CSCW Preview Talks

"From the War Room to the Living Room: Decision Support for Home-based Therapy Teams"
Julie Kientz

"Technology in Spiritual Formation: An Exploratory Study of Computer Mediated Religious Communications"
Susan Wyche

College of Computing
12:00 Noon on Thursday, October 5, 2006
TSRB 132

Teams of therapists often provide targeted interventions for children with developmental disabilities. A common practice in these cases is one-on-one interaction between a therapist and the child together with occasional group meetings of the therapists to discuss progress and make informed decisions to modify the intervention plan. We designed a system called Abaris to support this form of collaborative decision-making for a particular intervention popular in the treatment of children with autism. Our system allows for the simultaneous use of trending data across therapy sessions and detailed session data that is automatically integrated with highly indexed video. We discuss the impact this system had on the team dynamics, the amount of collaboration, and the effect it had on the team using evidence and videos to make decisions about the care of the child.

In this paper, we report findings from a study of American Christian ministers' uses of technologies in religious practices. We focus on the use of technologies for spiritual purposes as opposed to pragmatic and logistical, but report on all. We present results about the uses of technologies in three aspects of religious work: religious study and reflection, church services, and pastoral care. We end by examining how the collaborative religious uses of technologies cross and blend work and personal life.