Telepresence robots have recently been introduced as a way for children who are homebound due to medical conditions to attend their local schools. These robots provide an experience that is a much richer learning experience than the typical home instruction services of 4–5 hours a week. Because the robots on the market today were designed for use by adults in work settings, they do not necessarily fit children in school settings. We carried out a study of 19 homebound students, interviewing and observing them as well as interviewing their parents, teachers, administrators, and classmates. We organized our findings along the lines of the various tasks and settings the child is in, developing a learner-centered analytic framework , then teacher -, classmate -, and homebound-controller-centered analytic frameworks . Although some features of current robots fit children in school settings, we discovered a number of cases where there was a mismatch or additional features are needed. Our findings are described according to analytic frames that capture user experiences. Based on these user-centered findings, we provide recommendations for designing the robot and user interface to better fit children using robots for school and learning activities.

Homebound students, those who can learn but have a serious health issue (e.g. cancer, heart disease, immune deficiency) that prevents physical attendance at school, are now able to go to school using telepresence robots. Telepresence robots are generally video conferencing units on remote-controlled robots. Previous research has shown that using these robots allows homebound students to interact with classmates and teachers as if they are physically present. But, what does this mean for teachers and administrators? We present a qualitative study of 22 teachers and school administrators who worked with telepresent students and 4 who decided against adopting the robot. Our goal was to learn how decisions are made to adopt the robot, what issues arise in its use, and what would make adoption easier. This study contributes new insights on teacher and administrator perspectives on what is needed for effective use of this technology in educational settings.

Group activities that use Google Docs for simultaneous collaborative writing and editing are increasingly common in higher education. Although studies show that synchronous collaboration can bring multiple benefits, such as enhanced productivity and writing quality, little is known about these writing practices in classrooms and their impact on students' writing. Using a mixed method approach, we conducted an empirical study that explores the different styles of synchronous collaboration in 45 Google Docs documents produced by 82 undergraduate students, and how students' practices affect the specific dimensions of the final text including quality. The results suggest that (a) out of four styles, Divide and Conquer style tended to produce better quality text whereas Main Writer had the lowest quality scores, and that (b) balanced participation and amount of peer editing led to longer texts with higher quality scores for content, evidence, but not organization or mechanics. Given these results, we suggest several design features for collaborative writing systems and propose guidelines for instructional practices.

Today's commercially available word processors allow people to write collaboratively in the cloud, both in the familiar asynchronous mode and now in synchronous mode as well. This opens up new ways of working together. We examined the data traces of collaborative writing behavior in student teams’ use of Google Docs to discover how they are writing together now. We found that student teams write both synchronously and asynchronously, take fluid roles in the writing and editing of the documents, and show a variety of styles of collaborative writing, including writing from scratch, beginning with an outline, pasting in a related example as a template to organize their own writing, and three more. We also found that the document serves as a place where they share a number of things not included in the final document, including links or references to related materials, the assignment requirements from the instructor, and informal discussions to coordinate the collaboration or to structure the document. We computed a number of measures to depict a group's collaboration behavior and asked external graders to score these documents for quality. We found that the documents that included balanced participation and/or exhibited leadership were judged higher in quality, as were those that were longer. We then suggested system design implications and behavioral guidelines to support people writing together better, and concluded the paper with future research directions.

Collaborative writing is on the increase. In order to write well together, authors often need to be aware of who has done what recently. We offer a new tool, DocuViz, that displays the entire revision history of Google Docs, showing more than the one-step-at-a-time view now shown in revision history and tracking changes in Word. We introduce the tool and present cases in which the tool has the potential to be useful: To authors themselves to see recent "seismic activity," indicating where in particular a co-author might want to pay attention, to instructors to see who has contributed what and which changes were made to comments from them, and to researchers interested in the new patterns of collaboration made possible by simultaneous editing capabilities.

We report on a qualitative study of the user experience of cloud-based information work. We characterize the information work practices and challenges that exist largely at the different intersections of three constructs - cloud-based services, collaborations, and digital identifiers. We also demonstrate how the misalignment of these three constructs is experienced as a "losing battle" that has led to miscommunication among collaborators, the abandonment of cloud-based services, and the irreparable blurring of digital identities.

