Knowledge exchange, communication and context in electronic networks (KnowHow

Knowledge exchange, communication and context in electronic networks

(KnowHow)

VINNOVA Rapport VR 2002:8

Kerstin Severinson EklundhOlle Bälter

Teresa CerattoKristina Groth

Hee-Cheol KimAnn Lantz

Maria NormarkHenry RodriguezEva-Lotta Sallnäs

TITEL: Kunskapsutbyte, kommunikation och kontext i elektroniska nätverk. TITLE: Knowledge exchange, communication and context in electronic networks (KnowHow)

SERIE/SERIES: VINNOVA Rapport/Report VR 2002:8 ISBN 91-89588-56-8 ISSN 1650-3104 PUBLICERINGSDATUM/DATE PUBLISHED: Mars/March 2002

FÖRFATTARE/AUTHOR: Kerstin Severinson Eklundh, Olle Bälter, Teresa Cerratto, Kristina Groth, Hee-Cheol Kim, Ann Lantz, Maria Normark, Henry Rodriguez & Eva-Lotta Sallnäs

UTGIVARE/PUBLISHER: VINNOVA – Verket för Innovationssystem/ Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, Stockholm VINNOVA DIARIENR/RECORD NO: 2001-03104

REFERAT (syfte, metod, resultat): Forskningsprogrammet ”Kunskapsutbyte, kommunikation och kontext i elektroniska nätverk” har pågått vid IPLab, NADA, KTH åren 1997-2001. Det övergripande syftet med programmet har varit att studera betydelsen av kommunikation via elektroniska nätverk för samarbete och kunskapsutbyte inom kunskapsorienterade yrken. Fem projekt med mer specifikt fokus har ingått i programmet: 1) Kunskapsutbyte och kompetensutveckling i lokala och globala nätverk, 2) Kunskapsnät i organisationer, 3) Samarbete vid skrivande och dokumentframställning, 4) Virtuella miljöer för samverkan och 5) Hantering och organisation av informationflödet vid elektronisk kommunikation. Arbetet har varit starkt tvärvetenskapligt, med en kombination av empiriska studier av teknikanvändning i kunskapsorienterat yrkesarbete, design och utvärdering av prototyper för samarbete, samt kontrollerade experiment med fokus på multimodal interaktion. Totalt har sex doktorander varit engagerade i programmet, som har resulterat i två doktorsavhandlingar och tre licentiatavhandlingar. Arbetet inom flera av projekten fortsätter med annan finansiering och väntas leda till ytterligare fyra doktorsavhandlingar. Forskningen inom programmet har skett i samverkan med forskarskolan för människa-maskininteraktion (HMI) samt Centrum för användarorienterad IT-design (CID). ABSTRACT (aim, method, results): The research programme “Knowledge exchange, communication and context in electronic networks” has been going on at the Interaction and Presentation Laboratory (IPLab), NADA, KTH during the years 1997-2001. The general aim of the programme has been to study the impact of digital network communication on collaboration and knowledge exchange in knowledge-oriented professions. Five projects with more specific focus have been included in the programme: 1) Knowledge exchange and competence development in local and global networks, 2) Knowledge nets in organisations, 3) Collaborative writing and document design, 4) Virtual environments for collaboration, and 5) Management and organisation of information in electronic communication. The work has been strongly interdisciplinary, with a combination of empirical studies of technology use in knowledge-oriented professional work, design and evaluation of prototypes for collaboration, and controlled experiments focusing on multimodal interaction. In total, six doctoral students have been engaged in the programme, which has so far resulted in two doctoral theses and three licentiate theses. The work within several of the projects continues with other funding, and is expected to result in four additional doctoral theses. The research within the programme has been carried out in collaboration with the Graduate School for Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) and the Centre for User-Oriented IT Design (CID).

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Knowledge exchange, communication and context inelectronic networks (KnowHow)

Final report 2002-02-28

Kerstin Severinson EklundhOlle Bälter

Teresa CerrattoKristina Groth

Hee-Cheol KimAnn Lantz

Maria NormarkHenrry Rodriguez Eva-Lotta Sallnäs

Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA)Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Knowledge exchange, communication and context in electronic networks (KnowHow)

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Table of contents1. Introduction (Kerstin Severinson Eklundh)

2. Knowledge exchange and competence development in global and local networks (AnnLantz)

3. Studying information and knowledge exchange in organisations (Kristina Groth)

4. Using technology for real-time coordination of work (Maria Normark)

5. Using the WWW for collaboration: writing and sharing information (HenrryRodriguez)

6. Support for collaborative reviewing of documents (Hee-Cheol Kim)

7. Collaboration in multimodal virtual worlds: comparing touch, text, voice and video(Eva-Lotta Sallnäs)

8. The use of synchronous text-based environments for teacher professional development(Teresa Cerratto)

9. Management and organisation of information in electronic communication (OlleBälter)


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1. Introduction

Kerstin Severinson EklundhThe research programme "Knowledge exchange, communication and context in electronicnetworks" (KnowHow) has been going on during 1997-2001 at the Interaction andPresentation Laboratory (IPLab), NADA, KTH. Before the project, a pre-study was carriedout in 1996, in order to explore and clarify important issues to be investigated. The work hasmainly been funded by KFB (The Swedish Transport and Communications Research Board;now a part of Vinnova). The group has also had partial funding from the SSF (SwedishFoundation for Strategic Research) through the HMI Graduate School.

The overall purpose of the KnowHow programme has been to study the impact of electronicnetworks for communication and information exchange in knowledge-oriented professions.This is a vast research area, and in practice, the work has been divided into a collection ofprojects with more specific goals. The point of departure for the programme was thetremendous development of the Internet and the WWW, with their great potential forcommunication and collaboration across geographical distances, evoking promises forprofessional work in many areas. An overview of issues and results obtained with regard tothe possibilites of the Web for collaboration is given in Severinson Eklundh et al. (2000).However, the work in the KnowHow project group has also extended beyond this sphere,addressing more general topics in the area of cooperative use of information technology in theknowledge professions.

Because of the rapid change of the technological and social foundations for networkedinformation exchange, it has been important that the studies were longitudinal to a substantialextent. This means that in several of the studies reported, a group of people have beenobserved during an extended period of time, or subjected to repeated interviews andquestionnaires, to provide a basis for an understanding of the long-term processes ofappropriation of network technology in particular professional contexts.

IPLab is a research laboratory with a strongly interdisciplinary profile in the field of human-computer interaction. Therefore, the research in the KnowHow group has included bothdetailed empirical study of technology use in professional contexts, and design-orientedendeavours aiming at the development of new tools and environments for collaboration. Someissues have also been investigated through carefully controlled laboratory studies. This meansthat the studies described in this report are different in character, reflecting the varyingbackground and research orientation of the researchers and doctoral students who carried outthe work.

Research overview

The original proposal divided the research programme into four parts, each with one or twoprojects. In the revised proposal, this structure was somewhat modified to adapt to thereduced resources of the programme. As a result, five separate projects have remained as thefocus of study within KnowHow, each giving a separate perspective on the processes ofcommunication and knowledge exchange in professional contexts. Below, we describe eachproject briefly, giving pointers to the relevant chapters in this report, and also mentioningsome efforts that were not included in the summary.


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Knowledge exchange and competence development in local and global networks

The entire KnowHow programme departed from the fact that the computer networks havestrong potential for being used in professional knowledge exchange and competencedevelopment. Undisputably, the work of journalists, librarians and researchers has changedfundamentally through the developments of the Internet and the Web during the 90's. Thepurpose of this project was to begin to explore this potential in empirical studies ofprofessional collaboration, and to gain insights about problems with the use of the technologyfor further study. Important issues were, for example, the impact of the Web for sharingknowledge and development of competence, and the consequences of providing informationopenly on the Internet as opposed to closed, organisational intranets. Chapter 2 (by AnnLantz) gives an overview of the work in this project, which focuses on the pre-study and someof the issues emanating from its results.

Later, the work also was extended to include studies of coordination of work in professionalsettings, bringing up a number of pertinent research issues about the role of technology incollaborative work. Chapter 3 in this summary reports the work by Maria Normark oncoordination in control rooms, which has included ethnographic studies at air-traffic controland SOS Alarm emergency dispatch. A Master’s thesis by Jonas Boquist (1999) included astudy of the role of documents for coordination in three organisations.

Knowledge nets in organisations

Within a thesis project reported in Chapter 4, Kristina Groth has investigated the role ofpersonal contacts for knowledge exchange in organisational settings. The initial idea,explored in her licentiate thesis, was to provide technical support for a "knowledge net"providing information about who-knows-what, to support personal contacts in information-seeking situations. This approach is in contrast with previous work on organisational memoryand related technical developments, focusing on storing knowledge in computers for later re-use. Initially, a study of home pages on the Web was performed in this project, to exploretheir potential as parts of a knowledge net. Also, a Web-based prototype to support people’srating of their own knowledge was developed, and evaluated empirically with users. Recentwork in the project has included ethnographical studies of how people go about finding thingsout in a technical organisation, and discussions of design issues related to the results of thesestudies.

Collaborative writing and document design

Writing is a natural part of knowledge-oriented work. In professional settings, writing oftenoccurs as a collaborative activity, but the technical support for this activity has so far beenscarce. The fact that the Internet and the Web provide a powerful infrastructure for sharingdocuments, has been a point of departure for the work of two graduate students in KnowHow.In Chapter 5 (by Henrry Rodriguez), an extensive design effort is described with the purposeto provide Web-based support for group collaboration and dialogue around shared documents.Chapter 6 (by Hee-Cheol Kim) reports on a series of studies of collaborative writingpractices, especially focusing on the reviewing phase. This involves issues about how changesto a document can be represented, and how a computer system can support communicationabout changes among co-authors.


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Virtual environments for collaboration

Traditionally, research on computer-mediated communication has focused on text as acommunication modality for distributed synchronous or asynchronous work.The Internet haspaved the way for multimodal collaboration across distances, and for the development ofvirtual worlds in which participants can interact through spatial navigation. In this project, wehave investigated how virtual environments can be designed to support professionalcollaboration (Lenman, 1999a; b; Hedman & Lenman, 1999; see also Chapter 2), and studiedmore general issues about the role of different modalities in collaborative tasks. In Chapter 7,Eva-Lotta Sallnäs gives an overview of a series of experiments to address these issues. Animportant part of the work has focused on the potentials of haptic feedback, i.e. givingparticipants in virtual environments a possibility to use the touch modality in communicativeand collaborative tasks.

Virtual environments can also use plain text as the main communication modality. A well-known example is MUD games where participants navigate in a virtual world through textcommands. Recently, MUDs have also been used for professional purposes, e.g. for learning,education and shared access to information. Chapter 8, by Teresa Cerratto, reports on a studyof the use of a MUD environment for teacher education. The textual interaction in theenvironment has been followed through several weeks, through different stages of an onlinecourse. The results show how the participants gradually develop their use of the environmentto serve as a medium for social interaction as well as task-oriented interaction.

Management and organisation of information in electronic communication

The increasing use of electronic mail for communication in workplaces has changed workpractices as well as contact patterns. When more and more tasks are performed via email, theusers are in need of strategies to handle the flow of messages. In a previous project, the issueof information overflow was dealt with by Ann Lantz (see Chapter 2), and these studiescontinued in the KnowHow programme as a part of Olle Bälter's doctoral thesis. Chapter 9gives an overview of his work, and includes also some studies that have been completed afterthe dissertation. The focus is how people deal with the electronic communication in twosettings: a technical development company and a healthcare organisation. In particular, themanagers' situation is in focus, as they are often receivers of much information and at thesame time must make priorities. Therefore, their strategies of email usage are of particularinterest. In a post-doctoral period at Lotus Development, Olle Bälter led the development of acomputer-based tool to prioritize among email messages.

Another side of the increasing communication is how users manage to keep coherence in theevolving flow of email messages. The strategy of quoting a previous message in a reply is aubiquitous one which has uniqute pragmatic and conversational properties. This issue hasbeen explored in an empirical study of email communication in Severinson Eklundh (1998).

Ongoing and future work

During the course of the KnowHow programme, network technologies have developedrapidly and spread to new user groups. Many new issues have emerged, and others are beingreformulated. The research group in KnowHow has built up a strong competence to take partin the development of collaborative technologies for human use. At present, the work inseveral of the KnowHow projects continues with other sources of funding.


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Doctoral work performed within the programme

In all, six doctoral students have been funded by the KnowHow programme. Some of themhave enjoyed shared funding with HMI or CID. Kristina Groth, Maria Normark, HenrryRodriguez, and Eva-Lotta Sallnäs are at present continuing their doctoral work, partly withinother Vinnova-funded projects.

The following is a list of theses produced.

Doctoral theses

Electronic mail in a working context (Olle Bälter, PhD 1998)

Computer support for collaborative reviewing of documents (Hee-Cheol Kim, PhD 2001)

Licentiate theses

Knowledge nets (Kristina Groth, 1999)

The World Wide Web as infrastructure for collaborative production of documents (HenrryRodriguez, June 2001)

Using technology for real-time coordination of work (Maria Normark, January 2002)

Master's theses

Kunskapsöverföring och kompetensutveckling i en distribuerad expertgrupp med hjälp avintranät (Maria Bonde, 1999)

Dokument för samarbete: En fallstudie av datoranvändning i tre organisationer (JonasBoquist, 1999)

Collaborations and contacts

The work within KnowHow has benefited greatly from collaboration and joint projects withthe HMI (Human-Machine Interaction) Graduate School. The HMI programme enabled us torecruit new doctoral students with a relevant background, and to fund additional activitieswithin the KnowHow themes.

The programme has also had close connections with the Centre for User-oriented IT Design(CID), NADA. The work described by Henrry Rodriguez in Chapter 5 originated in a CIDproject about Domain Help, which went on 1996-98. Subsequently, it became focused oncollaborative writing within the KnowHow group and the HMI school. CID has also, throughSören Lenman and Anders Hedman, taken part in the work on virtual environments forcollaboration. Guest professor John Bowers at CID has taken part as Kristina Groth’s assistantsupervisor and has contributed to the work described in Chapter 3.

Olle Bälter’s post-doctoral research was carried out at Lotus Development in Boston, USA.This contact, and in particular the collaboration with Candace Sidner has been very importantfor the work described in Chapter 9.

Through Teresa Cerratto (at the time post-doctoral researcher at IPLab) we have collaboratedwith the University of Linköping, Dept. of Communication Studies, in a project led by YvonneWaern and funded by KFB (cf. Chapter 8).

Maria Normark’s work on SOS Alarm was initiated within a project led by Bo Helgeson andhis group at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Ronneby.


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2. Knowledge exchange and competence developmentin global and local networksAnn LantzWithin companies and organisations, Internet has spread rapidly and has had a great impacton the distribution of information. This is true not only for local knowledge exchange but alsofor cases where an organisation is geographically situated at different sites.

The overall goal for this project has been to conduct longitudinal field studies of how Internetand intranet are used in the daily routines in knowledge oriented professions. This includeshow Internet and intranets influence the possibility of knowledge exchange among workers ina profession, how these processes develop and change over time and how the communicationvia Internet complements other forms of competence development.

The pre-study

As a pre-study, interviews were conducted with a group of knowledge professionals. Thequestions guiding the study were: How do experts use the electronic networks at their worksite? Does the electronic network function as a support for competence development andcommunication? How do the experts apprehend the electronic nets? Which metaphor is usedto describe the electronic nets? Ten experts working within the areas of research,development, and information were interviewed about their use of electronic nets forcommunication and knowledge exchange.

The results point to the fact that the experts are responsible for their own competencedevelopment. They use traditional ways to improve their competence by reading and takingpart in seminars, discussions and conferences, but they also use the net to search forinformation and to contact people. One way the expert can reach out to others withinformation is through a personal home page. How and why a home page is developed variesamong the respondents; some of the experts have chosen not to have a personal home pagebecause they experience a risk of communication overflow. In contrast to the experts at theuniversities, those working in companies cannot give out information as openly, and theyoften experience isolation. The internal net at companies is often experienced as beingsurrounded by walls that hinder an open exchange of information. These questions and theirconsequences are of interest for further research. The pre-study is described in Lantz &Severinson Eklundh (1999).

