A contemporary approach to describing and theorizing about joint human endeavor is to posit 'knowledge in common' as a basis for awareness and coordination. Recent analysis has identified weaknesses in this approach even as it is typically employed in relatively simple task contexts. We suggest that in realistically complex circumstances, people share activities and not merely concepts. We describe a framework for understanding joint endeavor in terms of four facets of activity awareness: common ground, communities of practice, social capital, and human development. We illustrate the sort of analysis we favor with a scenario from emergency management, and consider implications and future directions for system design and empirical methods. q
We study the development of common ground in an emergency management planning task. Twelve three-person multi-role teams performed the task with a paper prototype in a controlled setting; each team completed three versions of the task. We use converging measures to document the development of common ground in the teams and present an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the common ground development process. Our findings indicate that in complex collaborative work, process common ground increases, thus diminishing the need for acts like information querying or strategy discussions about how to organize the collaborative activities. However, content common ground is created and tested throughout the three runs; in fact dialogue acts used to clarify this content increase over time. Discussion of the implications of these findings for the theory of common ground and the design of collaborative systems follows.
The present experiment investigates effects of group composition in computersupported collaborative intelligence analysis. Human cognition, though highly adaptive, is also quite limited, leading to systematic errors and limitations in performance -that is, biases. We experimentally investigated the impact of group composition on an individual's bias, by composing groups that differ in whether their members initial beliefs are diverse (heterogeneous group) or similar (homogeneous group). We study three-member, distributed, computer-supported teams in heterogeneous, homogeneous, and solo (or nominal) groups. We measured bias in final judgment, and also in the selection and evaluation of the evidence that contributed to the final beliefs. The distributed teams collaborated via CACHE-A, a web-based software environment that supports a collaborative version of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (or ACH, a method used by intelligence analysts). Individuals in Heterogeneous Groups showed no net process cost, relative to noninteracting individuals. Both heterogeneous and solo (noninteracting) groups debiased strongly, given a stream of balanced evidence. In contrast, individuals in Homogenous Groups did worst, accentuating their initial bias rather than debiasing. We offer suggestions about how CACHE-A supports collaborative analysis, and how experimental investigation in this research area can contribute to design of CSCW systems.
We present a design research project on knowledge sharing and activity awareness in distributed emergency management planning. In three experiments we studied groups using three different prototypes, respectively: a paper-prototype in a collocated work setting, a first software prototype in a distributed setting, and a second, enhanced software prototype in a distributed setting. In this series of studies we tried to better understand the processes of knowledge sharing and activity awareness in complex cooperative work by developing and investigating new tools that can support these processes. We explicate the design rationale behind each prototype and report the results of each experiment investigating it. We discuss how the results from each prototyping phase brought us closer to defining properties of a system that facilitate the sharing and awareness of both content and process knowledge. Our designs enhanced aspects of distributed group performance, in some respects beyond that of comparable face-to-face groups.
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