Knowledge sharing and awareness in collaborative computing: Experimental research methods

I will give an overview of my research and present a 5-year research program focusing on activity awareness and knowledge sharing in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). I will first present two studies on activity awareness with pairs performing a collaborative editing project and then two studies with teams performing an emergency management planning task on maps. Many failures in CSCW systems are attributed to inadequate support for the collaborators’ awareness. In the studies of awareness I draw on prior fieldwork and model typical awareness problems in a controlled lab setting. I compare pairs working in two functionally equivalent CSCW systems, Bridge and Groove. I focus on how workers’ awareness can be measured empirically and characterized theoretically. The findings show that many events remain unnoticed in current systems. The results also suggest that awareness should be construed and measured as a process and careful consideration is needed for person variables such as metacognition. I discuss differences between the two systems and implications for design. I present a theoretical articulation of the concept of activity awareness in sub-processes. A basic sub-process of activity awareness in teamwork is common ground building. The second part of the research program focuses on this process. I present two studies on common ground building in teams making complex group decisions. Three-person groups collaborate on an emergency planning task using geographic maps. In the first study the teams use a paper prototype and work face-to-face around a tabletop. I present the changes in common ground and some design requirements elicited from this study. I give an overview of the software prototype that was developed. I describe the results of a second study, a comparable distributed experiment where the teams use the software prototype but perform the same task. Finally, I compare the results and explore implications for system design and common ground theory.

Speaker Bios

Gregorio Convertino is a Fulbright Fellow, Teaching Fellow, PhD Candidate at the College of IST of Penn State. He has about ten years of research experience in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). He conducted about a dozen of empirical studies, several in the laboratory and some in the field. His work focuses on collaborative systems and complex tasks. He has a dual background in Computing and Psychology. He obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Psychology from La Sapienza University of Rome, graduating «cum laude». He completed a 3-year Bachelor’s coursework in Computer Science at the Sapienza. In 2002, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and started his Ph.D. in USA. Since then, he has worked with John Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson at Virginia Tech and Penn State. He has been CoPI with John M. Carroll, his advisor, in the ONR-funded research project on common ground. He worked as intern at IBM Research, PARC, and IRST in Italy. He coauthored about forty peer-reviewed papers in HCI.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Gregorio Convertino
Affiliation:
Center for HCI, College of IST, Pennsylvania State University