This paper reports the results of a study comparing the relative influence of location and shared identity in partially distributed work. Using an experimental task called Shape Factory, groups of eight participants were configured such that in the baseline 'strangers' condition only the location-based faultline was present while in the experimental 'intergroup' condition, participants from two different shared identity groups engaged in distributed collaboration, creating an additional, cross-cutting faultline. The results showed that participants in the intergroup condition, with both location-based and shared identity faultlines, performed at a higher level than participants in the strangers condition, with only the location-based faultline. In the intergroup condition, the performance effects of location and shared identity were roughly equal and did not affect each other differentially in combination.

Geographically distributed work has become a popular way to work. Past CSCW research has shown that remote workers rely on innovative communication platforms but still face challenges being remote. Research has also provided organizational and managerial strategies to bridge the distance gap. Our study in contrast investigates how individuals develop strategies to cope with the daily challenges of working remotely and alone, and what managers can do to help them. We interviewed seventeen individuals involved in remote work about their experiences, identifying unique challenges and their workarounds. Our interview results suggest that, although people may work alone, the process of conducting distributed work is actually very social. Individual remote workers establish a unique kind of work rhythm, visibility management for evaluation, social support infrastructure, and personal connection as a part of their coping strategies to balance their professional and personal lives.

A number of threads of thought have come together recently having to do with how we make our research useable and useful to the world. One thread is inspired by a movement in medicine called Clinical Translational Science in which funding is given to researchers to translate basic research into guidelines, treatments, and regimens that clinicians can use. A second thread arose in reflecting about our own recent work in which we translated a theory about what makes for good distance collaboration into an online assessment tool and administered it to hundreds of people involved in remote collaboration. Upon completion of the assessment, each participant immediately gets a personalized report on the strengths of their collaboration, the challenges, and what to do about it. We get the data, and they get the help. These two threads point to making a difference, having broader impact.

Previous research on partially distributed teams has revealed a cluster of problems, including difficulty coordinating, 'ingroup' formation among members in different locations, and lower trust in teammates across distance. But these prior studies involved groups of strangers; would pre-existing groups have the same problems? We recruited groups from the same fraternity or sorority to test groups with a pre-existing shared identity. We found that these groups did indeed coordinate work better, cooperated more, and were more willing and able to take on larger scale projects. However, even within these high-performing shared identity groups, there were significant differences between collocated and remote members in performance, group efficacy, and sense of group identity.

Under what circumstances might a group member be better off as a long-distance participant rather than collocated? We ran a set of experiments to study how partially-distributed groups collaborate when skill sets are unequally distributed. Partially distributed groups are those where some collaborators work together in the same space (collocated) and some work remotely using computer-mediated communications. Previous experiments had shown that these groups tend to form semi-autonomous 'in-groups'. In this set of experiments the configuration was changed so that some player skills were located only in the collocated space, and some were located only remotely, creating local surplus of some skills and local scarcity of others in the collocated room. Players whose skills were locally in surplus performed significantly worse. They experienced 'collocation blindness' and failed to pay enough attention to collaborators outside of the room. In contrast, the remote players whose skills were scarce inside the collocated room did particularly well because they charged a high price for their skills.

HCI and CSCW researchers have begun to call for greater and more explicit support of creative endeavors. Current theories of creativity suggest that it is an inherently collaborative activity, situated and highly contextualized. This work argues that a contextualized view of creativity calls in turn for assessment and technological support to be considered in situ.This poster presents a case study of the creative collaboration in a multimedia arts collective, with the goal of describing their current practices to inform appropriate information system design. We found that even a small and cohesive collaborative arts group contained a multitude of artistic practices and production tool choices, several distinct but interdependent work tracks and a variety of attitudes about the individual members' collaborative roles. Such heterogeneity, evidenced even within a self-selected and self-organized group, suggests challenges for future technological support of creative practices.