Case studies

The pre-study was followed by a number of case studies focusing on how the work contextinfluences the use of the electronic nets and how the net can be viewed and used as a tool forcollaboration. The following studies have been performed:

� Cooperation, communication and competence development – working over the border,Ann Lantz and Maria Bonde

� Psychological studies of knowledge creation through electronic networks, G. Balsvik

� Heavy users of email and the role of Internet, Ann Lantz

� 3D worlds as a platform for cooperation, Ann Lantz and Marc Giron


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Co-operation, communication and competence development - working over the borders

Study 1

A longitudinal study was performed of a group of collaborating experts working in differentcountries. The research questions concerned the experts’ choice of media for communicationduring co-operation, their development of common and shared competence, and developmentof a common ground. The group had the options of scheduled face-to-face meetings andseveral forms of mediated communication. A web site had been constructed to facilitate thegroup members’ communication and for spreading information.

A questionnaire was distributed to the group (n=173), and a follow up interview wasperformed (n=11). The results show that it is possible to build a web site where information isgathered and published by a lot of involved persons. This specific web site had manypurposes. It served as a common place for project participants, a place to build a commonground for newcomers or just to find specific information needed for the moment. Accordingto the respondents the site could be more adapted for visitors i.e. the general public. Onepurpose of the site was to facilitate discussion among project participants through an internalpart of the web site, but this effort failed. Many did not know that the internal part existed,and others tried to enter it but could not do so. The internal part of the web site wasaccordingly not a success. Distribution lists were constructed depending on whom to includein the discussion. Probably, email and distribution lists are sufficient to enable conversationamong the participants in the project, and if a synchronous communication channel is neededthere is always the telephone to use.

Co-operation mainly consisted in joint composition of documents that could be distributed viaemail, distribution lists or fax and then published on the web site as final reports. Thecommunication with eastern countries was sometimes troublesome both due to technicalproblems and to language problems. Also this communication demands an openness that isnot obvious to all participants.

The web site was developed by a firm in an eastern country who had the technicalresponsibility. The content of the web site was constructed by all the project sectors via theirreports and together with other information this was the responsibility of the secretariat.

The development of the web site must take into account the needs of many target groups. It iseasiest to see the usefulness for the project participants and the web site could be regarded asa tool for their professional competence development. However, there are several aspects ofcompetence that are intrinsically difficult to support via an electronic medium. This includessocial and learning competence and skills involving procedural and tacit knowledge.

An important factor is that it is not enough to present information only on a web site. Also acontact person or an expert on the specific topic should be easy to get in touch with. In theweb site described in this project report it might not have been clear to the project participantsthat one or several such contact persons really existed. The secretariat and the webmasterwere probably possible to contact but from the data collected it emerged that these personswere not contacted. For instance, not being able to enter the internal web site and havingsevere problems publishing a report might have been solved by just contacting one of thecontact persons.

The study was based on five different ways of collecting data: an interview with a informanti.e. a representant for the secretariat, the project’s own questionnaire, a questionnaire sent toall participants, a telephone interview with "critical" persons in the project and observations


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of the web site. Some of the interviewed persons had left the project during the time betweenthe questionnaire and the telephone interview. This is often the case when a study isperformed over an extended period of time (in this case several years). The interview studywas based on nine interviews and must therefore be regarded as merely providing examples ofthe situation for some participants in the project. It would be of interest to investigate a website that also has an active internal part, to get a picture of if and how such a site can become aplace for communication, co-operation and competence development at a distance.

Study 2

A study of intranet use among knowledge workers, geographically located at different siteswas performed. The research questions were: Can explicit knowledge transfer be supportedby intranets? Can transfer of tacit knowledge be supported by intranets that includecollaboration tools and/or a video link (assuming that transfer of tacit knowledge is donethrough participation in an activity)?

Interviews were performed with a group of experts working in two cities, one in Sweden andone in USA. The results show that an intranet can support knowledge sharing and competencedevelopment in a group of distributed experts, if the experts master the technology and sharepractices built up by working together face-to-face before the cooperation over the intranet.Also important is that the intranet is a tool that is actively used, so that it is an interestingplace that contains topical information. The intranet can support knowledge sharing andcompetence development, but the question still to be answered is to what level of depth. Theexperts in this study visited one another when a problem was felt to be of such a character thatthey needed a face-to-face discussion (Bonde, 1999).

Psychological studies of knowledge creation through electronic networksThe aim of this study was to get an understanding of how net based information technologicalmedia are used and integrated with the daily practice in knowledge- and information intensiveprofessions. Six journalists at newspapers/magazines published on the Internet wereinterviewed at their work sites. The aim of the interviews was to try to understand thejournalists’ opinions and attitudes towards learning, communicating and collaborating throughelectronic networks. The result showed that electronic mail is the communication tool usedmost frequently by these journalists. It is used for interviews, for information exchange andfor making a first contact. The study also indicated that web published papers could foster acloser relationship between the journalist and the reader (Balsvik, 1999).

Heavy users of email and the role of IntranetA field study was made, based on a questionnaire and interviews concerning how e-mail isused as a work tool for communication. Results from the questionnaire show that the usersreceiving and sending large numbers of mail are not the same subjects as those experiencingproblems with handling mail. Managers seem to experience problems to a larger extent thanother work groups.

Results from the interviews how that although the e-mail system is entered continuously thisis not experienced as disturbing other work activities, but rather as having a positive effect.The users' experience of problems correlates with the number of messages stored in the inbox.The users experience the time for handling mail as insufficient and give examples ofcommunication problems. Regardless of the number of messages in the inbox and if theyexperienced lack of time or not the users have difficulty organising stored messages intofolders and catalogues.


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As a complement to the previous studies of heavy email users a follow up questionnaire wasdistributed to previous respondents (n=10). An analysis of the longitudinal data show that thatexperienced problems with email decreased during the five years. The flow of messages wasconstant. The time for the respondents to reply an email message changed from immediatelyto in a day or even in a week depending on the complexity of the content of the message. Theexpected report on experience on Internet as an open and intranet as a closed net was notreported. Nor did the respondents feel a need for publishing reports on the electronic nets.This study is presented in Lantz (1999).

3D worlds as a platform for co-operation

Study 1

This study was performed in co-operation with the project Digital Worlds at CID, RoyalInstitute of technology in Stockholm. The aim of the study was to investigate what help isneeded by persons entering a 3D world the first time. Ten subjects were participating in anexperiment. Preliminary results show that although the subjects were experienced computergame players and computer users, navigating and communicating in a 3D world was notintuitive.

Meetings in a distributed group of experts comparing Face-to-Face, Chat and CollaborativeVirtual Environment (CVE) have been observed. The focus was on the potential CVE’s havefor work meetings and for a common ground for geographically spread experts in onedomain.

Research question concerns the difference between face-to-face-, chat-, and CVE-meetings onthe sub topics: efficiency, communication, technique, enjoyment, and, competencedevelopment.

A small group of experts were observed during their work meetings. Six of the groups’scheduled meetings were held three times in a chat environment and three times in a CVE.Results suggest that a Collaborative Virtual Environment meeting is more task oriented thanface-to-face meetings, and that avatars support turn taking and are enjoyable (Lantz, 2000).

Study 2

A study was performed with the research question: Is a three dimensional virtual environmenta useful tool for supporting excange of knowledge within human-computer interaction? Athree dimensional world was designed. The design was based on literature studies andinterviews with members of the target group. The world was then user tested, modified usingthe results of the tests and finally came to represent a prototype of this tool.

Interviews and user tests showed that this tool is interesting for the target group, but thatmore research has to be done to investigate what such three dimensional tools can give inaddition to traditional two dimensional tools. During both interviews and user tests severalideas and requirements were articulated by the target group. This influenced and contributedto a large extent to the design of the virtual world. Requirements about support were alsodiscussed. Examples of such requirements were about the need of an receptionist in the worldand clear instructions about how to navigate in the world (Giron, 2000).Several of the studies summarized above influenced the formulation of new researchquestions resulting in the projects ”IT-use and accessibility for communication in distributedgroups: a pre-study with the aim to base technology on the demand push from its users” and”Formal meetings – if the users have access and can integrate needed artefacts” funded byKFB and VINNOVA respectively.


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References

Balsvik, G. (1999) Electronic Networks and Knowledge Creation: A study of new learningperspectives related to the context of a media profession. Technical report TRITA-NA-P9911,NADA, November 1999.

Bonde, M. (1999) Kunskapsöverföring och kompetensutveckling i en distribueradexpertgrupp med hjälp av intranät. Technical report TRITA-NA-P9915, NADA, December1999.

Giron, M. (2000). An open three dimensional meeting place for exchange of knowledgewithin human-computer intraction. (In Swedish). Technical report No. 78. TRITA-NA-D0009, Royal Institute of technology, August, 2000.

Groth, K. & Lantz, A. (1997). Personliga hemsidor: funktion eller passion? In Proceedings ofSTIMDI'97 Linköping: IDA, Linköpings universitet. (pp.29-34) ISBN91-630-5870-7

Lantz, A. (1998). Knowledge exchange and competence development in global and localnetworks. Poster presented at ITS'98, HH Stockholm.

Lantz, A. (1998). Heavy users of electronic mail. International Journal of Human-ComputerInteraction. Vol. 10, No.4, pp.361-380.

Lantz, A. (1999) Use of email: Does it change over time? Technical report TRITA-NA-P9905, NADA, August 1999.

Lantz, A. (1999). Virtual Environments - Usability for distributed Small group meetings.Position paper presented at the Workshop Future directions in Virtual Environments II.November 11-12, 1999, Stockholm.

Lantz, A. (2001) Meetings in a distributed group of experts: Comparing face-to-face, chat andcollaborative virtual environments. Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 20, No.2,pp.111-118. Also available as Technical report TRITA-NA-P0001, NADA, KTH.

Lantz, A. & Severinson Eklundh, K. (1999). Communication and competence developmentvia electronic net works: a pre-study (in Swedish). Technical report TRITA-NA-P9903,NADA, April 1999.


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3. Studying information and knowledge exchange inorganizations

Kristina Groth

Introduction

The combined knowledge of the employees is in many cases considered to be the main assetof an organisation. The information that the knowledge is based upon can, to some extent, bestored and made available for everybody within the organisation. However, this is a rathertime consuming task, both for those who have to store the information and for those that willsearch for and try to interpret it. In many cases the information will not be enough to be usedas is intended.

On the other hand, several studies show that internal communication in an organisation is ofgreat importance and that the best source of information is a colleague in the localorganisation (c.f. Bannon 1986). Based on this assumption, an alternative to storing theinformation itself could be to instead support the awareness of “who-knows-what”. The timeconsuming task to store a large amount of information is reduced, and the information andknowledge can easily be mediated through other persons. Of course, knowledge can be lostbecause of people leaving the organisation, but this can, to some extent, be taken care of byother means, e.g., job rotation.

Four studies have been conducted, within the framework of this research programme, in orderto investigate how people can be supported in finding things out by asking others. In the firststudy personal home pages on the web were investigated in respect to what people include ontheir personal home pages and how such pages are used. In the second study a simple webbased prototype was implemented in order to investigate if knowledge could be rated byrelating a topic to what a person can perform using that knowledge. In the third and fourthstudies, one small at a development company and one larger at a consultancy firm,information and knowledge sharing was further explored through ethnographic methods. Thethree first studies have been reported in “Knowledge Net–A Support for Sharing KnowledgeWithin an Organisation” (Groth 1999).

Personal home pages on the World Wide Web

Internet technology is relatively cheap and easy to learn and has therefore, through the WorldWide Web, become a powerful tool for communication and information sharing among smallorganisations (through Internet), groups (through intranets) and even individuals (throughpersonal home pages). One advantage with the Web is that it is not intrusive. Erickson (1996)points out that an important difference between finding personal information using the Weband using direct contact with a person through email or phone is that the person searching forinformation is not obligated to the person giving the information, e.g., if you ask a person fora paper then that person might expect you to read and comment on it.

On personal home pages on the Internet people usually describe who they are and what theydo. The pages contain information about individuals, and are created, in most cases, by theindividuals themselves. In this study we wanted to explore how personal home pages in anorganisation were used and if this could have any implications for supporting people in


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finding other persons to ask and to discuss a problem with (Groth 1998, Groth & Lantz 1997,Groth 1996).

It was found that the information on the personal home pages was mainly intended forcolleagues and that it describes, in most cases, what “projects” the owner of the page isinvolved in and what areas he or she is interested in (see also Bly, Cook, Bickmore, Churchill& Sullivan 1998). The subjects usually presented information about the areas of which theyhave knowledge rather than their opinions on different topics (although this may also befound on some pages). They did not seem to object to presenting what they knew, wanted todo, and had been doing. Contact information was also common on the personal home pages.

The subjects in the study also expressed that they found the information included on otherpersons’ home pages to be of interest. This, together with the finding that some of the subjectshad been contacted about their information on their home page, indicates that there is acommon interest in personal information. In this regard, many people may, consciously orunconsciously, have used personal home pages as a way of finding things out.

The first study thus shows that individuals are comfortable in sharing information about whatthey know. They are also willing to supply others with this information and information abouthow they may be contacted. The study also shows that computer supported systems (in thiscase simple personal web pages) may help in finding others.

Rating knowledge

One important part of a knowledge net was to be able to, together with a reference to aperson, specify what and how much a person knows about the topic. Therefore, a prototypewas developed to investigate if and how knowledge can be rated when a person is supplyinginformation about his or her knowledge. The prototype was developed using the Web as aplatform.

The study was conducted in two different organisations. People were instructed to enter nameand definitions of topics that they knew well or wanted to know more about. They were alsoinstructed to rate their knowledge about the topics using two different methods. In the firstmethod people rated their knowledge using a scale between 1 and 7, where 1 corresponded tothe situation that no one within the organisation knew less about the topic, and 7 correspondedto the situation that no one within the organisation knew more about the topic. In the secondmethod people rated their knowledge about a topic by relating the knowledge to what theycould do with it. Each person described an activity they could perform using the knowledge,an audience involved in this activity, and a setting in which the activity could take place.People were asked to think aloud when they used the prototype and each session were taperecorded. People were also shortly interviewed after each session.

It was found that the activity method was somewhat difficult to use when rating a topic, butrelatively easy to use when interpreting ratings that others had made. The main reason for thedifficulties was that people found it difficult to find a setting, and sometimes also an audience,coupled to the activity they entered into the prototype. The subjects enjoyed the sessionswhen they were using the prototype and a large number of topics were entered and rated.However, the conditions in which the prototype was used makes it difficult to draw anyconclusions on how such an application would be used in a real life situation.

This study shows that it is difficult to rate knowledge, at least using the two simple methodsoutlined above. The results of the study imply that the practical problems of rating knowledge


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and entering this meta information in a system may well outweigh the benefits of being ableto search or sort information according to quantitative parameters.

Finding things out

For a number of years, researchers in a variety of communities have been involved inquestions about organisational knowledge. Some researchers regard the knowledge and skillsof an organisation’s members to be one of the prime resources, but one that is very hard toaccount for and manage. Some researchers have looked to technical means for externalisingand recording member’s knowledge (c.f. Ackerman & McDonald 1996). Others talk about“organisational memory” and the management challenges there are once one takes the notionseriously (Walsh & Ungson 1991).

These topics have attracted a range of contributions, including critical analyses (Bannon &Kuutti 1996) and proposals for supportive technology (McDonald & Ackerman 2000). Latelysome researchers have been concerned to study sharing of knowledge and expertise in anorganisation empirically and documenting the methods used by members to find things out(c.f. McDonald & Ackerman 1998).

In 1998 we initiated a smaller ethnographic study at a company developing software for thetelecommunication industry. We wanted to investigate how people identify whom to talk towhen they have a problem they need to discuss. In the late 1999 we initiated a longerethnographic study at a consultancy organisation, based on the same questions as in the pre-study (Groth 2000, Groth & Bowers 2001). Both studies are described below.

A pre-study of knowledge exchangeA limited ethnographic study of a company developing software applications for thetelecommunication industry, CompD, was carried out. A group of eleven software developers,all organised under the same section, were studied for a period of two months in May 1998.The main purpose with the study was to find out how people act when they need to findanother person to ask or discuss problems with, how aware people are of each others’activities and who they choose to ask about different matters.

