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.

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.

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

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

An interesting dialogue about the issues raised by Gray and Salzman surfaced in the first round of reviews, and it occurred to us that this dialogue could be of value to the readers of Human–Computer Interaction. We invited a number of people in the field to submit commentaries on the article. These were reviewed and revised, with all commentators seeing each others’ comments, as well as Gray and Salzman’s final article.

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.

We compared face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated (CMC) conversations among small groups of scientists carrying out data collection campaigns.We found multiple threads of conversation in both settings, but this was much more extensive in the CMC cases.The two kinds of conversation were very similar in content and nature of participation, but difTered in their temporal flow.The software that supported the CMC conversations allowed interactions that were quite similar in character to the F TF situations.The low incidence of thread confusions and the potential value of overhearing uset%l conversations does not seem to warrant providing technology in the CMC situation to split apart conversational threads.

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.

Earlier studies of computerized brainstorming showed that by restructuring group processes, groups can overcome well known performance deficits that groups suffer relative to nominal groups.These earlier tools are essentially computerized versions of Nominal Group Technique.We examined the ability of a simple, unstructured parallel editor to facilitate idea generation in face to face groups.Our results showed that parallel interacting groups outperformed serial interacting groups, and parallel interacting groups did not differ significantly from nominal, non interacting groups.Thus, an informal tool that allows parallel work is an effective way to increase idea generation in real interacting groups.

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.

No abstract available.

Two experiments investigated expert-novice differences in debugging computer programs. Debugging was done on programs provided to the subject, and were run on a microcomputer. The programs were in LOGO in Exp. 1 and Pascal in Exp. 2. Experts debugged more quickly and accurately, largely because they generated high quality hypotheses on the basis of less study of the code than novices. Further, novices frequently added bugs to the program during the course of trying to find the original one. At least for these simple programs, experts superior debugging performance seemed to be due primarily to their superior ability to comprehend the program.