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Article history:
Available online 5 August 2010
Keywords:
Computer-supported collaborative learning
Group awareness
Design features
a b s t r a c t
Group awareness has become an important concept since it was introduced into the eld of computersupported collaborative learning. This paper discusses current trends and future directions in this
research eld. It is argued that the development and implementation of tools should be complemented
by systematic explorations into the mechanisms that moderate the relationship between group awareness and learning. It is suggested that variations in tool design features are a starting point for furthering
our understanding of the processes involved in group awareness. Based on the contributions in this special issue, eight areas for future empirical investigations are identied. The paper concludes with some
theoretical considerations on the nature of group awareness.
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
When the term awareness was coined some 20 years ago,
many scholars in the eld of computer-supported collaborative
work (CSCW) held that interacting via computers was lacking the
richness of natural, unmediated interaction. In CSCW research,
awareness became an umbrella term to express precisely those
qualities that were lacking in computer-mediated environments;
in other words, awareness was dened ex negativo. Consequently,
early technological solutions to provide awareness were trying to
recreate the gold standard of face-to-face environments, e.g.
through the use of video cameras that captured how work activities unfolded across space. In subsequent years, the notion of
awareness was extended considerably, and while Gutwin and
Greenberg (1995) were among the rst to theorize about social aspects of awareness, CSCW research and development was still
bound to the idea of facilitating the perception of spatially
grounded activities (seeing who is around; seeing who is located
in real or virtual space; seeing what others are doing).
For large parts of the last 20 years, the notion of awareness has
been conned to the area of CSCW. However, about 5 years ago the
concept was begun to be explored by a number of research groups
in the eld of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) as
well. Along with the move from cooperative work to collaborative
learning came a number of different ideas on what awareness is
about. First of all, providing environmental or spatial cues plays a
much smaller role in the relevant CSCL literature. Rather, awareness tools focus on social aspects, i.e. on information that is inex Address: Knowledge Media Research Center, Konrad-Adenauer-Str. 40, 72072
Tbingen, Germany. Tel.: +49 7071 979 326; fax: +49 7071 979 100.
E-mail address: j.buder@iwm-kmrc.de
0747-5632/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.07.012
partners in terms of the degree of understanding of learning materials. Sangin, Molinari, Nssli, and Dillenbourg (2011) explored
awareness about objective levels of partner performance from a
knowledge test. The tool developed by Janssen, Erkens, and Kirschner (2011) provides awareness about the overall writing activity
levels of participants. And the study by Phielix, Prins, Kirschner, Erkens, and Jaspers (2011) addresses awareness about social and
cognitive categories like the friendliness or the productivity of collaborators. Despite all the differences in the scenarios involved,
these studies have all shown a relationship between group awareness and indicators of learning, and they add to an impressive list
of other studies that have found such a relationship in the past.
While the diversity of settings and tools makes it exceedingly difcult to provide a comprehensive and clear-cut denition of group
awareness, it also underlines the enormous potential of group
awareness support systems for computer-supported collaborative
learning.
As the eld matures, it can be expected that more and more
studies will show the benets of group awareness technologies
for collaborative learning, both in laboratory settings and in educational practice. However, apart from developing ever new tools to
support awareness, we should also begin to systematically explore
the underlying mechanisms that impact the relationship between
awareness and learning outcomes. The paper by Fransen, Kirschner, and Erkens (2011) provides many important insights into
the psychological variables that are related to group awareness,
but it does not directly address the role of technology in this process. What we need, then, is an understanding of the potentially
complex interactions between group features, design features, task
features, learning processes, and learning outcomes. The present
contribution is an attempt to integrate some of the ndings from
this special issue and from other sources in order to provide building blocks towards a deeper understanding of why and how group
awareness can foster learning. With a particular emphasis on design features, it tries to identify relevant research questions that
deserve to be tackled in dedicated empirical investigations.
The next sections of this paper are organized around a distinction made by Schmidt (2002) in his review on CSCW awareness research. He identied two observable activities that can be found in
virtually all settings where (group) awareness plays a prominent
role. The rst of these activities is displaying which can loosely
be described as the process of making something aware. The second activity is monitoring, and it refers to the process of actually
becoming aware of information that was displayed by others before. Coordination between collaborators can be regarded as an
ongoing cycle between displaying and monitoring activities. The
next two sections discuss some empirically open questions that
can be associated with displaying and monitoring activities.
2. Displaying
Displaying refers to the processes by which the things to be
made aware of are generated. There are several methods of how
to design and support displaying activities, but we only have a very
rough understanding of what method is appropriate in a given context. This section describes four different issues that are associated
with different design options.
The rst issue to be discussed refers to two alternative principles that can lead to the display of awareness information which
are commonly referred to as explicit feedback vs. implicit feedback
in the literature on information retrieval systems. Explicit feedback
involves a deliberate, intentional and conscious displaying activity
by learners. For instance, in Bodemers study (2010), participants
intentionally assigned graphical elements in the collaborative integration task to express their current understanding of statistics
1115
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3. Monitoring
Monitoring describes the process of becoming aware of information that was displayed by other group members. While Fransen
et al. (2011) have investigated monitoring behavior by means of a
post hoc questionnaire, the process itself is an integral part of collaboration as it unfolds. This special issue provides some interesting insights into the monitoring process, e.g. by tracking at what
times and for which duration awareness information is used (Sangin et al., Janssen et al.). This section describes four issues that deserve further empirical investigation with regard to monitoring.
