Rick Borovoy, Fred Martin, Mitchel Resnick

Abstract

At the center of an intellectual community, members draw upon their knowledge of shared assumptions to have nuanced discussions about complex ideas. Newcomers to the conversation, who are on the edge of this "interpretive community," do not partake in the common ground necessary to join these discussions and can find themselves in a trapped state. We are designing a new kind of computationally-generated augmentation that jumpstarts the search for meaningful common ground ñ both for people trying to join an established interpretive community, and for people trying to form a new one. This paper discusses the application of this type of augmentation, called the μ -cue, to both face-to-face and on-line communities.