How can I learn more when I collaborate in a virtual group?

Learning in virtual groups has been a process studied and analysed long from multiple perspectives. However, the literature is scarce when we look for models to explain information problem solving skills in online collaboration. A descriptive model of cognitive skills involved in individual information problem solving while using internet information can be found in recent research. The purpose of this study was to find out what information problem solving skills (IPS) students apply when working collaboratively online, and secondly, to analyse what differentiates students who do well on their knowledge tests after collaboration, in relation to these IPS skills. We conducted a research with more than 40 students in 10 virtual groups to analyse the correlation between learning and IPS skills applied by students during an online task that lasted more than 4 weeks. Students completed a weekly self-report with actions related to IPS skills and time devoted to the collaborative task. Findings show that students applied more frequently the skill to check the communication (30%), secondly, read de information (22%), in the third place exchange information (20%), followed by write the information (15%), analyze the information (8%), and finally, search for information (5%). However, only three skills correlate with learning: information exchange, analysis of information and checking communication. Two of them (exchange and check) are collaborative skills and one of them (analysis) is an information problem-solving skill. The conclusions of this study may provide guidelines for instructors and students on ways to improve learning in online collaborative group work

Collaborative BIM in the cloud and the communication tools to support it

Process in the AEC industry is characterised by the distributed and temporary nature of project teams; discipline specific teams engage in a highly collaborative process with not yet fully standardised requirements for information exchange which often results in chaotic communication patterns. This collaborative process makes communication and coordination challenging and intensifies the need for sophisticated software tools. Efforts to address some of the UK construction industry’s problems have seen rapid acceleration of BIM adoption in recent years. The exchange of interoperable building information models across teams provides the opportunity for an improved communication paradigm, where the “structured model” rather than the “document” acts as the focal unit of communication. Since collaborators are geographically distributed, this communication type finds its natural environment in online collaboration platforms hosting building information models. Effective collaboration requires coordinated communication and communicated coordination. BIM can be expressed as the “language of construction” and requires structure and standardization even on the human communication level. The life-cycle approach will pose additional collaboration requirements. Integrated, intuitive communication tools for BIM should replace e-mail. A preliminary analysis of data from the usage of online collaboration software, including network graph representations, provides some insight into usage patterns and serves as a basis for similar analyses as more of project data becomes available. Improved results would come from a better designed analysis of more projects

Reduce Response Time: Get Hooked on a Wiki

Managing the flow of information both within the IT department and to our customers is one of our greatest challenges in the Office of Technology Information at Valparaiso University. To be successful, IT staff first need to acquire the right information from colleagues to provide excellent service. Then, the staff must determine the most effective way to communicate that information to internal and external customers to encourage the flow of information. To advance the IT department’s goals, how best can we utilize “information” and “communication” vehicles to exchange information, improve workflow, and ultimately communicate essential information to our internal and external customers? We’ve asked ourselves this question and have resolved that “information” and “communication” need to work cooperatively! How better than with a wiki? Recent changes in departmental structure gave us the opportunity to examine our communication vehicles—specifically the software tools we use to facilitate the flow of information. Our previous knowledge base, First Level Support, a module of the HEAT support software produced by FrontRange Solutions, once met our needs as an internal knowledge base solution. We realized we had outgrown FLS and needed a more robust alternative. Our student employees asked for a newer, more interactive method of sharing information. With the assistance of our UNIX systems administrator, we investigated various options and decided to implement the MediaWikiTM system. As we had anticipated, use of this wiki system reduced the response time a customer must wait for an answer to their inquiry. What we didn’t realize was that utilization of the wiki would meet many more needs than we had anticipated. It has also helped us meet other departmental needs, such as increased collaboration, an online knowledge base, and a training tool for staff. Come see how a sprinkle of pixie dust improved communication through adoption of the wiki, and brought information to the forefront of our operations

Potato breeding by many hands? : measuring the germplasm exchange based on a cultivated potatoes database

In science, collaboration is sometimes understood as synonymous with co‐authorship. However, it also can be measured through the exchange of information and materials. In agriculture, potato late blight is still a challenge to the breeding programs. Accessing different materials, which can be used as sources of resistance, is the key to successful disease control. This article maps the germplasm exchanges carried out by potato breeding in the world as a way to measure collaboration between countries. Cultivars of potato resistant to late blight were selected based on a European database and some countries stood out from others. This was mainly the case of Germany and the Netherlands. Most of the countries have greater links with themselves than with other countries, with reinforces the idea that national breeding programs work more closely within their own country than with other countries. The hegemony of some countries, the prioritization of national research and the high costs of developing a resistant cultivar can be obstacles to greater collaboration

A Systematic Review of Scientific Collaboration Studies by Iranian Authors

Scientific collaboration indicates active teamwork between researchers beyond the simple exchange of material or information. This study is a systematic review of the papers published by Iranian researchers, aiming to provide comprehensive indicators, methodologies, and software used for evaluating scientific collaboration. According to guidelines of the Cochrane Handbook, the national and international databases were used for searching by English and Persian keywords without any time limitations. The retrieved articles were managed using EndNote software. By applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 201 articles remained for this review. These articles were selected from 93 domestic and foreign journals between 2000 and 2019. The studies used 16 software to extract and analyze scientific collaboration indicators. Systematic review shows that bibliometric and network analysis methods were the main approaches used in scientific collaboration studies among papers published by Iranian researchers (93.5%). More than 25 indicators were extracted from these studies, and they were categorized into patterns of collaboration and co-authorship network analysis. Researchers have revealed an increasing interest in the factors affecting scientific collaboration in recent years. The present study provides comprehensive information on the articles published by Iranian researchers on scientific collaboration. The methodologies and software were identified that are most often used to evaluate scientific collaboration and adapted to direct future research. Still, a variety of indicators situates them in heterogeneous methods of research. This analytical perspective does not locate the evaluation of scientific collaboration at a single spot. Future scientific collaboration studies will continue to evolve to offer more powerful indicators for assessing the knowledge flow status quo.https://dorl.net/dor/20.1001.1.20088302.2022.20.2.13.

