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Research methods in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) are mostly imported from other disciplines, primarily psychology, social sciences, and computer science. The imported methods are generally used with little or no grounding in explicit theoretical models about collaboration; the measures considered are very heterogeneous (ranging from p...
Citations
... Elsewhere [Convertino and Carroll 2010] we have argued that the field of research on collaborative computing has a clear need for more studies that develop and validate measures, procedures, and reference tasks (see the call for reference tasks in [Whittaker et al. 2000]). Given the variety of definitions of awareness and models of knowledge sharing in groups this need for standard tasks and measures is particularly evident for research on knowledge sharing and activity awareness in the context of complex collaboration [Convertino 2008]. ...
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.
