摘要:

The development of schemes to support group work, whether behavioral methods or new technologies like groupware, should be based on detailed knowledge about how groups work, what they do well, and what they have trouble with. Such data can be used to suggest what kinds of tools people might need as well as to provide a baseline for evaluating the effects of schemes for improvement. We present details of how real groups engage in a representative collaborative task—early software design meetings—to provide such knowledge. We studied 10 design meetings from four projects in two organizations. The meetings were videotaped, transcribed, and then analyzed using a coding scheme that looked at participants' problem solving and the activities they used to coordinate and manage themselves. We also analyzed the structure of their design arguments. We found, to our surprise, that although the meetings differed in how many issues were covered they were strikingly similar in both how people spent their time and in the sequential organization of that activity. Overall, only 40% of the time was spent in direct discussions of design, with many swift transitions between alternative ideas and their evaluation. The groups spent another 30% taking stock of their progress through walkthroughs and summaries. Pure coordination activities consumed about 20%, and clarification of ideas—a cross-cutting classification—took one third of the time, indicating how much time was spent in both orchestrating and sharing expertise among group members. The pattern of transitions revealed these activities were clustered into two general classes—design and management. Although most issues had more than one alternative offered and discussed, there was rarely a wide set discussed, and one third of them were never explicitly evaluated. The results have implications for both the characterization of collaboration itself and for the way in which it might be supported through technology. Finally, the coding schemes developed may be useful for a wide range of problem-solving meetings other than design.

ISSN:0737-0024    

DOI:10.1207/s15327051hci0704_1

出版商:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    

年代:1992

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

Modalities such as face-to-face meetings permit rich communication, which involves both expressiveness and interactivity. Modalities such as text annotation or electronic mail, however, limit both. Contingency theory, as applied to collaborative writing, says that as the equivocality of the writing task increases, communication modalities that support rich communication are more likely to be used. In addition, it says that if these modalities are used, equivocal tasks can be carried out with greater ease and better results. This article explores these hypotheses using multiple data sources: an interview study tracing the history of 55 published collaborative articles, two field experiments comparing the use of face-to-face communication and electronic mail as media for collaborative writing, and a laboratory experiment comparing voice and text as media for annotating documents. Taken together, the findings of these investigations are loosely consistent with a contingency theory of media use, but they suggest that careful measures of task characteristics are needed to obtain a detailed understanding of the effects of particular task/technology combinations. Further, they indicate that it may be important to consider the distinction between the interactivity and expressiveness components of media richness in making decisions about what technologies to buy or build.

ISSN:0737-0024    

DOI:10.1207/s15327051hci0704_2

出版商:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    

年代:1992

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

In this article, we examine learning within a cooperative system. We focus on the role of learning from errors in a context where regular attrition of group members occurs. Specifically, the study involved observation of distributed activity in the team navigation of a large naval vessel. Analyses revealed frequent individual errors; however, successful detection and correction of errors also occurred. Thus, the cooperative system simultaneously allowed high component error and ensured low system output error. This robustness is an especially valuable feature for distributed systems because it provides for needed on-the-job learning while maintaining a high level of overall performance. Errors were observed to function as opportunities for instruction based on a novice's demonstrated "need to know." The distributed system was found to contain certain design tradeoffs that are exploited for their utility in learning (viz., distributing knowledge across the team and providing multiple perspectives for error detection). The results are applicable to the design of computer-supported cooperative tasks and provide guidelines for task organization that facilitates performance while incorporating the ability to learn from errors.

ISSN:0737-0024    

DOI:10.1207/s15327051hci0704_3

出版商:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    

年代:1992

数据来源: Taylor