Results

In many cases the subjects solved their problems within the group. The need to ask someoneoutside the group or project seemed to arise less often in the every day work. On the otherhand, most people interviewed were not aware of whether similar activities were or had beenperformed, or if other people were working with similar software tools or programminglanguages, in other departments in the local company, or in other companies within the worldwide organisation. The study showed that most people in the group had a rather limitedpersonal contact net. They knew whom to ask in the corridor or among people participating inthe same project. Only a few of the persons studied had contacts outside the department.

Different barriers for sharing information across local companies that were part of the sameworld wide organisation were identified, but the reciprocity within the department is socially,and not individually, “distributed” within the organisation. No market of favours wasobserved among the subjects. There was a kind of social understanding to help each other andbeing helped by others, at least within the department.

There was usually plenty of activity in the corridor of the group studied. People walkedaround in the corridor in order to find specific persons, or to find someone to talk to. The way


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people walked around in the corridor can be compared to browsing. When browsing you arelooking for something and you may find other interesting things along the way.

How aware people are of others’ availability depends to some extent on how they areorganised in the building. In this study the “corridor office” was used with implications suchas that people could see other persons sitting across the corridor, that they could walk downthe corridor and see people in their office, that they could see groups of people moving in thecorridor on their way to a meeting or for lunch, and that they could see when people wantedprivacy because the office door was closed.

This pre-study clearly showed that the process involved when people search for others to askis quite complicated. Not surprisingly, whom people turn to appears to depend on who is thereand available at the moment. What the problem is about also affects whom people turn to, aswell as location, i.e., people rather ask persons sitting nearby.

A field study of knowledge exchangeIn October 1999 an ethnographic study of knowledge exchange within a technically focusedconsultancy company was initiated. The study was conducted, with a variety of intensity,until the fall of 2000.

The company studied, CompC, is a local consultancy company that is part of a larger Swedishconsultancy corporation with similar consultancy companies spread all over the country.CompC describes itself, on its public Web pages, as active in the fields of precisionmechanics, electronics, computer science, and the combination of these. At the beginning ofthe study there were about 100 employees within CompC. Two critical organizationalchanges occurred at CompC during the study. First, CompC bought a smaller mechanicalengineering company with 20 people, and as a result CompC was itself considerably re-organised. Second, the management made the decision to split CompC in two parts, oneincluding the software and hardware divisions and one including the mechanical engineeringdivision. This was a controversial change for some employees and had the consequence thatfour of the eight original section managers resigned from the organization. Such dramaticchanges make CompC an ideal case study from the point of view of “organizationalknowledge”. Organizational changes such as the ones at CompC can affect the office ecology,e.g., people might change office, the administrative organisation, e.g, people can changedepartment or group, and even the project organisation, e.g., new people can be added to theproject.

The study is based on over a year’s contact with CompC. A significant amount of time hasbeen spent at the organization’s premises engaged in ethnographic observation, including,e.g., visiting a variety of meetings, and shadowing a number of persons in the moment-by-moment conduct of their work. In addition, some section and project managers, as well asconsultants who do not have a management role, have been interviewed in an open-endedstyle, the discussions being tape-recorded and transcribed.

Results

The most important finding from the field study at CompC is that whom people choose to ask,how people are asked etc, depends on the situation. Who is available at the moment, whohappens to be around, what kind of problem has occurred, and so on, affects how people findthings out. The awareness of other persons’ availability and activities are central. Therefore,the most suitable way of supporting people in finding things out might simply be to use


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regular technology for computer supported cooperative work, such as support for awarenessof availability and activities, instead of a specific knowledge management application.Other findings from the field study are that

� projects are thoroughly documented and stored both electronically and in binders, but thedocumentation is only available for those who participate in the project, which maycomplicate the dissemination of knowledge within the organisation,

� project documentation is used, for example, when identifying what has happened when anerror occurs, as grounds for deciding how to do a change request, and as examples forother projects that has not yet been started. Thus, project documentation is an importantsource of generally applicable information,

� the office ecology used in CompC, with people grouped around projects butadministratively organised by sections, facilitates the communication within projects,

� when finding things out people usually turn to persons within the project or with longexperience within CompC, but also, surprisingly, to people that just happen to be around,

� section managers are responsible for knowing, and also do know, what knowledge andavailability their section members have,

� the intranet used within CompC is considered to be of little use because of poorlystructured and out-dated information, but it is, at the same time, considered to contain a lotof useful information. The intranet is also seen as a potential for presenting personalinformation, such as on what project people work, etc,

� knowledge about other projects, people’s whereabouts, and other things are not onlyexchanged during formal meetings, but also during informal meetings such as coffee orlunch breaks.

Design issues

As a natural next step we would like to look at technical means for supporting the processinvolved in order to enhance the exchange of knowledge in an organisation. To supportpeople in knowing about others’ doings will make people more aware of what activities otherpeople are involved in (i.e. what experiences and competencies they have) and who isavailable at the moment when a question arises.

At the beginning of this project the idea was to develop an application where informationabout people’s knowledge was to be stored (Groth 1997). However, based on the results fromall four studies we would like to develop and evaluate technical support that focuses onpeople's awareness of others' availability and activities. The conclusions from earlier studiespoint out two main design strategies. The first is that so called awareness systems can be moresuitable than so called knowledge systems in helping individuals to find things out. Thesecond is that using “light weight technology” is to be preferred so as to avoid that the botherexceeds the benefit of using the technology, e.g., time consuming handling when using anapplication. In our case, we feel that considering light weight approaches which add value toexisting systems would be a better strategy than extensive technical solutions withorganisational redesign in turn. These design strategies are supported by the findingsFitzpatrick (n.d.) made in a study of introducing new technology in an organisation.


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References

Ackerman, M. S. & McDonald, D. W. (1996), Answer Garden 2: Merging OrganizationalMemory with Collaborative Help, Proceedings of CSCW’96, ACM Press.

Bannon, L. (1986), Helping Users Help Each Other, in ’User Centered System Design, NewPerspectives on Human-Centered Interaction’, LEA.

Bannon, L. & Kuutti, K. (1996), Shifting Perspectives on Organizational Memory: FromStorage to Active Remembering, Proceedings of HICSS-29, IEEE.

Bly, S., Cook, L., Bickmore, T., Churchill, E. & Sullivan, J. W. (1998), The Rise of PersonalWeb Pages at Work, Summary of CHI’98, ACM Press.

Erickson, T. (1996) The World Wide Web as a Social Hypertext, Communications of theACM vol. 39(1), 15–17.

Fitzpatrick, G. Bootstrapping Expertise Sharing, draft chapter submitted to BeyondKnowledge Management: Managing Expertise, Ackerman, M. and Wulf, V. (eds), MIT Press(http://www.dstc.edu.au/Research/Projects/EWP/Papers/).

Groth, K. (1996), Writing Personal Information on the World Wide Web, European writingconferences, Barcelona. (IPLab-122)

Groth, K. (1997), The Use of Knowledge Nets for Collaboration within Organizations: aTheoretical Background, Technical report TRITA-NA-P9703, NADA. (IPLab-127)

Groth, K. (1998), Personal Home Pages on the World Wide Web–a Simple Version of aKnowledge Net?, Trends of Communication, (4), 47–59. (IPLab-140)

Groth, K. (1999), Knowledge Net–A Support for Sharing Knowledge Within an Organisation,Licentiate thesis, Dep. of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science, Royal Institute ofTechnology. (IPLab-156)

Groth, K. (2000) A Case Study of Knowledge Sharing (part one), Technical report TRITA-NA-P0016, NADA. (IPLab-176)

Groth, K. & Bowers, J. (2001) On finding things out: Situating organisational knowledge inCSCW, Proceedings of ECSCW 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers. (IPLab-196)

Groth, K. & Lantz, L. (1997) Personliga hemsidor – funktion eller passion?, Användbarhet imorgon – funktion eller passion, pages 29-34, STIMDI, Linköping. (IPLab-139)

McDonald, D. W. & Ackerman, M. S. (1998), Just Talk to Me: A Field Study of ExpertiseLocation, Proceedings of CSCW’98, ACM Press.

McDonald, D. W. & Ackerman, M. S. (2000), Expertise Recommender: A FlexibleRecommendation System and Architecture, Proceedings of CSCW’00, ACM Press.

Walsh, J. P. & Ungson, G. R. (1991), Organizational Memory, Academy of ManagementReview 16(1), 57–91.


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4. Using Technology for Real Time Coordination ofWork

Maria NormarkWork in control rooms, or so-called Centers of coordination, places demands both on humansand technology. The people working there have to be able to make quick decisions as well asbe alert during less busy times. The work has to be coordinated within the group, since theoperators are much depending on each other's work. This places special demands on thetechnology; it should be fast, trustworthy and easy to manipulate so that the complexity of thework is reduced. This type of work has been a source of interest in the research area ofComputer Supported Cooperative Work, especially so since the needs for real-timecoordination is great in these settings. In centers of coordination there is a great need forcommunication through visibility, overhearing and real-time updates. Typical work is airtraffic control or emergency call-centers. The main goal is to understand how practitionersbridge the time criticalness, how technology is applied and what it could mean for the designof new coordinative technologies.

The CSCW research area is multi-disciplinary where a rich variation of methods and theoriesare included. The current theoretical focus in this project is on ethnomethodology, culturestudies, and human-centered design. The main method for collecting data is ethnography, aqualitative method that means that the researcher tries to understand the activities from withinby being there as much as possible. Video recordings, tape recordings and notes whileinterviewing and observing the practitioners was used. To understand the technology in thesetting, manuals, blue prints etc were studied. The purpose is to understand details that willonly come forward through a thorough investigation of work, finding issues that may even behidden to the practitioners themselves and how these issues may affect design. During the lastyears the study of SOS Alarm has resulted in a Licentate Thesis, (Normark, 2002). Thisethnographic workplace study was inspired by ethnomethodological perspectives as well asearlier field studies of work and technology use. Its main results were a description of thework practice and technology at two centers, implications for design of a new computer aideddispatch system that is currently developed at SOS Alarm and general design ideas for controlrooms.

Research background

A fundamental part of any social activity is that we orient ourselves in a social way. Simpleexamples of how we physically orient ourselves is the way we avoid bumping into each otherat the pavement or the way we orient ourselves to show that we are queuing. We also uselanguage and signs to socially inform others of our intentions and opinions, etc. The way wechoose to orient, adjust, express etc ourselves is largely dependent on our culture. Greetings,for example, differ between countries, cultures and groups, some do nose rubbing, someshake hands, others give a high five and so on. The important issue is that we make ourexpressions of social interaction intelligible to others in a way that is dependent on ourcommon cultural knowledge. These cues often involve artifacts. One assumption in thisresearch is that professional settings have their own cues and signs that symbolize certainimportant information for the group.


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Earlier, machines were generally large, noisy, heavy and easier to read off the status, considerfor example the typewriter. One usually did not carry it around; it stood where it stood, oneknew what it was used for and it was easily heard through doors. These features could be usedas cues by others to understand what was happening. Today, when we use computers forvarious kinds of tasks it is much more complex to understand from the setting what ishappening and what a tool is used for. It is also more difficult to manipulate the computerizedmaterial in a way so that others understand what one wants to highlight or put emphasis on.One cannot make dog ear foldings or underline, for example, on a computer screen as easilyand as obviously as with paper. And if one does, it is difficult to be certain that one’scollaboration partner knows that feature in the program and will notice it. It is thus importantto study how people in complex work use computers and how they deal with them to achieveinteraction.

At SOS Alarm, a special focus has been the cues that are needed in order for an operator to beable to handle a case, to make sense of it, and how it is presented to them. How are artifacts ingeneral and the computer system in particular part of the sense-making work?

In order to learn more about what role the computers play for interaction in the work ofemergency operators the focus was the following:

How is real-time (as-it-comes) coordination done in emergency dispatch and how arethe features of the computer system vs. other tools a part of it?

An assumption was that a work setting is an arena where the actors to a large extent dependon tools as coordinative mediators (i.e. notes, PM's, documentation, orders, forms), and thatthe common goal makes it necessary to coordinate. How are social mechanisms inscribed indifferent artifacts and how does a competent member interpret different objects as resourcesfor social interaction?

There is a distinction between;

� cooperation: working for a common benefit

� collaboration: working jointly

� coordination: working interdependently, adjusting to the immediate work of others

The perspective was thus on individuals rather than groups or organizations. One question iswhether all work is social or not. The assumption was that most, if not all, human conduct issocially oriented. However, not all work is coordinative. In the following quote, Schmidt thebalance between individual and cooperative work in the sense that can describe coordinativework:

"While work is always socially situated and socially organized, the very process is notalways cooperative in the sense that it requires and involves multiple actors who arethus interdependent in their work." (Schmidt, 1994)

Previous case study: Air traffic control coordination

The issues presented above were first dealt with in a study of air traffic controllers(Berndtsson & Normark, 1999; Berndtsson & Normark, 2000). The study took place inCopenhagen, at Kastrup airport. Later on a short comparative study at Shannon airport inLimerick was made. The controllers could not physically control the aircraft in the sky, butgave directions through radio communication with the pilots. The controllers were directing


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the aircraft (gave instructions about heading, altitude and speed) continuously in order to keepsafety distance between them. The airspace was divided into sectors, and thus was also theresponsibility for the aircraft, being in and moving in between. In order to keep track of thecurrent flights in a sector, each flight was represented by a paper flight strip, which was handannotated with the latest orders given. Since the aircraft usually crossed many sectors during aflight, coordination of the current activities to the adjacent sectors that would be responsiblefor the aircraft in a near future was necessary. One way to distribute information about thecurrent state to a colleague in an adjacent sector was to broadcast the activities through avideo/audio link, which was noted during the field studies at Copenhagen ATC and ShannonATC. There were several important features of this system:

� It was unobtrusive

� It communicated a manageable amount of information

� It supported a real time view of the state

� It made use of artifacts that are already there for local communication

Current case study - SOS Alarm AB

After the workplace studies of coordination and technology in air traffic control, a field studyat SOS Alarm AB followed (Normark, 2002; Helgeson, Lundberg, Normark, Pettersson, &Crabtree, 2000). SOS Alarm is the company that receives all calls made to the emergencyphone number 112 and they are responsible for dispatch and monitoring of ambulances andredirecting emergency calls to for example the police. The focus in our studies was on howartifacts and technology are used in order to cooperate. The air traffic control study gaveexamples of the "former" way of working in control rooms, using paper flight strips, radar,and a vast range of sources, towards which the controllers orient themselves. The SOS studywas an example of a newer computerized setting, where most artifacts were put into onesystem and one screen, one focus of attention. One reason for our studies at SOS Alarm wasthat a new system is under development. A main change would be the national databaseinstead of a local database at each center. In theory at least it would be possible to answer an112 call regardless of where it is made.

SOS Alarm has 20 centers covering Sweden. Besides receiving 112-calls they also havecommercial customers, like alarm companies and they sell on-duty call services for e.g. realestate companies. The operators are consequently handling a wide range of cases, whichshould be analyzed, documented, coordinated, monitored, and so on. One focus of interest inour study was how they coordinate the information and tasks between them and how thetechnology supports that work.

The operators' main tool was the computer-aided dispatch system called CoordCom. Throughthe system they handled all communication: telephone, fax, mobitex, radio. They also did alldocumentation in it. The system was connected to different databases, both the local ones: allaction plans, ongoing cases, resources, contact information and also to a central database: thetelephone subscription record that generates addresses from the caller. At some centers inSweden there was a Map Computer in use as well. This computer was mainly used to trackthe units in the area through the GPS system in the ambulance units. The system could also beused to look up addresses, but is usually considered to slow for that.


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An incoming 112 call is answered with "SOS 112, what has occurred". That was the firstthing the operator tried to decide. Is it a case for SOS or not? What kind of priority should beassigned to the case (1-4)? Do I need to ask a fellow operator to listen in to the call? Whiledeciding what kind of accident it was, the operators worked with CoordCom to document andlabel the accident. The second kind of information was the address of the incident. Afterputting in the address, a colleague could start dispatching (if the case is priority 1) while thereceiving operator could collect more information about driving directions, development ofthe accident, etc from the caller. When the call was finished, it was the dispatching operators'responsibility to handle the case. S/he chose among the resources that are suggested byCoordCom, based on proximity of the ambulance station. After calling the ambulanceverbally, the operator sent out a mobitex message, a text message that got printed out in theambulance, containing the case information that was entered into CoordCom. The mobitexsystem was also used to send automatic status reports from the paramedics to the SOSoperator. The dispatching operator then followed the advancement of the ambulance or rescuevehicle through these status reports. S/he would also may help coordinate informationbetween different vehicles, but the dispatching and monitoring could be handled without anyverbal communication between the operator and the units.

