AWARENESS AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING: EXPERIMENTAL METHODS
Open Access
- Author:
- Convertino, Gregorio
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 27, 2008
- Committee Members:
- John Millar Carroll, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Mary Beth Rosson, Committee Member
Xiaolong Zhang, Committee Member
Aleksandra B Slavkovic, Committee Member
Thomas Moran, Committee Member - Keywords:
- HCI
human-computer interaction
CSCW
computer-supported cooperative work
awareness
common ground
knowledge sharing
research method
experimental method
laboratory method
measure
process
groupware - Abstract:
- Research methods in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) are mostly imported from other disciplines, primarily social sciences and computer science. The imported methods are generally used with little or no grounding in explicit theoretical models about collaboration; the measures are very heterogeneous and not explicitly mapped onto investigated concepts. Also the overall methodology of the studies tends to be unilaterally oriented either toward naturalistic field methods or controlled laboratory methods. To date, there has been no attempt to address such deficiencies within an empirical program that incrementally investigates related research constructs. This thesis addresses the problem of constructing appropriate research methods for studying awareness and knowledge sharing (common ground) in CSCW. It presents a research program, or a sequence of related studies, as an instantiation of a new methodological approach. The approach has three characteristics: (1) Model-based: provides a mapping between conceptual models and methods; (2) Centered on group-level processes: the group is the unit of analysis and specific group processes are the focus of investigation; (3) Comprehensive in measurement: field and laboratory results are integrated and multiple measures of the same constructs are used. The first part of the program investigated activity awareness in CSCW, with pairs that performed a multi-session collaborative editing task. Drawing on the findings of a prior field study, a laboratory method was developed. A first lab study validated the laboratory method. A second lab study provided detailed measurements of activity awareness and compared the effects of two CSCW systems. The findings confirmed that many events tend to remain unnoticed in current systems and point to specific classes of factors that affected activity awareness. The second half of the program investigated common ground. The knowledge sharing process was studied in two lab studies respectively with collocated teams using a paper prototype and with distributed teams using a software prototype. The results gave clear evidence of the increase in common ground and helped to understand the ways in which such increment occurred. Finally, the thesis discusses the approach, the experimental techniques developed, and implications for investigating activity awareness and common ground in the future.