THE IMPORTANCE OF AWARENESS FOR TEAM COGNITION IN DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATION
Date
2001-12-18
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Abstract
Although the phrase team cognition suggests something that happens
inside people's heads, teams are very much situated in the real world, and
there are a number of things that have to happen out in that world for teams to
be able to think and work together. This is not just spoken communication.
Depending on the circumstances, effective team cognition includes things like
using environmental cues to establish a common ground of understanding, seeing
who is around and what they are doing, monitoring the state of artifacts in a
shared work setting, noticing other people's gestures and what they are
referring to, and so on (Clark, 1996; Hutchins, 1996). In this chapter, we will
argue that awareness of other group members is a critical building block in
the construct of team cognition, and consequently that computational support
for awareness in groupware systems is crucial for supporting team cognition in
distributed groups. Our main message is that: for people to sustain
effective team cognition when working over a shared visual workspace, our
groupware systems must give team members a sense of workspace awareness. Before
getting into details, we will set the scene by first describing the
collaborative situations we address in this chapter, and then by introducing
workspace awareness and why it is a problem in conventional groupware systems.
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Computer Science