Recent years have seen an increasing use of collaboratories in scientific work. It is hypothesized that by enabling scientists to reach remotely located data, instruments and experts, collaboratories will benefit peripheral scientists (e.g., scientists from developing countries and scientists from minority colleges in the U.S.) more than core scientists. However, previous studies on computer network use have shown mixed results regarding peripherality effects. Adopting a qualitative approach, this study intends to investigate cultural, political, and technical factors that influence collaboratory use by peripheral scientists.

Modern workplaces often bring together virtual teams where some members are collocated, and some participate remotely. We are using a simulation game to study collaborations of 10-person groups, with five collocated members and five isolates (simulated 'telecommuters'). Individual players in this game buy and sell 'shapes' from each other in order to form strings of shapes, where strings represent joint projects, and each individual players' shapes represent their unique skills. We found that the collocated people formed an in-group, excluding the isolates. But, surprisingly, the isolates also formed an in-group, mainly because the collocated people ignored them and they responded to each other.

When virtual teams need to establish trust at a distance, it is advantageous for them to use rich media to communicate. We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. All three of the richer conditions were significant improvements over text chat. Video and audio conferencing groups were nearly as good as face-to-face, but both did show some evidence of what we term delayed trust (slower progress toward full cooperation) and fragile trust (vulnerability to opportunistic behavior)

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. If, however, people meet before using CMC, they trust each other, trust being established through touch. Here we show that if participants do not meet beforehand but rather engage in various getting-acquainted activities over a network, trust is much higher than if they do nothing beforehand, nearly as good as a prior meeting. Using text-chat to get acquainted is nearly as good as meeting, and even just seeing a picture is better than nothing

In a field study conducted at a leading Fortune 100 company, we examined how having development teams reside in their own large room (an arrangement called radical collocation) affected system development. The collocated projects had significantly higher productivity and shorter schedules than both the industry benchmarks and the performance of past similar projects within the firm. The teams reported high satisfaction about their process, and both customers and project sponsors were similarly highly satisfied. The analysis of questionnaire, interview and observational data from these teams showed that being "at hand," i.e. both visible and available, helped them to coordinate their work better and learn from each other. Radical collocation seems to be one of the factors leading to high productivity in these teams.

Companies are experimenting with putting teams into warrooms, hoping for some productivity enhancement. We conducted a field study of six such teams, tracking their activity, attitudes, use of technology and productivity. Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity. Why? Among other things, teams had easy access to each other for both coordination of their work and for learning, and the work artifacts they posted on the walls remained visible to all. These results imply that if we are to truly support remote teams, we should provide constant awareness and easy transitions in and out of spontaneous meetings.

Giant strides in information technology at the turn of the century may have unleashed unreachable goals. With the invention of groupware, people expect to communicate easily with each other and accomplish difficult work even though they are remotely located or rarely overlap in time. Major corporations launch global teams, expecting that technology will make "virtual collocation" possible. Federal research money encourages global science through the establishment of "collaboratories. " We review over 10 years of field and laboratory investigations of collocated and noncollocated synchronous group collaborations. In particular, we compare collocated work with remote work as it is possible today and comment on the promise of remote work tomorrow. We focus on the sociotechnical conditions required for effective distance work and bring together the results with four key concepts: common ground, coupling of work, collaboration readiness, and collaboration technology readiness. Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both for collaboration and collaboration technology, have a chance at succeeding with remote work. Deviations from each of these create strain on the relationships among teammates and require changes in the work or processes of collaboration to succeed. Often they do not succeed because distance still matters.

More and more organizations are forming teams that are not co-located. These teams communicate via email, fax, telephone and audio conferences, and sometimes video. The question often arises whether the cost of video is worth it. Previous research has shown that video makes people more satisfied with the work, but it doesnt help the quality of the work itself. There is one exception; negotiation tasks are measurably better with video. In this study, we show that the same effect holds for a more subtle form of negotiation, when people have to negotiate meaning in a conversation. We compared the performance and communication of people explaining a map route to each other. Half the pairs have video and audio connections, half only audio. Half of the pairs were native speakers of English; the other half were non-native speakers, those presumably who have to negotiate meaning more. The results showed that non-native speaker pairs did benefit from the video; native speakers did not. Detailed analysis of the conversational strategies showed that with video, the non-native speaker pairs spent proportionately more effort negotiating common ground.