The rst issue relates to the fact that similar to displaying, monitoring can be more or less obtrusive. Regulating awareness is generally held to be a secondary task to the main task that a group has
to accomplish (Gutwin & Greenberg, 2002). Bodemers collaborative integration tool is an interesting departure from this idea, as
no distinction between primary (learning activity) and secondary
task (regulating awareness) can be drawn. However, in cases
where displaying and monitoring become extra activities, there is
the open question of how much monitoring diverts attention from
the main task. Most monitoring tools described in this special issue
were contained in a dedicated window of the main workspace
(Dehler et al., Sangin et al., Phielix et al.). However, the participation tool by Janssen et al. required participants to open an extra
window for monitoring the activity levels of their collaborators.
Further investigations might address the levels of extraneous cognitive load that is associated with splitting attention between different workspace windows vs. opening an additional window
when the situational affordances call for it.
A second issue with regard to monitoring refers to the ability
and ease with which to compare pieces of information that were
displayed. For instance, the participation tool (Janssen et al.) and
the Radar tool (Phielix et al.) enable learners to compare assessments of their own performance with the performance of others,
albeit with the use of visualizations that might be difcult to
understand for novices. In contrast, the collaborative integration
tool (Bodemer) and the GKA tool (Dehler et al.) are maximized
for salience and comparability between own display and partner
display by using adjacent boxes. Consequently, both Bodemer
and Dehler et al. argue that comparability should be a main feature
of group awareness tools. It is interesting to compare these solutions to the tool of Sangin et al., as it is the only example in this
special issue where only partner performance can be monitored,
thus providing no support for comparability. Sangin et al. have
found in their study that learning performance was related to the
amount of uncertainty markers in the linguistic utterances of collaborators, and it might be that not knowing about ones own performance introduces exactly this element of uncertainty. As it is,
comparability is a double-edged sword: in the best case, it triggers
help-giving behavior, as was found in the study by Dehler et al. in
the worst case, it can be associated with social psychological phenomena like downward comparison or sucker effects, and lead to
withholding of information. It should be interesting to explore
the conditions that lead to positive or detrimental outcomes of
comparability.
The third issue deserving further investigation is related to the
notion of comparability, viz. the general normative function of
group awareness tools. It can be argued that many group awareness tools make group norms visible, and this in turn will regulate
the ow of collaboration. In the papers of this special issue, this is
probably most obvious in the case of the participation tool (Janssen
et al.). Perceiving and knowing that others have contributed more
than oneself is likely to activate some degree of normative pressure, thereby preventing free-riding from taking place. On the
other hand, knowing that performance will be monitored by others
can lead to evaluation apprehension (Cottrell, 1972). For instance,
it could be that the GKA tool from Dehler et al. can backre in those
cases where learners of clearly different levels of knowledge are
paired, thereby impeding the acceptance of the tool. How to deal
with evaluation apprehension is a largely unresolved issue. It
might be that learners counteract the dangers of evaluation apprehension through an ination of positive ratings. This conclusion
could be drawn from the unexpected nding of Phielix et al.
(2010) showing that partner ratings increased the longer the collaboration lasted.
The fourth issue that is related to monitoring refers to the directivity and/or guidance of group awareness tools. It can be speculated that the effectiveness of tools for learning is positively
correlated to the degree of behavioral adaptation that they bring
about: a tool that does not change collaboration is unlikely to have
a positive effect. The tools described in this special issue certainly
all adhere to the idea of behavioral adaptation, but it can be argued
that they support different degrees of coupling monitored information with immediate action. For instance, the knowledge awareness tool by Sangin et al. helps learners to mentally contextualize
the utterances of their partners, but it does not trigger immediate
action on the part of the learner who monitors the partner performance. In contrast, the participation tool (Janssen et al.) and the
Radar tool (Phielix et al.) certainly provide cues for behavioral
adaptation, but it might still be difcult for learners to implement
this adaptation. It is one thing to see that one should be friendlier
or more productive, but the tools themselves do not foster the
skills that are necessary to actually become friendlier or more productive. Guidance and directivity are probably more pronounced in
the GKA tool (Dehler et al.) and the collaborative integration tool
(Bodemer). In these cases, the tools provide strong affordances
for immediate action by not only making salient interpersonal
commonalities and differences, but also by triggering adaptive
behavior (asking questions vs. giving explanations in the GKA tool;
adding elements and focusing on conicting assignments in the
collaborative integration tool). However, it is conceivable to
strengthen directivity and guidance even more, e.g. through the
use of explicit recommendations generated by the tool, or through
scripting mechanisms. Dehler, Bodemer, Buder, and Hesse (2009)
have already discussed the need to translate awareness information in a way that coordinated activities are facilitated.
Issue
Displaying
Displaying
Displaying
Displaying
Monitoring
Monitoring
Monitoring
Monitoring
1117
The analysis by Fransen et al. can be interpreted in a way that relatively stable, long-term concepts like shared mental models are a
better determinant of learning success than situational, short-term
group awareness and performance monitoring. But it leaves open
the question of whether group awareness is an important antecedent of stable cognitive structures like shared mental models or
transactive memory systems, a possibility that was raised in an
overview by Engelmann, Dehler, Bodemer, and Buder (2009).
In sum, research on group awareness still has many empirical
and theoretical areas that are left unexplored. However, this should
not be regarded as a drawback, but rather as an encouraging sign
that group awareness is likely to stay an active eld of research
in the area of computer-supported collaborative learning.
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