Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity

Abstract

People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another's intentions, actions and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent and complex activities. We analysed awareness breakdowns in use of our Virtual School system-stemming from problems related to the collaborative situation, group, task and tool support-to motivate the concept of activity awareness. Activity awareness builds on prior conceptions of social and action awareness, but emphasizes the importance of activity context factors like planning and coordination. This work suggests design strategies for notification systems to better support collaborative activity. r

Attention aware systems: Theories, applications, and research agenda

“…Presentation style, timing, and content are obviously related, both because certain styles are better suited for certain contents, and because the effects achievable (possibly in terms of interruption, reaction, comprehension, and satisfaction) will often depend on how well the new information is integrated in the context of the current activity. For example, Carroll and his colleagues (Carroll, Neale, Isenhour, Rosson, & McCrickard, 2003), focussing on the support of collaborative activities, make a compelling case for the integration of awareness information within the context of user's current activity.…”

Design for Social Presence in Online Communities: A Multidimensional Approach

“…For instance, Spring and Vathanophas (2003) find that the awareness tool may reduce the users' need to communicate, and this reduction in communications may cause a reduction in the quality of the work effort. Moreover, extensive design efforts that have been invested in far more sophisticated notification systems (e.g., Carroll et al, 2003) for decision support and/or group collaboration also imply that IT artifacts used in online communities may not be able to offer sufficient information for members to develop mutual understanding and/or emotional connection. Therefore, we hypothesize that:  H3a: A member's perceived usage of online community artifacts supporting virtual co-presence is positively related to his/her sense of awareness.…”

Using an experimental study to develop group awareness support for real-time distributed collaborative writing

“…Perceiving and understanding the responsibilities, activities and intentions of other members of a collaborating ensemble is a basic requirement for group interaction [16,17]. In face-to-face interaction, it is naturally easy for collaborators to establish a shared background of understanding which is known as 'common ground' [18], and to maintain a sense of awareness about who else are present in a workspace, what other collaborators are doing, and so on.…”

“…As reported by many other researchers, in order to facilitate group collaboration effectively, groupware systems must provide group awareness support [16,19,[21][22][23][24][25][26]. Group awareness is defined as ''an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity'' [22], p. 107.…”