Gutwin, CarlGreenberg, Saul2008-02-272008-02-272001-12-18http://hdl.handle.net/1880/45867Although 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.EngComputer Scienceunknown2001-696-1910.11575/PRISM/30784