The division of labor between the call-taking operator and the ambulance dispatcher gave thefollowing issues as areas of concern.

The call-taking operator needed to

� Make decisions about priority and be sure that the dispatcher understand the decision.

� Document the case on a form-like computerized case-file which has a very limited space.

� Be able to motivate the decisions to the dispatcher

The dispatcher needed to

� Grasp the background to the decisions so that s/he is sure of them

� maintain a good relationship to paramedics, so that they are not dispatched when notreally needed

One general conclusion that was drawn from the field study is that the system handles factswell. Facts are, however, not independent of the context. Impressions, values and localknowledge are important and are unconditionally a part of the SOS Alarm operators' work.The computerized system, as it looked and what seems to be realistic with current technology,should be considered as a communication and information storing system. It should not takeany responsibility for categorization and analysis of the case. One conclusion drawn from thatis that the case files, as they were observed, are not complete. They lacked importantinformation, conditions that were not considered as facts and thus not entered into the system.There were some cases when the information in the system was sufficient, but in many of thecases, the operators had to coordinate verbally. There were no cases in the study where theverbal coordination was a problem, but, when considering a new setting where temporarycoordination can be arranged at distances, problems may arise. One of the main potentialproblems is the time constraint. When the operators needed to coordinate verbally they couldsmooth the flow by seeing what the other one was doing. They had an overview of the currentsituation at the center and the actions of others. This would be more difficult, but notunsolvable, in a distance coordination arrangement. The goal was not to remove verbal


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coordination, but to consider when it could be replaced by a more nuanced case fileinformation.

The account of the work of the receiving operator and the dispatcher and the CoordComsystem gave several different results. The system was founded upon two older tools, namelythe old switchboard and a paper form. The interface was thus not effectively used; theoperators worked with only a part of the screen so that the full potential of the interface wasnot used. The form-oriented documentation part called for keeping the information short, tooshort for some occasions. The system's categorization method was based on a relationshipbetween the priority of the case and the type of injury that the person in need had. This wasoften worked around since it was not only physical facts but conditions of the caller (is s/hefor example vague or upset), the context of the accident (was it a public place), the age of theinjured, and many other reasons that decided the priority. Also, in rescue cases, it was onlythe facts and not the underlying reasons that were documented. If this design would bemaintained, there would be a potential problem when cases are supposed to be coordinatedbetween centers and this important information would be lacking.

In the two studies of centers of coordination, the preliminary conclusion has been drawn thatfour aspects of centers of coordination, closely related to each other, are useful for describingthe work that is going on there. These are

� working with severe time constraints

� distributed work

� complexity because of the unpredictability

� need of real-time information exchange

The interaction with technology in centers of coordination is very much formed by these fourcriteria. Problems that occur in the work can often be derived to one or more of these criteria.The more intensely they are considered in the design of tools, the smoother the work seems toget.

References

Berndtsson, J., & Normark, M. (1999). The Coordinative Functions of Flight Strips: AirTraffic Control Revisited. Paper presented at the In the proceedings of theInternational ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, Phoenix,Arizona, USA.

Berndtsson, J., & Normark, M. (2000). The CATCH project - A Field Study of Air TrafficControl in Copenhagen.: CTI Working Paper no. 57, Center for Tele-Information,Technical University of Denmark.

Helgeson, B., Lundberg, J., Normark, M., Pettersson, M., & Crabtree, A. (2000). Redovisningav uppdrag i SOS Alarm AB:s Nova 2005 Teknik projekt (541 00 010) . Ronneby,Sweden: Institutionen för arbetsvetenskap (IAR): BTH och SOS Alarm AB.

Normark, M. (2002). Using technology for real-time coordination of work; A study of workand artifact use in the everyday activities of SOS Alarm. Licentiate Thesis TRITA-NA-0122, ISBN 91-7283-239-8, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Schmidt, K. (1994). Modes and Mechanisms of Interaction in Cooperative Work (87-550-1876-9). Roskilde, Denmark: Risø National Laboratory.


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5. Using the WWW for collaboration: writing andsharing information

Henrry Rodríguez

Introduction

The Internet has paved the way for collaboration by letting users easily share objects andaccess to information, e.g. documents. Nowadays, the World Wide Web (WWW) hasprogressed beyond the capacity to display static information so that interactivity amongmembers in a group can be supported. The possibility to communicate at a distance hasincreased and novel ways of collaboration have ensued.

Since 1996 we have tried to broaden our understanding of the use of the Web as aninfrastructure for collaboration. This part of the KnowHow project has focused attention oncollaborative writing and sharing information. A set of tools have been developed which areoriented to support small, distributed, asynchronous group collaboration around shareddocuments. The prototypes have been developed iteratively with help of users’ participation.

The main research issue has been how small or middle size groups work collaboratively todiscuss, annotate and revise a document on the WWW. Special emphasis has been put on theneed to support a dialogue among collaborators. A number of longitudinal case studies havebeen carried out, and the tools have been developed using the results of observation on theusers' interaction with the systems. The studies indicate that the WWW can successfully beused for sharing documents and discussing their content. Also, asynchronous text-basedcommunication was shown to be an effective medium for collaborative writing. Thedevelopment of the prototypes has given general experiences on the development ofcollaborative web-based tools. These experiences suggest that such tools should be designedin collaboration with the users. A method for the design of such tools “from the inside” hasemerged from our experiences.

A collection of Web-based collaborative tools

The tools that we have developed are:1. The DHS1. The system is oriented to support two common collaborative writing

activities. 1) discussion of the content of a document and 2) annotation intended torevise the text of a document. This system has been used and evaluated in11 casestudies by 133 participants in an educational environment. Initially, this tool wasevaluated in a pilot study. Later longitudinal studies (1997-2002) using these toolswere carried. The methods used to evaluate the system were interviews, survey, and thedata submitted by the users while the system was in use.

2. Col.laboració. The system is oriented to support communication among co-authors duringa collaborative task and to share the document being written. The system has been used forthe realization of eight collaborative writing tasks within groups of 2-9 co-authors. Thesystem has been evaluated in case studies in which participants have worked in co-located

1

The DHS was originally a project started at the Centre for User-Oriented IT Design at NADA, KTH in 1996


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and distributed mode. The evaluation of the system has been supported by interviews andsurvey. Also the comments added by co-author using the system have been analysed.

3. Col.lecció: This system supports the common feature of web browsers; book marking. Oneof the main novelties of this system is that it allows for web annotations. This system hasbeen used in only one case study within an internationally distributed group of 6 people.

A licentiate thesis “Using the WWW as infrastructure for collaborative production ofdocuments” (Rodríguez 2001) was written under this project. A poster with partial results waspresented in the international conference “European computer supported collaborative work”,ECSCW 1999.

In the following sections we will describe in detail these tools, as well as the studiesevaluating them.

The DHS system

The Domain Help System (DHS) project started in 1996. The original idea was to develop anew help system that could present information according to an iceberg model of information.The idea of this approach was that initially only a minimum of information is presented,namely that information which an experienced user could request for, and consecutively moreinformation would be available on demand. Like an iceberg the system shows only tips ofinformation, but an entire mountain of information can be accessed as we descend deeper(Gustafsson et al. 1997). An important requirement for this project was that a user should beable to easily add knowledge items to the system while he/she was interacting with it. Wetherefore decided to have a simple representation of knowledge items in the form of writtencomments or annotations.

The result of that project was a Web-based tool that, generally speaking, lets users select aWeb document from a list and attach a comment to it. These comments are availableimmediately to all the users. The comments are presented in chronological order, whichallows for the development of a dialogue. Combining a) the possibility to make an annotationor comment on a Web document, and b) the possibility to create a dialogue among thoseusing the tool, we decided to use the DHS as a discussion or forum tool and simultaneously asan annotation tool for document production

The DHS letsusers shareWebdocuments andmakecomments onthem. Thecomments arealso shared bythe users. Adomain, in theDHS project,is a site on theWeb thatdivides theWeb browser

Content Frame

Comment Frame

Command frame

Hyperlinks


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into four frames which display (see figure 1): 1) a hypertext link list, 2) the content of themost recently activated link in the form of a document, 3) the comments users have made sofar on that document, and 4) a button that pop-ups a comment-input window. The documentsheld by the system are included in the domain by the domain’s editor. Comments could berelated to the content, the formatting, the design of the document, or even be a response to aprevious comment.

Paste button

Annotation

Orig

inal

text

FIGURE 2. The Add comment window divided into two frames. The left one contains the document aboutto be commented. The right frame contains the input field and the title of the document to be commented.Note the paste button and that the reviewer makes an interlinear correction to the text.

To add a comment on the current document, (the one that is displayed in the content-frame)the user has to click on the “Add comment” button. This will open a separate window (seefigure 2) in which users can write their name or nickname and the text of their comment. Thiswindow allows users to paste the original text in an input area, so that they can have access tothe original text and edit it When the comment is submitted the Add comment windows isclosed automatically, and the comment is appended immediately to the comment-frame.Email messages are sent automatically to the author(s) of the document when a comment ismade to it. The comment is attached to the email and it is labelled in such a way that thereceiver could recognise that the message is sent by the DHS system. Also, a commentcounter tag is placed beside the links in the index-frames to indicate how many comments hadbeen made when the session started, for example: Document-A (3 comments).

The DHS has a logging function in order to provide information about the users’ actions inthe system, which documents they visited, how long time they spent on each document, howlong time it took for a comment to be written, how long time the user spent in one session,etc.

Case Studies in which the DHS was evaluatedThe system has been used since 1997 in an educational context. It has been used in traditionalclassroom in which students could share their homework and make comments to each others’homework. In one of the contexts the system was used as a discussion tool around Webdocuments. In the other context was used as an annotation system for sections of text


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presented as Web documents in a writing course. These annotations were mainly suggestionsfrom the reviewer to change the original text. In table 1 we can see a summary of cases inwhich the system was used.

Table 1. Cases in which the DHS has been used

Course Task Time used Participants Comments

/Words

Methods

Theoretical

course

Discussion of the content

of a document

6 issues

1997-2002

85 in group of

15-20 people

342

/32000

Survey, comments

submitted, log file analysis

Writing

course

Suggestion to change

(style, misspelling, etc.)

the text of a document

5 issues

1997-2000

48 (Ph.D)in

group of 12-15

people

287

/4600

Survey, Interview,

comments submitter, log

file analysis

An interesting finding was that participants in the discussion context were focusing theircomments on the original text, even if they were following the discussion that was created inthe comments. Also, it was observed that one comment could make a dual reference in itsbody; one to the original text and the other to the on going discussion. We suggest that this ismainly because the system aims to focus the users’ attention on the document. Indeed adocument in the system plays a big role. First the table of content presented in the index frameshows all the documents in the domain. The content of the document is presented in the up-right frame (comments below it) which gives a hierarchic structure. Furthermore, when acomment is added the document content is aligned to the input area where the participant willwrite his/ her comment. Another possible reason why participants focus on the document isthat no threading is used to present the comments. So topics not related to the documents aremore difficult to develop.

From the data collected in the writing course, an analysis of how the comments were writtenwas made. We found that few change representation artefacts could be satisfactorilyexpressed using plain text. Furthermore, these representations might be weak and misleading.Thus, a common system or standard for change representation needs to be created amongreviewers and writers. Reviewers clearly needed to have access to the original text on thescreen, both when commenting and when making corrective annotations.

As a Web-tool in the traditional classroom, the DHS constitutes a valuable supplement to theusual channels of communication. It is accessible from any computer with an Internetconnection, enabling students and teachers to work flexibly both in terms of time andlocation. Furthermore, it gives students a quick response to their work, avoiding the timelapses of scheduled lessons. The use of a simple Web-based tool that has taken shape on thebasis of users’ needs in traditional classrooms might be the key for the acceptance of Web-based tools in education.

Col•laboració

Collaborative writing is a common practice in work places and academic environments. Thepossibility to exchange documents through the Internet has paved the way for collaborationamong co-authors. To date, the tools available for collaborative writing have largely beenlimited to email and commenting support. However, communication, co-ordination andsharing information are factors of vital importance to succeed in a collaborative writing task.The World Wide Web provides a network infrastructure that can support those needs of co-


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authors. Few of the available co-writing systems are really used. This has been confirmed byan interview study (Kim & Severinson Eklundh, 1998) focused on collaborative writingpractices in academic settings. The results pointed especially at the importance ofcommunication among co-authors, and the need for a good network infrastructure for sharingcommon documents within a group. Against the background of these results, we havedeveloped a Web-based cooperation tool, Col•laboració, for distributed asynchronous workthrough the WWW. The perspective followed in the design differs from past studies ofcollaborative writing focused on writing strategies, co-authors' roles or document controlprocess (see e.g. Posner et al. 1992).

During the design we have concentrated on the following basic requirements:1. supporting interactive communication among co-authors2. a rapid understanding among co-authors of the changes that the text undergoes3. access to a good network infrastructure using the WWW

Document’

ssections

Standardsections

Index frame

Navigation bar through the comments

Command frame

Comment frame

Comment counter tag

Documentsection frame

It is important to bear in mind that in the system Col•laboració the term document is treated ina particular way. A document is defined in this study as follows:

A document is a set of HTML files related to each other. Each HTML file represents adistinct self-contained portion of the document called section. A section, being aseparate file, can be added, changed, or deleted independently of the other sections.Merging the sections produces the document as a whole.

Col•laboració presents the document to co-authors displaying the titles of its sections whichare hypertext links that show the section’s content. It also allows co-authors to work ondifferent sections simultaneously. It should be stressed that the system is not designed for the

FIGURE 3. The screen layout of the document-development module.


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transcription of the document to be produced. Rather, it supports sharing of the document andthe evolving dialogue among co-authors that the production of the document might demand.

Case Studies in which Col•laboració was evaluatedThe Col•laboració system has been used to support collaborative writing in eight differenttasks in which 2-9 co-authors took part. Table 2 presents the case studies in whichCol•laboració has been used so far.

It is also important to indicate that in all the case studies the developer-programmer wasfollowing the discussion that was supported by the system and giving technical support to theco-authors or was one of the co-authors. Also, problems reported by the co-authors weretackled immediately after they were sent in the form of comments in the ATP document. Co-authors gave suggestions too, some of them implemented after the task, so the system wasiteratively improved after each case study.

In none of the cases, the final formatting of the document was done within Col•laboració. Bymutual agreement one of the co-authors took the current version from the system and finishedthe document using a word processor. Email awareness for each case study was set up indifferent ways. Generally, all co-authors were coupled to all sections of the document. Thus,they received an email notification when a comment was added to a section, or when a sectionhad been added or deleted.

Table 2. Case studies in which Col•laboració has been used.

Case Study

(ordered by time)

Co-

autho

rs

Durati

on

(days)

Co-located or

distributed

The task

Poster A 3 23 co-located To design and write the text for a workshop poster.

Report Alpha 2 24 distributed The author had to write a technical report. The author and the reviewer

were located in different countries.

Report Beta 9 42 co-located To write a 10-section technical report. Co-authors were responsible in

different sections in sub-groups of 2-3.

Poster B 3 6 co-located To design and write the text for a conference poster.

Masters’ thesis

proposal

2 22 distributed The author had to write a Masters’ thesis proposal. One reviewer. Both co-

located in different places in the city.

Flyer 4 11 co-located To write a flyer for a presentation in a conference.

Workshop 4 15 distributed Co-authors had to write the final report for an international conference

they had participated in.

Short paper 4 24 co-located To write a short paper (two pages) for a conference.

In total there have been 14 participants who have used the system in real cases as co-authorsof documents. All of them are experienced computer users and are familiar with the WWWand Web-browsers. They had experience in writing and most of them had previouslypublished a report or a paper in collaboration with others in an academic environment.

From the case studies there are three important observations. The first one is that the amountof words co-authors produced when discussing the system itself decreases drastically if we


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compare the first case study (Poster A) with the last case study (Short paper), from 82% to13%. This might be due to various reasons: The most obvious reason might be the fact thatthose who used the system knew that we were developing a Web-based tool and it is logicalthat participants give some comments to improve the interface.

