Berglund Fellows for 2006-2007

We are very pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Yang Shengde of Wenzhou Medical College, Wenzhou, China, and Professor Eli Dresner of Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel as Berglund Fellows for 2006-07.

Professor Yang’s proposal is “A Protocol for Mutual Negotiation for Internet Content Filtering between Wenzhou Medical College and the Berglund Center, Pacific University.”

Professor Yang proposes to develop a protocol for solving a current and serious problem in the transmission of files on the Internet.  At present, the issue of how content files are filtered or blocked by end users who do not desire these materials to be seen either in their home, at their Internet Service Provider, or in their entire country is a chaotic and controversial one.   Professor Yang proposes to develop a protocol between providers of content and end users of content, to filter out culturally objectionable materials via mutual negotiation.

His protocol will link standards for classifying such materials, and software applications for permitting end users to identify these classifications.  He will begin by developing such a protocol to be utilized between Wenzhou Medical College and Pacific University with the expectation that such an approach would be scalable to much larger contexts.  We are pleased to fund this research in the expectation that such a protocol will be of interest to a great many end users and content providers, not only in China and in the United States, but world-wide.

Professor Eli Dresner ‘s proposal is entitled “Conversational Multitasking in Computer Mediated Communications as a Communication Competence.” View his complete proposal here: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/06/dresner.php

The purpose of this study is to investigate one of the novel aspects of synchronous textual computer mediated communication (CMC) that has not been acknowledged so far for what it is—a new cognitive communicative skill. The competence in question is conversational multi-tasking—the ability to follow and take part in several textual conversational interactions at the same time. CMC users manifest this ability in a variety of Interactive Written Discourse (IWD) contexts: Internet Chat in its various forms, Instant Messaging applications, and textual virtual worlds (e.g., MUDs and MOOs). In all these contexts several conversation threads unfold concomitantly on the user’s screen—either within the same text window, or in different windows—and the user (especially if she is experienced) manages to juggle them and keep track of them all together. The objective of this research is to examine how the capacity for conversational multi-tasking is affected by a variety of factors and what best practices for such communications might be.

We will publish the results of these projects during the spring of 2006.  We hope you will look for these reports at that time.

This year saw a number of excellent applications for appointments as Berglund Fellows for 2006-07.  We look forward to the time when we can make more such appointments as the number of meritorious proposals greatly exceeded our ability to fund them.