitive unit so as to make HCI more effective and useful.

The "old HCI foundation" as found by nearly all the readers was making the interaction between a user and the computer easier and more efficient by adding a mouse, keyboard, monitor, icons etc. In other words, it dealt with how to make HCI easier but not necessarily more useful. As far as the new foundation goes, it has to do more with how to make HCI more useful by implementing distributed cognition systems where the user and computer interact together so as to create a cognitive unit. Most people thought these "new HCI foundations" to not be new since we have become exposed to them throughout this course but I would disagree because I don't necessarily think the question is asking whether the reader thinks these foundations are new, but are these new to people in general. They aren't new to me because I've been exposed to them in this class, but as one other person pointed out, they are new to people in general. (Take my mom for instance, she uses the computer to write papers and check email. This is what she thinks the computer is for and if I tried to show her how much more powerful the computer could be, I don't even think she'd want to take the time to listen.)

As far as the CLever project goes, all readers found examples of distributed cognition. Some common examples were that the CLever project demonstrates shared cognitive processes, tenets of distributed cognition, and the fact that the caretakers and participants work together as one cognitive unit.

The mojority of readers found the quote given to relate to the article in the sense that like eyeglasses improving eyesight, distributed cognition can improve HCI and help the user use knowledge more effectively and improve their problem solving skills dramatically. There was kind of a split when the reader's were asked if they agreed with the quote or not. Most agreed that indeed HCI can be improved and we shouldn't settle for par systems, but that like Bill Joy's arguments some wondered if vastly improving systems will be a good thing in the long run. Others brought up the fact that even if we do improve these systems, who will have access to them? Some people who don't have sufficient vision can't afford eyeglasses even though they are available.