ASSISTED FOCUS OF ATTENTION IN THE CONTEXT OF WEBCASTING

This paper discusses the question of attention in the context of Computer-Mediated Communications (CMC), and specifically in the case of webcasted lectures. The reasons why such technologies don't capture properly the richness of face-to-face experiences are discussed, both from usability and information science perspectives, and lead us to posit that sustaining the remote listeners' attention is a key issue. We argue that solely correcting the usability of existing webcasting applications does not offer sufficient perspectives, and we propose a novel approach, the assisted focus of attention, based on artificial saliency to create a sense of narration. Finally, we present an early experimental study of this assisted focus of attention principle.