Article Free Access Share on CSCW '98 doctoral colloquium (summary) Authors: Judith S. Olson Collaboratoty for Research on Electronic Work Collaboratoty for Research on Electronic WorkView Profile , Gary M. Olson View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 419–421https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289520Published:01 November 1998Publication History 0citation131DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads131Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Goals and objectives: Evaluating CSCW systems is much more difficult than evaluating single-user systems because of the additional group and organizational factors. Behavioral evaluation consists of having people use CSCW technologies under appropriate conditions and gathering either qualitiative or quantitative information about their behavior.

Current research on CSC W for remote groups focuses on one technology at a time: shared editing on the desktop, video conferencing, glancing at others' offices, email, etc.When a real group sets out to work remotely, however, they need to consider all aspects of work, synchronous, asynchronous, and the transitions to and tkom.This paper explores the planning, implementation, and use of a suite of groupware tools over the course of a year in a real group with remote members.We found that groupware atlkted people's commitments and the nature of the work distribution.

This study reports the second in a series of related studies of the ways in which small groups work together, and the effects of various kinds of technology support.In this study groups of three people worked for an hour and a half designing an Automated Post Office.Our previous work showed that people doing this task produced higher quality designs when they were able to use a shared-editor to support their emerging design.This study compares the same kinds of groups now working at a distance, connected to each other both by this shared editor and either with high-quality stereo audio or the same audio plus highquality video.The video was arranged so that people made eye contact and spatial relations were preserved, allowing people to have a sense of who was doing what in a way similar to that in face-to-face work.Results showed that with video, work was as good in quality as that face-to face; with audio only, the quality of the work suffered a small but significant amount.When working at a distance, however, groups spent more time clarifying to each other and talking longer about how to manage their work.Furthermore, groups rated the audio-only condition as having a lower discussion quality, and reported more difficulty communicating Perceptions suffer without video, and work is accomplished in slightly different manner, but the quality of work suffers very little.

Software design and user interface design and analysis methods are each insufficient methods for ensuring good software development.We propose a combination of object-oriented analysis and design, human computer interaction, and process redesign forged into one methodology.We describe the use of these methods in a project case study and conclude with a synopsis of how the methods worked and lessons we learned.

Abstract

A simple collaborative tool, a shared text editor called ShrEdit, changed the way groups of designers performed their work, and changed it for the better. First, the designs produced by the 19 groups of three designers were of higher quality than those of the 19 groups who worked with conventional whiteboard, paper and pencil. The groups with the new tool reported liking their work process a little less, probably because they had to adapt their work style to a new tool. We expected, from the brainstorming literature and recent work on Group Support Systems, that the reason the designs were of better quality was that the supported groups generated more ideas . To our surprise, the groups working with ShrEdit generated fewer design ideas , but apparently better ones. It appears that the tool helped the supported groups keep more focused on the core issued in the emerging design, to waste less time on less important topics, and to capture what was said as they went. This suggests that small workgroups can capitalize on the free access they have to a shared workspace, without requiring a facilitator or a work process embedded in the software.

This paper explores the behavior of experts choosing among various methods to accomplish tasks. Given the results showing that methods are not chosen solely on the basis of keystroke efficiency, we recommend a technique to help designers assess whether they should offer multiple methods for some tasks, and if they should, how to make them so that they are chosen appropriately.

This study reports how the introduction of a simple collaborative tool changed the way groups of people did an interesting problem solving task, the design of an automatic post office.The designs produced by the groups supported with this tool were of higher quality than those who worked with conventional whiteboard and paper and pencil.They liked the process a little less, probably because it was a new tool.But, more surprising was the fact that those supported with the tool did less extensive exploration of the design space.Our expectation was just the opposite.It appears that the tool helped the supported group keep more focused on the core issues in the emerging design, to waste less time on less important topics, and to capture what was said as they went.

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.