The second observation to be noted is related to the “Ideas for this paper” section. Thissection appears to be really needed in a collaborative writing context. In six out of the sevencases in which this section was included it contained more than 25% of the words producedduring the task. In the “Masters’ thesis proposal case” it only reached 16%. This result wouldseem to stem from the role co-authors were playing. One was the reviewer and the other wasthe writer of the proposal.

The third observation is related to the comments co-authors made on the document’s sections.In the first five case studies the amount of words included in the document’s sections increase18%, 23%, 38%, 43%, and 61% respectively. This seems to indicate that the system indeedwas getting more stable and that co-authors could concentrate on the task and not on thesystem design

Co-authors were holding discussion about the text, asking for others’ opinion in the form ofdialogue “what do you think?”, asking others to read their contributions, coordinating face-to-face meetings. Co-authors were also indicating their activities in the dialogue, that issupporting the sense of awareness of other members’ activities.

As the system is Web-based all the resources that are in the WWW can be part of the writingenvironment. Furthermore, co-authors can include these sources in two different ways. Onemethod would be to insert an object inside the environment. An object can be anything Web-based, for example a picture, text, video clip, sound track, etc. The other alternative methodwould be to attach an object in the form of a hypertext link. The most relevant problem in thecommenting space is expired validity of comments.

Cadiz, Gupta and Grudin (2000) in their studies pointed out that a key complaint was theorphaning of annotations. That is, when the document got changed, the annotations lost thelink to it. This was according to their interviews the main reason that people stopped using theannotation system. They point out that it might be frustrating for annotators to comment on adocument, only to see the comments become meaningless through orphaning. In our system,though this situation can be found, co-authors can see their expired comments more from ahistorical perspective.

Col•lecció: Collaborative bookmarking on the WWW

This application is based on the idea of a web browser's bookmark feature but with acollective characteristic. The general idea is that member of a group form a collection(Col•lecció) of links that will be shared immediately within a group. Members of this groupcan make comment on these links. These comments will be also shared within the group. Theinterface is very simple. The select-item frame shows the list of the links that have beencollected so far. When a link is selected (click on it) the URL associated to that link is openedin the information-top frame. Comments on that link are shown in the information-middleframe and the Command frame is filled with three button-commands:1. Add URL command. When clicked a window pops-up. In a HTML-form you write the

label for the link (this label later will be shown in the list of list by Col•lecció) and its URL(this can be done using the cut-and-paste function).


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2. Add Comment command. It also calls a window with a HTML-form where you can writeyou name and comment.

3. Delete URL command. When it is used it deletes the related URL from the list of links.

When a URL is collected or removed, and a comment is added to one of the URL, the systemnotifies via email the event to the group. These actions are immediately reflected whenanother user enters the system.

Benyon and Höök (1997) argue for an alternative way of navigation on the web known associal navigation. Social navigation is the process of using information from other people tofinds things on the web. Today, the number of home-based applications, applications forcommunications, communities, etc. is increasing very fast. This implies that social navigationideas are going to find wider use (Wexelblat, 1998).

So far, only this tool has only been used in the laboratory. According to our experience, wecould say that the use of this tool is related to social navigation. Bookmarks are a “personalweb information space” to help users navigate on the WWW (Abrams, Baecker, and Chingell,1998). Pitkow, as cited by Abrams et al., reports that a great number of users make use ofbookmarks as a strategy for locating information and that bookmarks were used slightly morethan other navigation strategies, for example, a search engine. A collective bookmark impliesa “collective web information space” that will be used by members of a group. Informationrecommendation and filtering are two main issues that can be done with Col•lecció.Information filtering in this case is not related only to the sole user but to the group. Adding aURL to the link collection means:1. The user who adds the URL is automatically recommending that URL to the group;2. The user is filtering the added URL from other URLs he/she has probably found;3. Creating a shortcut to a web page the users think will be frequently used;4. Creating a pointer to a web page, that is, no need to remember or no possibility of

forgetting the URL.

Furthermore, the possibility that Col•lecció offers of making comments on the URL is exactlya personal recommendation. The comment could contain relevant information about the webpage. For example, say that the URL corresponds to a web-based dictionary; a user couldhave already interacted with it having an “opinion” about it. Suppose, also, that the user couldcomment whether the dictionary is oriented to native speakers or not. Such a comment wouldinform other users if it were worth interacting or not with the dictionary.

Forsberg, Höök, and Svensson (1998) define some characteristics for social navigationaccording to which Col•lecció could be classified as a direct social navigation tool where theadvice–giver intended to share information. The advice-giver in Col•lecció is one particularperson (or agent), known to us or a member of a group of users that are similar to thenavigator in terms of interests, profession, knowledge, or task.

We think it is self evident that the URL of a web page is more stable than its content inrelation to updates. Using Col•lecció we have our own collection of URLs in “tertiarystorage.” Using this tool, users do not have to worry about updates of the web pages' content;once it is done in the tertiary storage it will be immediately available in the system. It is veryimportant where up-to-date content is essential. We can mention also that we are borrowingothers' resources, that is, we are not using local storage to keep the content, but the leastresources to keep the URL records having access to the content anyway. However, the URLmight be removed, a problem that search engines are facing today. In that case the error


- 31 -

message, “file not found,” is sent by the server and this pointer could be easily removed fromthe URLs' list in the Col•lecció system. Another problem would be when the URL does notchange but its content does. In relation with the degree of content's change, the labelled linksand the comments this URL got so far might be “out of context” or “expired”.

Brief description of possible usage• A collective bookmark. You can have a Col•lecció site for your organization. Imagine aresearch group who uses the WWW. There are sites of interest related to the same researcharea that can be “discovered” by one of the member. Usually, in the best of cases, a“discovered” URL can be passed to the rest of the group via email, annotation, or speech.Comments made by the members and that are related to this site couldn't be shared in thegroup in an effective way because there is not a shared environment for that. With Col•leccióa shared environment is offered, so a discussion or relevant comments can be distributed tothe entire group with no extra effort.

• A Web-page exhibition tool. You can have a set of web pages that you consider interestingfrom the point of view of design. Additionally you can make comments to it. At the sametime, Col•lecció can be used as a “corrective” tool for Web pages. Suppose somebody wantsto get comments about the design, or content, of their web pages. With Col•lecció you canadd the URL and then wait for the collective to make comments on it. Later, you make yourchange in your local file but there is not need to send or ask the file to be updated.


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References

Abrams D., Baecker R., and Chignell M. (1998). Information archiving with bookmarks:personal Web space construction and organization. In Proceedings of CHI'98 (HumanFactors in Computing Systems), pp. 41 - 48.

Benyon, D. and Höök, K. (1997) Navigation in information spaces: Supporting the individual,In Proceedings of INTERACT'97, Sydney, 14-18 July 1997, pp. 39-46.

Cadiz, J., Gupta, A., and Grudin, J., (2000), Using web annotations for asynchronouscollaboration around documents, In Proceedings of CSCW'00 (Computer SupportedCollaborative Work), pp. 309-318

Forsberg M., Höök K., and Svensson M. (1998), Design principles for social navigation tools,http://www.i3net.org/ser_pub/ annualconf/abstracts/navigation/socialnavi.html

Gustafsson, N., Severinson-Eklundh, K. & Rodríguez H. (1998), Domänhjälp, Technicalreport TRITA-NA-D9803, CID-30, NADA, The Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm

Haas, C. (1989). Does the medium make a difference? Two studies of writing with pen andpaper and with computers. Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 10, 149-169.

Kim, H. C. and Severinson Eklundh, K. (2001): Reviewing practices in collaborative writing.Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 10(2), pp.247-259.

Posner, I. (1991). A study of collaborative writing. MSc. Dissertation University of TorontoCanada.

Rodríguez, H. (2001), Using the WWW as infrastructure for collaborative production ofdocuments, Licentiate thesis, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science,KTH, ISBN 91-7283-128-6.

Wexelblat, A. (1998). History-rich tools for social navigation. In Proceedings of CHI'98(Human Factors in Computing Systems), pp. 359-360.


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6. Support for Collaborative Reviewing of Documents

Hee-Cheol Kim

Computer support for collaborative writing has been a central area in HCI, CSCW, andwriting research. The particular concern in this project is how the computer can supportcollaborative reviewing of documents. The act of reviewing in collaborative writing requirescommunication about revisions of text among the collaborators. Computers are not onlycommunication media, as e.g. email and conferencing systems, but also tools to help build acommon ground on revisions between writers, which is a basis for communicating aboutrevisions. Typical examples of the latter are tools for representing changes in text and forcommenting on it. The project investigates the use of these tools and aspects of the design.

Reviewing practices in collaborative writing

(1) Background: A broad overview of reviewing practices in collaborative writing wasneeded. This is mainly because such an overview can be a foundation for further explorationof particular issues to support reviewing processes. We explored the work practices ofcollaborative reviewing which may be applied in the design of collaborative writing tools, byinterviewing 11 academics by whom we could obtain and analyze 15 cases of collaborativewriting (Kim and Severinson Eklundh, 2001).

(2) Results and discussion: We found that whereas a division of labor in writing, i.e. writingdifferent sections by different authors, one author tends to control the document, playing aneditorial role, e.g. to collect and integrate different parts written by members, and distributenew versions to all co-authors. Hence, a centralized document control mechanism is useful forefficient collaboration. Small group writing is also common, and so we believe that ifdesigners focus on support for small group writing, the complexity in designing co-authoringsystems can decrease.

With respect to reviewing practices, while pen and paper are frequently used for commentingand informing other co-authors of changed parts, some reviewers commented on electronicdocuments directly using special formats such as bold face, brackets, and italics. Emailexchange is also essential to communicate with others and make comments. Thus, how tointegrate email with writing tools becomes an important aspect in the design. Writers oftenneed to keep previous versions of the document in order not to lose anything important. Therewere also some users who used tools representing changes in text. Finally, it emerged that awell-equipped network environment is a crucial factor to facilitate collaboration for managingand sharing resources with others and for using features to support reviewing, such as changerepresentation and annotation.i

Use of change representation tools

(1) Background: Two explorative and experimental studies (Kim and Severinson Eklundh,2002: Kim, 2000) were designed to explore how people understand and use changerepresentation functions, and provide some implications for the design of these functions.They were motivated by the finding from the previous interview study that changerepresentation tools are in actual use, while little research has been done on the usage of suchtools. About a decade ago, Neuwirth et al. studied issues on change representation from more


- 34 -

theoretical perspectives (1992). However, since then, there have been no empirical studiesconducted. Focusing on user experiences, we carried out two studies: Study I where 10 pairsof a writer and a reviewer were involved in producing an argumentative letter, and Study IIwhere 13 pairs generated a short essay.

(2) Two conditions – A: Two ways of representing changes: ‘indication’ and ‘display’ ofchanges. Indication of changes means that the system only indicates locations where changeshave been made, while display of changes refers to visualization of deleted and added textsthemselves

B: Ways of collaboration: the writer-initiative (WI) and reviewer-initiative (RI) models. Inthe WI model, the reviewer comments on the text without changing the writer’s on-line textdirectly. The writer revises the text based on the reviewer's suggestions, and then the reviewercan inspect the changes made to the text by the use of change representation tools. In the RImodel, on the other hand, the reviewer directly revises the on-line document as a way ofsuggesting changes. After receiving the file of the revised text by the reviewer, the writerchooses either to accept or reject each change made by the reviewer through changerepresentation tools. Study II explored the RI collaboration in more depth.

(3) Results and discussion: The participants reported that change representation tools helpedthem decide where to review carefully and roughly. The tools also make them save timetrying to understand changes. Writers use change representation as a way of expressing theirreactions to reviewers’ comments and suggestions for changes. Reviewers consider changerepresentation as a tool to aid their recollection of comments that they made previously.Change representation does not only provide the sense of what changes were made, but alsothe extent to which the text was revised.

Reviewers regarded the indication mode as useful for reading, while the display mode wasmainly for understanding and checking changes. Based on this result, it is of importance thatchange representation tools provide an easy transition between these two modes, becausetransitions between the cognitive processes of reading and of checking changes occur quitefrequently while reviewing. Further, it is quite natural that users can use various otherreviewing tools as well as change representation tools while reviewing. Building a commonspace for reviewing tools such as commenting and change representation functions can be acentral element in the design of those tools to support flexible and dynamic reviewingprocesses.

In terms of two ways of collaborating, change representation tools were perceived as usefulfor reviewers in the WI model, whereas they were seen as mutually beneficial between writersand reviewers in the RI model. In particular, Study II shows that reviewers made mostrevisions at a low level as suggestion of further change in text, while they discussed parts ofdocuments demanding higher-level revisions by other ways of communicating such as face-to-face meetings and the commenting function. A tendency of making low level revisionsmay also be a major reason causing the following results obtained from the study: Bothreviewers' difficulty of formulating words and writers’ difficulty of accepting or rejectingeach suggested change were not perceived as so high.

A study of dialogue through commenting tools on the Web

(1) Background: Making comments is not merely an act of annotating text, but writtencomments may form dialogues among collaborating writers. This study has analyzedasynchronous dialogic aspects of written comments in the context of collaborative reviewing


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of documents (Kim, 2002). A case study was performed in which a small group of fourwriters used the commenting function in a Web-based co-authoring tool, Col•laboració, forreviewing a short document. The World Wide Web is an easily accessible environment forcollaboration, which may promote more interaction between people. In that respect, analysisof dialogues formed by written comments provides knowledge about potential impacts on theinteraction between collaborating writers of the new conditions for communication on theWeb.

(2) Results and discussion: According to the data, written communication is less interactivethan face-to-face communication. Writers also tended to produce more words per turn than insynchronous communication systems. The analysis shows that an interaction is represented bymultiple meanings and multiple expectations of participants, and the intentions behind it aresometimes even ambiguous. This property of dialogues also implies that conversants cannotpredict what kind of comment will be contributed next, which eventually causes a dynamicsof the reviewing process. Interestingly, writers’ responses to comments were often suppresseduntil a sufficient number of comments were collected, and written later at one time. Theytended not to respond to every comment whenever it was made. Since a new revised versionshould be made reflecting not only a single comment but also many different comments, suchsuppression may be necessary for efficiency.

The commenting function in Col•laboració supports temporally scattered comments, in thatcomments are delivered one by one at different moments of time, since whenever a commentis contributed, it is automatically sent to other members via email. On the other hand, thetraditional way of reviewing is that reviewers write comments on a document and give themto the writer at one time. In that sense, such comments can be seen as temporally packedcomments. Most annotation systems reflect the image of such packed comments. Whilereviewing with scattered comments allows collaborators to respond easily to a comment, andtherefore promotes dialogues among them, reviewing with packed comments has theadvantage that writers are able to reflect on all comments (or annotations) together,structuring further revisions of text. Importantly, designers may take into consideration thetrade-offs of temporarily scattered versus packed comments, and dialogues versusannotations.

Computer-mediated written communication makes it easy to record written dialogues andreuse them. Therefore, as the number of dialogues increases, a good organization of dialoguesis necessary for facilitating further conversations. In this respect, systems should provideways of categorizing comments, which are easy to understand and flexible to use.


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References

Kim, H. C. (2000): On-line reviewing with change representation tools. Proceedings of theFirst Nordic Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, NordiCHI 2000.

Kim, H. C. (2002): From comments to dialogues: a study of asynchronous dialogue processesas part of collaborative reviewing on the Web. Proceedings of 35th Annual HawaiiInternational Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), January 7-10, 2002.

Kim, H. C. and Severinson Eklundh, K. (2001): Reviewing practices in collaborative writing.Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 10(2), pp.247-259.

Kim, H. C. and Severinson Eklundh, K. (2002): Collaboration between writer and reviewerthrough change representation tools. Proceedings of 35th Annual Hawaii InternationalConference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), January 7-10, 2002.

Neuwirth, C. M., Chandhok, R., Kaufer, D. S., Erion, P., Morris, J. and Miller, D. (1992):Flexible Diff-ing in a Collaborative Writing System. Proceedings of CSCW ’92, pp. 147-154.