Modeling Information Exchange Opportunities for Effective Human-Computer Teamwork

This paper studies information exchange in collaborative group activities involving mixed networks of people and computer agents. It introduces the concept of "nearly decomposable" decision-making problems to address the complexity of information exchange decisions in such multi-agent settings. This class of decision-making problems arise in settings which have an action structure that requires agents to reason about only a subset of their partners' actions – but otherwise allows them to act independently. The paper presents a formal model of nearly decomposable decision-making problems, NED-MDPs, and defines an approximation algorithm, NED-DECOP that computes efficient information exchange strategies. The paper shows that NED-DECOP is more efficient than prior collaborative planning algorithms for this class of problem. It presents an empirical study of the information exchange decisions made by the algorithm that investigates the extent to which people accept interruption requests from a computer agent. The context for the study is a game in which the agent can ask people for information that may benefit its individual performance and thus the groupʼs collaboration. This study revealed the key factors affecting peopleʼs perception of the benefit of interruptions in this setting. The paper also describes the use of machine learning to predict the situations in which people deviate from the strategies generated by the algorithm, using a combination of domain features and features informed by the algorithm. The methodology followed in this work could form the basis for designing agents that effectively exchange information in collaborations with people.Engineering and Applied Science

The Key Determinant Factors of Clinical Information Systems User Satisfaction: Lessons Learnt From an Australian Case Study

Driven by the escalating pressures to enhance its outcomes within its limited resources, the healthcare industry is increasingly investing in various clinical information systems. Although user satisfaction is key to realizing the benefits of these large invests, the determinant factors for user satisfaction with clinical information systems are still not well understood. This study addresses this need by qualitatively investigating the relationships between the overall satisfaction with clinical information systems and five key aspects of clinical information systems, namely key functionalities, efficiency of use, intuitiveness of graphical user interfaces (GUI), communication, collaboration, and information exchange, and interoperability and compatibility issues. The findings resulting from both descriptive and thematic analyses show that clinical information systems are still in their infant stage and that their maturity is highly questionable. Simpler clinical information systems are likely to be more satisfying than more complex systems. System design and training provided are also key factors as the study finds

The Dynamics of Teams and Technology: A Field Study of Groupware in a Network Organization

Groupware technology, such as electronic communication systems, discussion databases, collaborative writing tools, and workflow applications, has been viewed by both scholars and practitioners as having the potential to facilitate productive teamworkandenableanorganization’stransitiontotheso-callednetworkdesign. Networkedorganizationsrelyonmultiparty cooperative relationships across structural and geographic boundaries, yielding dense, flexible communication patterns. Because groupware systems provide a platform on which teams can support their communication needs and shared work obligations, teams which use groupware should experience improved information exchange and fewer coordination problems than those that do not. Further, organizations that invest in groupware systems should make more rapid progress toward a network form than those that do not. The added value of groupware, relative to more primitive forms of communication support, should increase as team members become more facile in new technology use and modify their work practices to accommodate computer-mediated collaboration

Task influences on spontaneous peer learning in the classroom

A number of experimental interventions have confirmed the effectiveness of peer collaboration for the acquisition of concepts such as conservation. However, no study to date has described the process or effectiveness of peer learning as it takes place in classrooms. The present study documented episodes of spontaneous peer interaction during academic tasks in a progressive school. Results indicated that the type of task performed influenced the structure of the interaction. Open-ended or discovery tasks such as story-writing promoted more exchange of information and more argumentation than did skill tasks that had only one right answer. Skill tasks were related to more negative behaviors, such as refusals and rejections, and resulted in more time spent off task. The interactive behavior observed during engagement with discovery tasks is consistent with the interactive style related to cognitive growth in laboratory studies of peer interaction

Interorganizational Information System Deployment in Supply Chain Triads

Interorganizational information systems (IOIS) are valuable tools providing platforms for information flow enabling more efficient and reliable collaboration in digitalized supply chains. An IOIS is subject to influencing factors originating in the company and environment. Inspired by complex adaptive system theory, an agent-based simulation model is designed, exploring factors affecting the integration and efficiency of IOIS. These factors are derived from resource-based view and dynamic capabilities theory. The influence on information system deployment is assessed by merging these factors into exogenous, intercompany climate, and operational dimensions. First, the results indicate that product-specific factors have a greater influence than the environment when deploying an IOIS. Second, deliberate design of IC relationships should be considered during the development of an IOIS. Third, extensive information exchange between supply chain partners might be disadvantageous for IOIS utilization. Fourth, the advantages of IOIS can be lost when completely open systems are used