Petr Slovak

Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understanding how interpersonal skills are taught or learned, and how technology can play a part in this, is yet an under-researched area in CSCW and HCI research. To start addressing this gap, our research explores the learning processes of counselling students, for whom developing interpersonal skills forms a fundamental part of their university education. We followed an iterative process to gain an in-depth understanding of a specific counselling program in the UK, combining interviews and low-fidelity technology prompts. Overall, 26 participants comprising tutors, students and expert counsellors took part. Our findings first provide insights into the highly collaborative and social learning process of the students. We highlight the complexity of interpersonal reflection as a crucial process for developing counselling skills, and identify the challenges to learning that students face. Second, we build on this understanding to draw out empirically grounded design considerations around opportunities for technology innovation in this setting.

Social and emotional skills are crucial for all aspects of our everyday life. However, understanding how digital technology can facilitate the development and learning of such skills is yet an under-researched area in HCI. To start addressing this gap, this paper reports on a series of interviews and design workshops with the leading researchers and developers of 'Social and Emotional Learning' (SEL) curricula throughout the US. SEL is a subfield of educational psychology with a long history of teaching such skills, and a range of evidence based curricula that are widely deployed. We identify the shared challenges across existing curricula that digital technology might help address: the support for out-of-session learning, scaffolding for parental engagement, and feedback for the curricula developers. We argue how this presents an opportunity for mutually beneficial collaborations, with the potential for significant real-world impact of novel HCI systems, but can also inform future HCI work on related social and emotional skills topics.

In this paper we describe a quantitative study of a group-to-group videoconferencing environment called GColl that provides a compromise between the need for preserving non-verbal cues and the requirements of low-cost and flexibility. We have compared the task process and outcome of participants interacting over an environment analogous to common commodity solutions, those using face-to-face communication, and groups communicating over

We present a videoconferencing tool, GColl, which aims to support collaboration among remote groups of participants. GColl supports mutual gaze as well as partial gaze awareness for all participants, while still retaining a modest technical requirements: a camera and an echo-canceling microphone at each site; and a laptop with two USB cameras for each user. The environment is also easily

In this paper, we present GColl, a group-to-group videoconferencing environment concept, which aims to provide a natural communication channel even for ad-hoc groups or other teams that require frequent changes in the number of participants or videoconferencing locations. GColl supports mutual gaze as well as partial gaze awareness for all participants while still retaining very modest technical requirements: a camera and an echo-canceling microphone at each site; and a notebook with two USB cameras for each user. A working prototype is available for download.

Previous work has shown that supporting trust via computer-mediated communication can be a challenge, especially among strangers. In this paper, we report on an experiment comparing two group-to-group video-conferencing environments and face-to-face communication in their ability to support trust and mutual cooperation in a social dilemma task. There are pronounced differences in participant behaviour between the two video-conferencing designs, indicating