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7. Collaboration in Multimodal Virtual Worlds:Comparing Touch, Text, Voice and Video

Eva-Lotta Sallnäs

Introduction

Social aspects of virtual reality is an area of research that has expanded as the technology hasmatured. Collaborative virtual environments (CVE’s) show great promise for investigatinghow human-human interaction works. The reason for this is that the mode of communicationas well as task contexts, spatial affordances, information presentation and manipulation ofcommon objects can be varied in order to understand effects of - and interrelations between -these factors. The communication mode is often text-chat in virtual environments, and audioor video channels are less often used. It has only recently become possible to support otherhuman senses like touch in three-dimensional virtual environments. In my research the mainfocus is comparing different communication modes such as text-chat, voice communication,video-conferencing, and also to investigate the effect of supporting the touch modality.

Evaluation of collaboration through different communication modes is not as common in thearea of CVE’s as in the area of telecommunications and computer-mediated communication(CMC). One reason for this is that social psychology has not had a large impact on research inthe field of CVE’s. In social psychological studies of mediated interaction, the focus ofinterest is for example on how people can build and sustain relations, prevent and solveconflicts, and collaborate to attain joint goals (McGrath, 1993). A general argument that anumber of theories make is that the social richness of the communication medium has to bematched with the task in order for collaborators to accomplish these different goals (Short,Williams & Christie, 1976; Katz & Tushman,1978; Daft & Lengel, 1986; Rice, 1993).

The capacity that a medium has to transmit social information like tone of voice or facialexpressions affects people’s notion of social presence. Social presence is defined as thefeeling of being present with another person at a remote location (Short, Williams & Christie,1976). In virtual reality contexts, the concepts of togetherness, co-presence and also socialpresence are used in order to address issues of social interaction (Durlach & Slater, 2000;Heeter, 1992). Short et al. (1976) regard social presence as a single dimension that representsa cognitive synthesis of several factors that are naturally occurring in face-to-facecommunication. Among these are the capacity to transmit information about tone of voice,gestures, facial expression, direction of gaze, posture, touch and non-verbal cues as they areperceived by the individual to enhance presence in the medium.

The three-dimensionality of virtual environments adds a number of specific features totraditional communication environments. The virtual environment is often perceived as aplace in which people can navigate with an avatar, interact with objects and obtaininformation. In order to evaluate the affordances of a virtual environment the concept virtualpresence has been developed. Virtual presence is defined as the notion of feeling as if beingpresent in a computer-generated environment that feels like reality (Witmer & Singer, 1998).Witmer and Singer (1998) define this kind of presence as the subjective experience of beingin a place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another. It is relevant tocompare social presence to virtual presence in hybrid collaborative environments whereseveral modes of interaction are provided. The reason is that both perceived social and virtual


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presence have been said to predict improved performance. It is therefore important toinvestigate interrelations between these two dimensions in relation to performance, and tomeasure collaboration objectively.

Studies on mediated collaboration have focused on people's subjective perception of differentcommunication modes and also people's actual behaviour when interacting in different modes(Sellen, 1992). Communicating through audio is important when collaborating at a distanceand improves both task performance and perceived affordances in comparison to text-chat(Ochsman & Chapanis,1974; Short et al., 1976; Vaske & Grantham, 1989; Matsuura, Fujino,Okada, & Matsushita, 1993). In one study (Chapanis, 1975) various modes of interactionwere examined ranging over audio, handwriting, typewriting, video and face-to-face. Resultsshowed that people spoke more than they wrote, and people performed best in terms of timeto complete tasks when audio was provided compared to text. Research has not found suchuniform results regarding benefits from using video conferencing. It is usually shown thatvideo does not add significant advantages to task performance compared to audio (Whittaker& O-Conaill, 1997; Anderson et al., 1996; Olson, Olson & Meader, 1995). In Chapanis' study(1975) it was found that, in terms of time to complete tasks and amount of words spoken,there was no advantage associated with visual access. The advantages of video that have beenfound are subjective ratings of qualities of communication modes. One study showed thatpreference ratings for people who met in an audio mode were lower than for those who met ina video mode or met face-to-face (Williams, 1977). Daly-Jones et al. (1998) found in theirstudy that users were more aware of the presence of their partner, could monitor their partners'attentional status better, and felt that the mode of communication aided collaboration morewhen video was provided. Video has also been shown to support informal communication andrelation building (Dourish & Bly, 1992; Bly, Harrison & Irwin, 1993; Kraut, Fish, Root &Chalfonte, 1990).

It has been shown in a number of studies of CVE’s, that supporting the touch modalitythrough haptic force feedback improves task performance (Gupta, Sheridan, & Whitney,1997; Hasser, Goldenberg, Martin & Rosenberg, 1998; Massimino & Sheridan,1994). Hapticsensing is defined as identifying objects through both motor behaviours and stimulation ofskin receptors (Appelle, 1991; Loomis & Lederman, 1986). One study showed that if twopeople have the opportunity to "feel" the interface they are collaborating in, they manipulatethe interface faster and more precisely (Ishii, Nakata & Sato, 1994). Finally results fromanother study showed that haptic communication could enhance perceived "togetherness" andimprove task performance in pairs working together (Basdogan, Ho, Srinivasan & Slater,2000; Durlach & Slater, 2000).

In this report two experimental studies are presented that were aimed at gaining a betterunderstanding of the social dynamics and experiences of users collaborating in virtualenvironments using different communicative modes. The research questions investigatedinclude how people perform in accomplishing different tasks when communicating viadifferent media, and to what extent people perceive that they are socially and physicallypresent in a mediated environment when communicating via different media.

Communication Modes in Virtual Worlds

In this experimental study a CVE was implemented (figure 1.) using three differentcommunication mode conditions, text-chat, audio conference and video conference. Also aweb environment was implemented, in order to be a control condition for the effect of three-


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dimensionality, using two communication mode conditions, audio conference and videoconference (figure 2.). Dependent variables in the experiment were perceived social presence,perceived virtual presence, perceived task performance and these were measured byquestionnaires. Furthermore objective measures of the interaction were time to finish the task,frequency of words used and finally words per second. Eighty subjects participated in theexperiment. Subjects collaborated in pairs and performed a decision making task together.

Figure 1. One subject’s perspective on the information in the CVE in Active Worlds showing the other subject,posters and links to QuickTime movie clips with audio.

Two PowerBook PC:s, networked through Ethernet, were used in the experiment. The CVEwas constructed in Active Worlds with the appearance of an exhibition with informationpoints (figure 1.). The information consisted of posters with pictures and QuickTime movieclips with video images and audio information. Humanlike avatars represented the subjects.The web-environment was designed as a web-site with the same information points (postersand QuickTime movie clips with audio) as in the CVE. The information points were placedbeside each other at one web page in a sequential fashion in the web-conditions (figure 2.).The subjects had no avatars in the web-conditions.


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Figure 2. The web-environment with posters and QuickTime movie clips with audio.

In the condition with audio connection two telephones with headsets were used. In thecondition with a video connection two 21-inch television monitors were used besides twotelephones with headsets providing the audio communication (figure 3.).

Figure 3. Subjects collaborating in the web environment with video conference.

The text-chat function that comes with the Active Worlds system was used in the text-chatcondition but it was hidden in the audio and video condition. The web conditions includedone audio conference condition and one video conference condition. The task included for thesubjects to navigate an information space either in a CVE or at a two dimensional webenvironment. The subjects could communicate via text-chat, audio conference or video


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conference in the CVE and by audio conference or video conference in the web environment.The decision making task was presented to the pairs of subjects as a written scenario.

Results from this experiment show that text-chat is problematic as a synchronouscommunications medium. When communicating through CVE text-chat, people do notperceive themselves to be virtually present to a large extent compared to a video or voiceconference regardless if it is in a CVE or web environment. The dimensions in thequestionnaire imply that people in CVE text-chat do not perceive the environment to be asinteractive, that they do not have as much control in the CVE, and that the environment is notas engaging or meaningful. There are no differences regarding perceived virtual presencebetween video or voice conditions in either CVE or web environments. This result must beinvestigated further as most studies on virtual presence implicitly state that threedimensionality increases perceived virtual presence.

Communication through CVE text-chat makes the interaction in the environment less socialcompared with CVE video and CVE voice conferences. The dimensions in the social presencequestionnaire imply that people do not feel that they can interpret the other person’semotional state equally well. They have a hard time conveying their feelings and emphasisand do not build up interpersonal relations as well. Results regarding perceived socialpresence are not as straightforward when CVE text-chat is compared with web audio and webvideo. There is a significant difference between CVE text-chat and web video but not betweenCVE text-chat and web audio. This implies that web audio would be more similar to CVEtext-chat than the other conditions. But at the same time there are no differences regardingperceived social presence between video or voice conditions in either CVE or webenvironments. There is only one significant difference regarding perceived performance foundin this study which was between the CVE text-chat condition and the CVE video condition.That could mean that people generally perceived that they could perform tasks efficiently inmost conditions, although slightly less so in CVE text-chat.

Making joint decisions in the CVE text-chat condition is a time consuming and crude process.Dialogues are much scarcer in text-chat and discussions preceding decisions are not asextensive. Results show a clear pattern that CVE text-chat is significantly different fromcollaboration through audio or video conference both regarding time to perform tasks (onaverage 29 minutes) and words used per second. However even if this pattern also appears forfrequency of words used there is one exception: there is no significant difference regardingfrequency of words used between CVE text-chat and web audio. The results regarding audioand video conditions are a bit more complicated to interpret. Although differences are notsignificant, mean values show that collaborating in web audio is very fast, about 6 minutesand in CVE audio about 10 minutes whereas people spend more time in web video (about 12minutes) and in CVE video (about 16 minutes). The difference is bigger between the webaudio and web video condition than between the CVE audio and CVE video condition. Thismight mean that three dimensionality smoothens out the difference between audio and video.Mean values also indicate, although not significant, that people have less extensive dialoguesin the web audio (M=819) and CVE audio (M=1084) condition than in the web video(M=1463) and CVE video (M=1243) condition. Also for this measure there is a smallerdifference between the CVE audio and CVE video condition than between the web audio andweb video condition. There are significant differences between CVE video and CVE audio interms of the frequency of words spoken per second. Collaborating in the CVE audio conditiontakes less amount of time and more words per second is used - but people spend more time inthe CVE video condition and have lengthier dialogues. This would suggest that the video


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condition is in fact different from the voice condition. The video condition might be a moreenjoyable medium - whereas the audio condition is the most efficient for this task.

If compared to the web conditions there are no significant differences between CVE audioand web audio or web video, these conditions are similar in this respect. However CVE videodiffers significantly from both the web audio and web video condition as well as the CVEaudio condition. This suggests that CVE video stands out from the other conditions regardingwords used per second. The CVE video condition might not be the most efficient medium butit is the medium in which people spend a large amount of time and in which they at the sametime have lengthy dialogues. Results from the two way ANOVA shows that there is asignificant main effect regarding words used per second between the audio and videoconditions and also between CVE and web conditions. These results further strengthen theresults from the one way ANOVA that showed that there in fact seems to be a differenceregarding wordiness both because of communication medium used and the three dimensionsadded in the Active Worlds environment.

Earlier studies of collaborative environments that were not related to CVE’s have foundsimilar results: that providing audio communication makes an important difference comparedto text-chat, whereas the effect of adding video is not as evident (Ochsman & Chapanis, 1974;Vaske & Grantham, 1989; Whittaker & O-Conaill, 1997, Anderson, 1996; Olson, Olson &Meader, 1995). However results from the study reported here show that there indeed aredifferences between audio and video in a collaborative three-dimensional desktop virtualenvironment (CVE). It is a challenge to understand all aspects of how support for differenthuman modes of interaction affects collaboration in a CVE. However, studies whichsystematically compare tasks in different CVE conditions can make a start in this direction.

Supporting touch in collaborative environments

Haptic feedback is a natural ingredient in face-to-face interaction between people, and it alsoserves important functions for communication. One example of haptic communication iswhen a person hands over a precious artifact; people then rely to a large extent on hapticperception for recognising that the object has been successfully received. Handshakes and apat on the back are powerful communicative events that are symbolic and convey informationabout relations, status and emotional states. It is also intuitive for people to combine gestures,deictic references and joint manipulation in collaborative environments. An experimentalstudy was performed in order to test the hypotheses that a distributed CVE supporting thetouch modality will increase perceived virtual presence and social presence, improve taskperformance and increase perceived task performance (Sallnäs, Rassmus-Gröhn & Sjöström,2000; Sallnäs, 2000). The independent variable in this experiment was the interface conditionwith two treatments, CVE-voice-haptic and CVE-voice-only. The subjects, in differentlocations, performed five collaborative tasks in both conditions. The haptic devices used inthe tests were two 1.0 PHANToM (fig. 4). In the first condition that included haptic forcefeedback, the subjects obtained haptic force feedback from the dynamic objects, the staticwalls and the other person in the CVE. The subjects could simultaneously manipulate thedynamic objects that were modelled to simulate real cubes with form, mass, damping andsurface friction. The subjects could also hold on to each other by pushing a small button onthe part of the haptic device that they also manipulated the virtual cubes with. In the secondcondition the subjects had no haptic force feedback and could not hold on to each other. Thehaptic device then functioned as a 3D-mouse. Voice communication in both conditions wasprovided through a telephone connection using headsets. Task performance was measured by


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the total time it took the pairs of subjects to perform the five tasks, and also by the frequencyof failure to lift cubes together - which was used as a measure of precision.

Figure 4. Subjects are doing the tasks using two versions of the PHANToM, on the left a "T" model and on theright an "A" model.

The results showed that haptic force feedback significantly increased task performance, whichmeans that the tasks were completed in less time in the haptic force feedback condition.Subjects used an average of 24 minutes to perform five tasks in the haptic force feedbackcondition as against 35 minutes in the condition with no haptic force feedback. An analysis offrequencies of failures to lift cubes together as a measure of precision in task performanceshows that it is significantly more difficult to co-ordinate actions with the aim of liftingobjects in a three-dimensional desktop virtual environment without haptic force feedback.Results show that there is a significant difference between conditions regarding subjects'ability to lift cubes when building one cube out of eight cubes and when constructing twopiles with eight cubes. In the haptic force feedback condition, subjects failed to lift cubes onaverage 4 times when building a cube and 7 times when constructing two piles. In thecondition without haptic force feedback, subjects failed to lift cubes on average 12 timeswhen building a cube and 30 times when constructing two piles. Thus a major part of thedifference of the time between conditions can be explained by the fact that subjects’ precisionwhen lifting cubes without haptic force feedback is lower.

The questionnaire that measured perceived performance showed that the subjects in the hapticforce feedback condition perceived themselves to be performing the tasks significantly better.The mean value for each question on a seven point Likert-type scale show that subjectsperceived their task performance to be higher in the three-dimensional visual/voice/hapticcondition (5.9) than in the three-dimensional visual/voice only condition (5.1). Supportinghaptic force feedback in a distributed collaborative environment makes manipulation ofcommon objects both faster and more precise. There are clear connections between the easewith which people manipulate objects together and how long time it takes to complete thetasks. The results also show that haptic force feedback in a collaborative environment makestask performance more efficient. Earlier results in studies investigating one person interactingwith a system providing haptic force feedback have shown similar results (Gupta et al., 1997;Hasser et al., 1998; Massimino & Sheridan, 1994). A further study has shown that two people


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manipulate an interface faster and more precisely if they can feel the interface (Ishii et at.,1994).

The analysis of data from the virtual presence questionnaire shows that conditions differsignificantly. The subjects' mean rating of perceived virtual presence was higher on a sevenpoint Likert-type scale in the three-dimensional visual/voice /haptic condition (5.4) than in thethree-dimensional visual/voice only condition (4.4). Haptic-force-feedback thus addssignificantly to people’s perceived virtual presence even in an environment that supportsvoice communication. An example of this is the observation that the emotional expressions offailure were much fewer in the non-haptic environment when people did not manage to liftthe cubes. People seemed to be more disappointed when failing to lift the cubes in the hapticenvironment.

The dimension of social presence measured by a questionnaire did not differ significantlyacross the two conditions when the items were analysed together as a total dimension. Themean rating on a seven point Likert-type scale of the total dimension for social presence washighest for the three-dimensional visual/voice/haptic condition (5.3) and lowest for the three-dimensional visual/voice only condition (4.8). This means that people only perceivedthemselves to be marginally more socially present in the haptic environment. The results inone study (Basdogan et al., 2000) indicate that haptic force feedback increased perceivedtogetherness between people in a collaborative environment. However, voice as acommunication medium was not provided in that study, which suggests that voice possiblyovershadows the effect of haptic force feedback to a certain extent.

Acknowledgements

Anders Hedman is gratefully acknowledged for performing the ActiveWorlds study with me.Kirsten Rassmus-Gröhn and Calle Sjöström are also gratefully acknowledged for theircontributions to the haptic force feedback study. I would also like to thank KerstinSeverinson-Eklundh for her valuable comments and suggestions.

References

Anderson, A., Newlands, A., Mullen, J., Flemming, A. M., Doherty-Sneddon, G. and Van derVelden, J. (1996). Impact of Video-Mediated Communication on Simulated ServiceEncounters. Interacting with Computers. 8: 193-206.

Appelle, S. (1991). Haptic Perception of Form: Activity and Stimulus Attributes. In Heller,M. and Schiff, W. (Eds.) The Psychology of Touch. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 169-188.

Basdogan, C., Ho, C., Srinivasan, M. A., and Slater, M. (2000). An Experimental Study onthe Role of Touch in Shared Virtual Environments. ACM Transactions on Computer-HumanInteraction. 7(4): 443-460.

Bly, S. A., Harrison, S. R. and Irwin, S. (1993). Media Spaces: Video, Audio and Computing.Communications of the ACM. 36: 28-47.

Chapanis, A. (1975). Interactive Human Communication. Scientific American. 232: 36-42.

Daft, R. L. & Lengel, R. (1986). Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness,and Structural Design. Management Science. 32: 554-571.


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Daly-Jones, O., Monk, A., Watts, L. (1998). Some Advantages of Video Conferencing OverHigh-Quality Audio Conferencing: Fluency and Awareness of Attentional Focus.International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 49: 21-58.

Dourish, P. & Bly, S. (1992). Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group.Proceedings of CHI´92. pp. 541-547.

Durlach, N. and Slater, M. (2000). Presence in Shared Virtual Environments and VirtualTogetherness. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. 9(2): 214-217.

Gupta, R., Sheridan, T. and Whitney, D. (1997). Experiments Using Multimodal VirtualEnvironments in Design for Assembly Analysis. Presence: Teleoperators and VirtualEnvironments. 6(3): 318-338.

Hasser, C. J. Goldenberg, A. S., Martin, K. M. and Rosenberg, L. B. (1998). User Performinga GUI Pointing Task with a Low-Cost Force-Feedback Computer Mouse. Proceedings of theASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division. 64: pp.151-156.

Heeter, C. (1992). Being There: The Subjective Experience of Presence. Presence:Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. 1(2): 262-271.

Ishii, M., Nakata, M. and Sato, M. (1994). Networked SPIDAR: A Networked VirtualEnvironment with Visual, Auditory, and Haptic Interactions. Presence: Teleoperators andVirtual Environments. 3(4): 351-359.

Katz, R. and Tushman, M. (1978). Communication Patterns, Project Performance, and TaskCharacteristics: An Empirical Evaluation in an R&D Setting. Organizational Behavior andHuman Performance. 23: 139-162.

Kraut, R. E., Fish, R. S., Root, R.W., and Chalfonte, B.L. (1990). Informal Communication inOrganizations: Form, Function, and Technology. In Oskamp, S. and Spacapan, S. (Eds).Human Reactions to Technology: The Claremont Symposium on Applied Social Psychology.Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 145-199.

Loomis, J. M. and Lederman, S. J. (1986). Tactual Perception, In Boff, K. R., Kaufman, L.,Thomas, J. P. (Eds.) Handbook of Perception and Human Performance: Volume II, CognitiveProcesses and Performance. New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 31.1-31.41.

Massimino, M.J. and Sheridan, T.B. (1994). Teleoperator Performance With Varying Forceand Visual Feedback. Human Factors. 36(1): 145-157.

Matsuura, N., Fujino, G., Okada, K. and Matsushita, Y. (1993). An Approach to Encountersand Interaction in a Virtual Environment. Proceedings of ACM Computer ScienceConference. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 298-303.

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8. The use of synchronous text-based environmentsfor teacher professional development

Teresa Cerratto

Introduction

Previous studies on computer-mediated-communication (CMC) have investigated therelationship between synchronous textual conversations, virtual communities (Rheingold,1993; Kollock and Smith 1999) and the effects of CMC on relationships (Herring, 1996;Kiesler, 1997; Jones, 1998 ; Sudweeks, 1998). Although they have contributed to anunderstanding of the social and psychological impact of computer-mediated communicationon people, many issues about the use of computer-mediated communication in learningenvironments still remain open. This work focuses on the use of a synchronous text-basedcommunication system in the context of teacher professional development. In that context,synchronous text-based communication gives new opportunities for communication,collaboration and learning. However, the use of synchronous text-based communicationchanges patterns of interaction as well as forms of communication. As we were interested inhow synchronous text-based communication is used by teachers in their discussions, wefocused on their messages and, in particular, on the object of the messages that teachers referto when they “talk”on-line. The primary goal in the analysis was thus to determine whetherthe groups could conduct their learning activities in the electronic environment and how thefocus of the conversations evolved over time. We were also interested in how conversationsaiming to elaborate mutual understanding might be affected by the characteristics of theartifact.

The synchronous text-based environment

The artifact we have studied is a MOO (Mud2 Object-Oriented). MOOs are persistent text-based virtual environments where interactions with objects and people can be extended overtime, mediated by historical trails of activity or talk. A basic characteristic is that allcommunication and actions leave behind a record at least until the text scrolls off the screenand each person can participate in a single activity at a time or in several possibly overlappingactivities.

The MOO consists of three elements:

� a text-based virtual environment with a web interface designed to support large numbersof education professionals in a single virtual place,

� a set of communication commands (speaking, whispering, paging, nonverbal actions) forthe environment,

� a set of tools and objects (e.g., virtual whiteboards, sharable text documents, transcriptrecorders) and commands to create and manipulate them.

2 MUD stands for Multi User Dungeon


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Framework

The question regarding the impact of MOOs on communication, collaboration and learningare part of a theoretical interest in how people incorporate artifacts, such as computer systemsin their practices and make them into instruments for achieving particular goals. In thatrespect, special attention is given here to the tool mediation perspective proposed by thesocio-cultural approach (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985) and in particular to the instrumentalapproach (Béguin and Rabardel, 2000). According to these frameworks, the nature of aninstrument can be understood by identifying the ways people use it, the needs it serves, thehistory of its development and the ways in which instruments shape practices, facilitatingand/or constraining particular human actions. Users not only use artifacts, they alsocontinuously renew and develop them, whether consciously or not. An artifact that isintegrated into the user’s activity becomes an instrument for her that acts as a mediatorbetween the person and her/his object of activity. The artifact transforms the user’s activitywhile the user subjectively transforms the properties of the artifact through his/her use.

In the particular case we have studied, the use of the MOO presents a challenge toparticipants, since they have to take the time to learn to conduct meaningful on-line activities.And that it is not a simple task: the more severe problems stem from a lack of understandingof how to employ on-line technology to achieve teacher professional development goals(Schlager et al., 2000). Learning how to use a MOO will first concern learning the commandsof the computer system per se, and then seeing how the features may be meaningfullyintegrated into collaborative and pedagogical activities.

Case study

We have observed two groups of teachers consisting of twenty-one and seventeen participantsfrom the end of March 2000 till mid May 2000. The participants attended a course« Technology as a Change Agent » that is part of a Master’s degree program in Educationoffered at School of education at a midsize University for teachers3 in the Kindergarten toGrade 12. The purpose of the course was to examine the opportunities and challenges ofsystemic change in education today, to provide an overview of societal evolution and therelationship of education to that evolution.

The participants were on average thirty years old and had on average eight years ofexperience of teaching.

Data

All communication in the classroom was logged with the help of the MOO administration.The log saved time-stamps as well as all the messages sent through the system. The empiricalmaterial collected represents a large amount of data. For the purpose of this study we havecoded and analyzed six on-line sessions out of the sixteen that we have logged. Six sessionsrepresent eleven and a half hours of on-line activity and more than one hundred pages oftranscriptions.

3 Due to this particular situation that a teacher (responsible for the course) is in fact a teacher of teachers and,the teachers (participants) are learners. We will use participants when we refer to the teachers/learners and useteacher when we refer to the person who is responsible for the course.


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Method

We developed a coding scheme to characterize the content and the flow of the conversations.The coding scheme is based on thematic categories (Bardin, 1987), on studies of face-to-faceand mediated collaborative writing (Cerratto, 1999) and on precedent studies concerning theuse of Tapped In (Schlager et al. 2000). We have coded the corpus together with anotherresearcher and each message has been categorized as an instance of one of six discoursecategories. The coding scheme was applied jointly and independently and we then cametogether to calibrate our findings. Differences between the two coders’ ratings were resolvedby following the primary coder. Interrater reliability was 91%.

Findings

We found that participants attending a course in education through a MOO start to usecommands in order to communicate with others and concentrate on the task at hand. Themessages sent are mainly related to the goal of the session and to the problems experiencedwith the artefact. However, this pattern changes over time. As participants gain experiencecommunicating and acting with and through the MOO, they become more interested inmaintaining relationships, private conversations and play. The groups observed integratesome of the features of the MOO into their social schemes of communication. However, thereare many obstacles until they can integrate the MOO into focused conversations, criticalreflection processes or other types of complex learning activities. In particular, we found thatnegotiating turns in online conversations has to do with how participants express informationand what they express (Cerratto and Waern, 2000 ; Cerratto, 2001). In a task-orienteddiscussion, turns that are generally taken present a good formulation of ideas, expresscontroversial thinking, and raise an issue that allows someone else to participate, or provideknowledge on the topic at hand (cf. Colomb and Simutis, 1996). Participants need tocollaborate in order to minimize confusion in online conversations. In this sense,collaboration means to identify, select and develop threads that meet the goal of thediscussion in a certain form. The teacher having the responsibility to conduct on line learningsessions has to be able to plan contents carefully, anticipate resources, reframe and emphasizemessages. It is the teacher's responsibility to show which the main thread is in the discussionsand to provide pertinent feedback to the participants’ messages and actions. The teacher has toshow the coherence or incoherence of the discussion and raise issues that improve the level ofthe written interaction. Unlike teachers in face-to-face discussions, teachers in MOO-environments have to deal with the medium of communication itself. That is, they have todevelop abilities for hooking and maintaining the participants’ attention through text-baseddialogues.

Moreover, the participants have created an instrument for communication from the MOOartifact. Within the appropriation process, they begin to change the object of the learningactivity: the participants find it easier to exchange information rather than to elaborate it. TheMOO in teachers’ activities facilitates social relationships while it constraints the focus inprofessional task-oriented discussions. This fact creates a tension among participants whoexpect to be able to reflect on their conversations and not only to be able to carry outconversations.

Based on this study, professional teachers might benefit from using MOOs as places forexchanging tips and advice, sharing resources, and having informal discussions, rather than asspaces for importing “traditional classrooms” on-line. MOOs may be seen as potential


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supports for the social and affective part of learning. However, meaning-making processesseem to face too many challenges through text-based communication to be able to bedeveloped in a simple way

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Schlager, M.; J. Fusco and P. Schank (2000). Evolution of an On-line Education Communityof Practice. Draft. To appear in: K.A. Renninger/W. Shumar (Eds.). Building virtualcommunities: Learning and change in cyberspace. New York.www.tappedin.org/info/papers/evol99/Sudweeks, F. (1998). Network and Netplay. Virtual Groups on the Internet. Boston.Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society. London.Wertsch, J.V. and C.A. Stone (1985). The concept of internalization in Vygotsky's account of

the genesis of higher mental functions. In: J.V. Wertsch (Ed.): Culture, communication,and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives. Cambridge, pp. 162–179.


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9. Management and organisation of information inelectronic communicationOlle BälterElectronic mail (email) is one of the most successful computer applications today withmillions of users all over the world. The number of users is still increasing and make emailusage important to study.

Daily intense communication with email and other electronic media can in many cases causeproblems with information overview. It is difficult to separate relevant information fromirrelevant on the limited computer screen, so different mechanisms to organise and filterinformation become essential.

Our research attempts to identify and understand problems with email both for individualsand organisations to suggest remedies; both by improved or new interface design to mail toolsand by suggesting strategies for users and policies for groups of users. Our methods includesquestionnaires, interviews, field studies, diaries, and mathematical analyses. Most of thesestudies are described in a doctoral thesis (Bälter 1998).

The findings are below divided into three groups: technically educated email users,overloaded email users, and non-technically educated users.

Technically educated usersTechnically educated users have a longer e-mail experience than the average user. Technicalcompanies adopted email technology early and their employees have in general a longexperience. It is important to learn from their experience and also identify their problems asthey today have the problems that other users may run in to tomorrow.

A technical company in the process of changing from two old mainframe email systems toLotus Notes were investigated (Bälter 1997a). This study was the origin of several papersdescribed below.

First the strategies for organising email were explored in detail (Bälter 1997b). This paperexpanded the definitions of different email users made by Whittaker & Sidner (1996).Whittaker & Sidner identified three different types of email users depending on their folderusage and cleaning habits: Frequent Filers, Spring Cleaners, and No Filers. Bälter's studyadded a fourth group, Beginners, and also suggested that the development of an email userwent through these states in a predicable order: From Beginner to Frequent Filer further toSpring Cleaner and finally to No Filer.

The major forces for this development are the ever increasing flow of email messages thatincreases the number of stored messages, a promotion that doubles the number of incomingmessages, and longer times of absence from the email system (travel or vacation) that breaksdown the order in the users’ organisation of email messages.

Forces that work in the other direction are more abrupt, such as replacing the email systemand thereby losing the old structure or changing job to a different employer.

The suggestion about a natural evolution as an email user was supported by a mathematicalanalysis of the time spent handling email messages. The model estimates the time to movemessages to folders and to retrieve them again (Bälter 2000b), but excludes the time to readand write messages. Another conclusion of the model is that most users should limit the


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number of folders to approximately 30. According to the model, it is more time efficient tolearn how to use the search and sorting facilities in the email client than using a high numberof folders.

One of the problems encountered in the switch between the mainframe mail systems andLotus Notes was that both the experience and the information structure that experienced usersof the mainframe systems had was lost in the transfer between the systems (Bälter 1997c).Skilled users that knew the old mainframe commands by heart and saw no need for a mouse"that only gave them shoulder and arm problems", were suddenly forced to use a PC to handletheir mail. Much of their accumulated knowledge of mainframes suddenly became obsolete.

Feelings were strong on both sides. Mainframe users threatened to quit their jobs if they wereforced to use a PC and PC users said the same if someone should force them to use themainframe system.

These and other observations lead to recommendations for how to replace an old email systemwith a new (Bälter 2000a). In order to make the new email system successful it should beclear, already before the introduction, that:

• The new system solves existing problems.

• The management gives clear support to the system.

• Managers will be given specialised support.

• The new system should include all users.

After the introduction of the email system:

• The system should be promoted continuously.

• An open discussion about the system among the users should be

encouraged.

• The users should be continually educated in several steps.

The managers’ situation at the company studied differed from the other employees. Bybecoming a manager the email volume doubled on average. It seems as email is managersfirst choice for the increased communication that follows with the new position (Bälter2000c). Half of the respondents allowed incoming email to interrupt other tasks, despite theirneed for un-interrupted time. Unwanted carbon copies was considered a problem by therespondents, but the time spent handling them seems to be negligible. However, the irritationthese messages cause may be a problem itself.

Overloaded email usersDuring the year 1999, Bälter visited Lotus Development in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USAas a post-doc, working together with Candace Sidner. Half of this visit was financed by LotusDevelopment. The main focus of the studies was to investigate the situation for email userswho receive too many email messages to read the new messages at once (Bälter & Sidner2000) in order to identify remedies.

Users were observed during their morning reading of email and were asked questions of howand why they chose to open certain messages. From these observations it is clear that theusers were not very efficient in identifying the important messages. Most users needed severalscans of their inboxes to find what they defined as important. Also, they often drifted offreading and answering messages that clearly were not important, although interesting.


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As a remedy for this initial prioritization of which email messages to open, a prototype wasdeveloped and named Bifrost. Bifrost presents messages categorized mainly in three groups:personal messages, group messages and distribution lists. Bifrost requires no programmingfrom the users, but allows users who wish, to tailor the categorisation. Another advantage ofBifrost is that it is scalable. By re-categorising only the unread messages the inbox can bemaintained as a to-do list, with the unfinished messages at top. Messages that have been readsink to the bottom of the inbox and extensive folder usage is no longer necessary in order tomaintain the to-do list. Another feature for scalability is the possibility to categorize only themessages from the last days.

Experiments was also made with a new interface design where the users were presented a 2Dinbox. Messages were represented as movable text object that could be grouped together inpiles. These piles had functionality to allow the top-most message to shift, by replacing it withanother message in the pile at a slow pace. This way, messages were not as likely to beforgotten as they never really disappeared out of sight. This design was presented atLotusphere (Rohall 2000).

Non-technically educated usersA health care organisation was observed over a period of four years during their introductionof email to 6000 employees (Bälter 2001). Managers of five primary care centres wereinterviewed repeatedly and surveys were distributed to their employees.

Attitudes towards computers and email have become more positive over the years, especiallyamong the employees. Most of the managers were positive already at the beginning of thisstudy, and that attitude did not change much.

The main reasons for the managers' positive attitude from the beginning was the significantsimplification of their complex communication that email carried with it. Email immediatelybecame a supporting tool that helped the managers to reach people and obtain answers tosimple questions without spending hours attempting to call people on the phone. Already aftertwo months of email usage, the managers trusted the email system more than the postalservice. This feeling of security may be influenced by the speed of the delivery and the receiptobtained when a receiver opens a message for the first time. The receipt facility was astandard setting for all users in this organisation. This had, according to the respondents,resulted in fewer people claiming that they "have not seen" certain information as they usedto.

The main negative attitudes among the managers were due to problems with attachments inemail messages. Initially this caused frustration when the receiver did not know why theattachment would not open correctly. Often the managers blamed themselves for their ownlack of computer knowledge. With time and increasing knowledge of the problems withdifferent versions of Word and Excel, these problems were blamed (correctly) on the senderinstead of themselves.

The managers had concerns from the start that email would replace personal face-to-facemeetings, but at the end of the study, only one of the managers could recall that email hadreplaced a face-to-face meeting. Their attitude from the beginning probably prevented thisusage of email.

Towards the end of the study, the main cause of irritation was mass mailings within theorganisation. A simple calculation of the time spent handling these messages indicates that forthe organisation this is an economical problem. For the individuals, it is mostly an annoyance.


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However, this internal spam problem is different from the ones described by e.g. Cranor&LaMacchia (1998) and Hall (1998) that describe a situation where large quantities of emailmessages are sent from outside an organisation. In this case the mass mailings came from theinside.

Before the email introduction the new computer technology was a major concern among theemployees. In a prospective study before the email introduction, only 5% agreed completelywith the statement that they knew enough about computers to handle their work tasks. Twoyears later, after the email introduction, this number was 77%. The managers' attitudestowards, or knowledge of, writing also seems to have improved during the study. In somecases the respondents seem to be unaware of this change.

ReferencesBälter O. (1997a) Kommunikation i ett teknikföretag. Technical report TRITA-NA-P9707,NADA, May 1997.

Bälter O. (1997b) Strategies for organising email. In Thimbleby, H., O'Conaill B., andThomas P. (editor), Proceedings of HCI'97, pages 21-38, Springer, London, UK, August1997.

Bälter O. (1997c) Negligera inte erfarenhet. In STIMDI'97, pages 9-16, Linköping, September1997.

Bälter O. (1998) Electronic mail in a working context. Doctoral Thesis, Nada, Royal Instituteof Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. ISBN 91-7170-345-4.

Bälter O. (2000a) How to Replace an Old Email System With a New. Interacting withComputers, vol. 12, 2000, pages 601-614.

Bälter O. (2000b) A Keyboard Level Analysis of Email Message Organization. InProceedings of CHI 2000, pages 105-112, 2000.

Bälter O. (2000c) Give the Boss a Break from Email: Managers and their Communication. InJ Gulliksen, A Lantz, L Oestericher, K Severinson-Eklundh (editor), Proceedings ofNordiCHI 2000, STIMDI, October 2000.

Bälter O. (2001) Införande av e-post i en sjukvårdsorganisation – en longitudinell studie avfem vårdcentraler. (In Swedish). TRITA-NA P0111, IPLab-187. Nada, Royal Institute ofTechnology, Stockholm, Sweden.

Bälter O. & Sidner C (2000): Bifrost Inbox Organizer: Giving users control over the inbox.Lotus Technical report , TR 00-08 Lotus Development Cooperation.

Cranor L. & B. LaMacchia (1998): Spam! Communications of the ACM, vol. 41, no 8, pp 74-83.

Hall R. (1998): How to Avoid Unwanted Email. Communications of the ACM, vol. 41, no 3,pp 88-95.

Rohall S (2000): OverViews: Using Java Applets to Visualize Domino Data.URL:http://media.lotus.com/lotusphere2000/AD108.pdf

Whittaker S. & Sidner C. (1996): Email overload: exploring personal informationmanagement of email. In Proceedings of CHI'96 (Human Factors in Computing Systems), pp276-283.


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10. PublicationsBalsvik, G. (1999) Electronic networks and knowledge creation: A study of new learningperspectives related to the context of a media profession. Technical Report TRITA-NA-P9911, IPLab-161, NADA, KTH.

Berndtsson, J., & Normark, M. (1999). The Coordinative Functions of Flight Strips: AirTraffic Control Revisited. In Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conferenceon Supporting Group Work, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Berndtsson, J., & Normark, M. (2000). The CATCH project - A Field Study of Air TrafficControl in Copenhagen, CTI Working Paper no. 57, Center for Tele-Information, TechnicalUniversity of Denmark.

Bonde, M. (1999) Kunskapsöverföring och kompetensutveckling i en distribueradexpertgrupp med hjälp av intranät. Technical Report TRITA-NA-P9915, IPLab-164, NADA,KTH.

Boquist, J. (1999) Dokument för samarbete: En fallstudier av datoranvändningen i treorganisationer. Technical Report TRITA-NA-P9912, IPLab-162, NADA, KTH.

Bälter, O. (1997) Negligera inte erfarenhet. Paper presented at STIMDI'97. Also available asTechnical Report IPLab-131, Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science (NADA),KTH.

Bälter, O. (1997) Strategies for organising email. In Proceedings of HCI'97, pages 21-38,1997. Also available as Technical Report IPLab-130, Dept. of Numerical Analysis andComputer Science (NADA), KTH.

Bälter, O. (1997) Kommunikation i ett teknikföretag. Technical report IPLab-128, Dept. ofNumerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA), KTH.

Bälter, O. (1998) Electronic Mail in a Working Context. PhD dissertation, ISBN 91-7170-345-4, TRITA-NA-9820, IPLab-154, Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science(NADA), KTH.

Bälter, O. (2000) A keyboard level analysis of message organization. Proceedings ofCHI'2000 (Human Factors in Computing Systems), pp.105-112. ACM Press.

Bälter, O. (2000) Give the Boss a Break from Email: Managers and their Communication. In JGulliksen, A Lantz, L Oestreicher, K Severinson Eklundh (editors), Proceedings ofNordiCHI’2000, STIMDI, October 2000.

Bälter, O. (2000) How to replace an old email system with a new. Interacting withComputers, vol. 12, 601-614.

Cerratto, T. (2001). The use of synchronous text-based environments for teacher professionaldevelopment. In M. Beißwenger (ed.) Chat-Kommunikation. Sprache, Interaktion, Sozialität& Identität in synchroner computervermittelter kommunikation. Ibidem. Verlag. Stuttgart.pp. 494-514.

Groth, K. (1996), Writing Personal Information on the World Wide Web, European WritingConferences, Barcelona. Also available as Technical Report IPLab-122, Dept. of NumericalAnalysis and Computer Science (NADA), KTH.


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Groth, K. (1997), The Use of Knowledge Nets for Collaboration within Organizations: aTheoretical Background, Technical report TRITA-NA-P9703, IPLab-127, NADA, KTH.

Groth, K. (1998), Personal Home Pages on the World Wide Web–a Simple Version of aKnowledge Net?, Trends of Communication, (4), 47–59. Also available as Technical ReportIPLab-140, Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA), KTH.

Groth, K. (1998) Knowledge nets. Poster presented at ITS’98, HHS, Stockholm.

Groth, K. (1999) The Knowledge Net approach to sharing knowledge in organisations. InConference supplement of ECSCW'99 (European Conference on Computer-SupportedCooperative Work), Copenhagen, Denmark.

Groth, K. (1999), Knowledge Net–A Support for Sharing Knowledge Within an Organisation,Licentiate thesis, Dep. of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science, Royal Institute ofTechnology. (IPLab-156)

Groth, K. (2000) A Case Study of Knowledge Sharing (part one), Technical report TRITA-NA-P0016, IPLab-176, NADA, KTH.

Groth, K. & Bowers, J. (2001) On finding things out: Situating organisational knowledge inCSCW, Proceedings of ECSCW 2001 (European Conference on Computer-SupportedCooperative Work), Kluwer Academic Publishers. Also available as Technical Report IPLab-196, Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA), KTH.

Groth, K. & Lantz, L. (1997) Personliga hemsidor – funktion eller passion?, Användbarhet imorgon – funktion eller passion, pages 29-34, STIMDI, Linköping. Also available asTechnical Report IPLab-139, Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA),KTH.

Gustafsson, N., Severinson-Eklundh, K. & Rodríguez H. (1998), Domänhjälp, Technicalreport TRITA-NA-D9803, CID-30, NADA, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Hedman, A. & Lenman, S. (1999) Orientation vs. Accommodation - New Requirements forthe HCI of Digital Communities. In Bullinger, H.J. & Ziegler, J: Proceedings of HCIInternational´99, pp. 457-466.

Helgeson, B., Lundberg, J., Normark, M., Pettersson, M., & Crabtree, A. (2000). Redovisningav uppdrag i SOS Alarm AB:s Nova 2005 Teknik projekt (541 00 010) . Ronneby, Sweden:Institutionen för arbetsvetenskap (IAR): BTH och SOS Alarm AB.

Kim, H. C (2000) On-line reviewing with change representation tools. In J Gulliksen, ALantz, L Oestreicher, K Severinson Eklundh (editors), Proceedings of NordiCHI’2000,STIMDI, October 2000.

Kim, H. C. (2001) Computer support for collaborative reviewing of documents. PhDdissertation, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA), KTH.

Kim, H. C. (2002) From comments to dialogues: a study of asynchronous dialogue processesas part of collaborative reviewing on the Web. Proceedings of 35th Annual HawaiiInternational Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), January 7-10, 2002.

Kim, H. C & Severinson Eklundh, K. (1998) How academics coordinate their documentationwork and communicate about reviewing in collaborative writing. Rapport TRITA-NA-P9815,IPLab-151, Inst. för numerisk analys och datalogi (NADA), KTH.

Kim, H-C. & Severinson Eklundh, K. (2000 ) Change Representation in CollaborativeWriting. Technical report TRITA-NA-P0005, NADA, Mars 2000.


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Kim, H. C. and Severinson Eklundh, K. (2001) Reviewing practices in collaborative writing.Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 10(2), pp.247-259.

Kim, H. C. and Severinson Eklundh, K. (2002) Collaboration between writer and reviewerthrough change representation tools. Proceedings of 35th Annual Hawaii InternationalConference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), January 7-10, 2002.

Lantz, A. (1998) Heavy users of email. International Journal of Human-ComputerInteraction, 10(4), 361-379.

Lantz, A. (1998) Knowledge exchange and competence development in global and localnetworks. Poster presented at ITS’98, HHS, Stockholm.

Lantz, A. (1999) Virtual environments - usability for distributed small group meetings.Position paper presented at the workshop "Future directions in Virtual Environments II,November 11-12, 1999.

Lantz, A. (2000) Use of email: does it change over time? Technical Report TRITA-NA-P9905, IPLab-160, NADA, KTH. Accepted for publication in International Journal ofHuman-Computer Interaction.

Lantz, A. (2001) Meetings in a distributed group of experts: Comparing face-to-face, chat andcollaborative virtual environments. Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol.20, No.2,March-April 2001, pp. 111-118. Also available as Technical report TRITA-NA-P0001,NADA, KTH.

Lantz, A. & Severinson Eklundh, K. (1997). Knowledge exchange and competencedevelopment in global and local networks. Telematics Program Conference, KFB 1997.

Lantz, A. & Severinson Eklundh, K. (1999) Kommunikation och kompetensutveckling ielektroniska nätverk: en förstudie. Technical Report TRITA-NA-P9903, IPLab-158, NADA,KTH.

Lenman, S (1997) Design of Virtual Environments for Collaboration. Telematics ProgramConference, KFB 1997-485, p 21.

Lenman, S. (1999) 3D-, Digital Environments for Social Contact in Distance Work. InElectronic Proceedings of Webnet'99 World Conference on the WWW and Internet, Honolulu,Hawaii, Oct. 24-30.

Lenman, S. (1999) A Workplace for Social Contact and Communication in Distributed Work.KFBs vetenskapsforum för telematikforskning, 27-28 sept.

Normark, M. (2000). Coordination through focused media spaces. In J Gulliksen, A Lantz, LOestreicher, K Severinson Eklundh (editors), Proceedings of NordiCHI’2000, STIMDI,October 2000.

Normark, M. (2002). Using technology for real-time coordination of work; A study of workand artifact use in the everyday activities of SOS Alarm. Licentiate Thesis TRITA-NA-0122,ISBN 91-7283-239-8, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Rodriguez, H. (1999) The Domain Help System. Rapport TRITA-NA-P9912, CID-56,NADA, KTH.

Rodríguez, H. (2001) Using the WWW as infrastructure for collaborative production ofdocuments, Licentiate thesis, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science,KTH, ISBN 91-7283-128-6.


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Rodriguez, H., Kim, H-C., & Severinson Eklundh, K. (1999) Using the Web as infrastructurefor collaborative writing and document design. In Conference supplement of ECSCW'99,Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sallnäs, E-L (2000) Distributed collaboration and multimodal environments. Technical reportTRITA-NA-P0011, NADA, KTH.

Sallnäs, E-L. (2000). Improved Precision in Mediated Collaborative Manipulation of Objectsby Haptic Force Feedback. In Brewster, S., and Murray-Smith, R. (Eds.) Haptic Human-Computer Interaction. Proceedings of First International Workshop, Glasgow, UK,August/September. pp. 69-75.

Sallnäs, E-L. & Hedman A. (2000). Exploring Communicative Modes for a VirtualEnvironment: A Social Psychological Analysis. Stockholm: The Royal Institute ofTechnology. Technical report TRITA-NA-P0107, NADA, KTH.

Sallnäs, E-L, Rassmus-Gröhn, K. & Sjöström, C. (1999) Haptic feedback in virtualenvironments. In Conference supplement of ECSCW'99, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sallnäs, E-L, Rassmus-Gröhn, K. & Sjöström, C. (1999) Support for the touch modality incollaborative distributed environments. Proceedings of SSOMC'99, Linköping.

Sallnäs, E-L., Rassmus-Gröhn, K., & Sjöström, C. (2000). Supporting Presence inCollaborative Environments by Haptic Force Feedback. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 7(4): 461-476.

Sallnäs, E-L, Rassmus-Gröhn, K. & Sjöström, C. (2001) Supporting Presence andPerformance in Collaborative Multimodal Environments by Touch Feedback. ACMInteractions. 8 (1) p. 15.

Severinson Eklundh, K. (1997) Samtalsmönster i elektroniska nätverk. In Olle Josephson (ed)Svenskan i IT-samhället. Ord och stil 28, Hallgren & Fallgren, Uppsala.

Severinson Eklundh, K. (1998) To quote or not to quote: setting the context for computer-mediated dialogues. Technical Report TRITA-NA-P9807, IPLab-144, Inst. för numeriskanalys och datalogi (NADA), KTH. To appear in S. Herring (ed.) Computer-mediatedconversation. Hampton Press.

Severinson Eklundh, K., Groth, K., Hedman, A., Lantz, A., Rodriguez, H. & Sallnäs, E-L.(2000) The World Wide Web as a social infrastructure for knowledge-oriented work.Technical Report IPLab-182, NADA, KTH. To appear in H. Van Oostendorp (ed.) Cognitionin a digital world. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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