Team Research at the Biology–Mathematics Interface: Project Management Perspectives

The success of interdisciplinary research teams depends largely upon skills related to team performance. We evaluated student and team performance for undergraduate biology and mathematics students who participated in summer research projects conducted in off-campus laboratories. The student teams were composed of a student with a mathematics background and an experimentally oriented biology student. The team mentors typically ranked the students' performance very good to excellent over a range of attributes that included creativity and ability to conduct independent research. However, the research teams experienced problems meeting prespecified deadlines due to poor time and project management skills. Because time and project management skills can be readily taught and moreover typically reflect good research practices, simple modifications should be made to undergraduate curricula so that the promise of initiatives, such as MATH-BIO 2010, can be implemented

Coordinative Entities: Forms of Organizing in Data Intensive Science

Scientific collaboration is a long-standing subject of CSCW scholarship that typically focuses on the development and use of computing systems to facilitate research. The research presented in this article investigates the sociality of science by identifying and describing particular, common forms of organizing that researchers in four different scientific realms employ to conduct work in both local contexts and as part of distributed, global projects. This paper introduces five prototypical forms of organizing we categorize as coordinative entities: the Principal Group, Intermittent Exchange, Sustained Aggregation, Federation, and Facility Organization. Coordinative entities as a categorization help specify, articulate, compare, and trace overlapping and evolving arrangements scientists use to facilitate data intensive research. We use this typology to unpack complexities of data intensive scientific collaboration in four cases, showing how scientists invoke different coordinative entities across three types of research activities: data collection, processing, and analysis. Our contribution scrutinizes the sociality of scientific work to illustrate how these actors engage in relational work within and among diverse, dispersed forms of organizing across project, funding, and disciplinary boundaries

Firm as a Coordination System: Evidence from Offshore Software Services

To examine what, if any, are the differences in how activities are coordinated within versus between firms, we conducted interviews with 32 project managers regarding 60 projects in the offshore software services industry. Uniquely, our projects were sampled along two dimensions: (1) colocation versus spatial distribution and (2) delivery by groups of individuals from a single firm versus from multiple firms. Our evidence suggests that in colocated projects, the same broad categories of coordination mechanisms are used both within and between firms. However, there is a qualitative difference in how geographically (i.e., spatially) distributed projects are coordinated within versus between firms. Distributed projects conducted within firms rely extensively on tacit coordination mechanisms; such mechanisms are not readily available in between-firm projects that are spatially distributed. This difference may arise because of the lack of shared history and lack of enforcement through common authority in the between-firm context. </jats:p

Groupware design : principles, prototypes, and systems

Computers are valuable tools for a wide range of work tasks. A substantial limitation on their value, however, is the predominant focus on enhancing the work of individuals. This fails to account for the issues of collaboration that affect almost all work. Research into computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) aims to eliminate this deficiency, but the promise of computer systems for group work has not been met. This thesis presents four design principles that promote the development of successful groupware. The principles identify the particular problems encountered by groupware, and provide guidelines and strategies to avoid, overcome, or minimise their impact. Derived from several sources, the major influence on the principles development is an investigation into the relationship between factors affecting groupware failure. They are stimulated by observations of groupware use, and by design insights arising from the development of two groupware applications and their prototypes: Mona and TELEFREEK. Mona provides conversation-based email management. Several groupware applications allow similar functionality, but the design principles result in Mona using different mechanisms to achieve its user-support. TELEFREEK provides a platform for accessing computer-supported communication and collaboration facilities. It attends to the problems of initiating interaction, and supports an adaptable and extendible set of "social awareness" assistants. TELEFREEK offers a broader range of facilities than other groupware, and avoids the use of prohibitively high-bandwidth communication networks. TELEFREEK demonstrates that much can be achieved through current and widely accessible technology. Together, Mona and TELEFREEK forcefully demonstrate the use of the design principles, and substantiate the claim of their utility

MCubed: The Formation and Output of Incentivized Interdisciplinary Collaborations.

Interdisciplinary collaboration involves many challenges. Simply finding researchers with the complementary expertise necessary to answer certain research questions can be a challenge. Once researchers find collaborators, differences in tacit disciplinary knowledge can make communication and agreement on research approaches difficult. Adding to these difficulties are the accepted norms regarding the theoretical and methodological approaches to research of the institutions surrounding various disciplines, such as university departments and publication venues. It should come as no surprise that conflicting evidence exists regarding the effect of interdisciplinary collaboration, with some studies showing benefits and others suggesting that the costs outweigh the benefits. This study uses a mixed methods approach to understand how these challenges affected the interdisciplinary projects funded by the MCubed initiative at the University of Michigan. Many researchers who participated in MCubed found their collaborators through existing professional networks, rather than the MCubed website. While prior interactions appeared to strongly influence the researchers chosen for collaboration on MCubed projects, those prior interactions did not appear to influence output from those projects. The use of certain technical tools—specifically, shared file repositories—was positively correlated to certain types of project output. The degree of institutional financial support—both within a department and the funding available to various disciplines—played a large part in both the decision to collaborate on a project and the output from a project. Each research project can produce a wide range of outputs. The perceived value of that output is greatly influenced by the norms of each discipline, as evidenced by individual departments and larger disciplinary institutions, such as funding agencies and publication venues. Moreover, disciplinary similarity was positively correlated to peer-reviewed project output. These findings suggest that the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration are a matter of perception and degree.PhDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116723/1/kkervin_1.pd

Designing together apart : computer supported collaborative design in architecture

The design of computer tools to assist in work has often attempted to replicate manual methods. This replication has been proven to fail in a diversity of fields such as business management, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer- Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). To avoid such a failure being repeated in the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Design (CSCD), this thesis explores the postulation that CSCD does not have to be supported by tools which replicate the face-to-face design context to support distal architectural design. The thesis closely examines the prevailing position that collaborative design is a social and situated act which must therefore be supported by high bandwidth tools. This formulation of architectural collaboration is rejected in favour of the formulation of a collaborative expert act. This proposal is tested experimentally, the results of which are presented. Supporting expert behaviour requires different tools than the support of situated acts. Surveying research in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), the thesis identifies tools that support expert work. The results of the research is transferred to two contexts: teaching and practice. The applications in these two contexts illustrate how CSCD can be applied in a variety of bandwidth and technological conditions. The conclusion is that supporting collaborative design as an expert and knowledge-based act can be beneficially implemented in the teaching and practice of architecture

Letters and networks : analysing Olive Schreiner's epistolary networks.

This thesis analyses letters and other archival material associated with Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and her network(s) to conceptualise and theorise aspects of "letterness" and networks. Its premise is that such qualitative micro-level analysis of letters and other historical documents can contribute effectively to contemporary thinking about both epistolarity and social networks and their analysis. Using the existing literatures on Schreiner, epistolarity and social network analysis as a starting point, the analysis of letters and other relevant archival material is used to inform the setting of analytical boundaries. Then five examples of Schreiner-related networks – the Lytton to Carpenter letters, the Great War letters to Aletta Jacobs, letters of the Men and Women‟s Club, women‟s letters to Jan Smuts, and letters in the Schreiner-Hemming family collection - are analysed to demonstrate the validity of the premise and to contribute in an innovative and in-depth way to conceptual and theoretical ideas in the field. In doing so, the thesis offers an in-depth analysis of letters and networks in a variety of historical social contexts, identifying key features within each network and exploring whether these are case-specific or generalizable in theoretical terms. This thesis argues that many existing concepts such as those of reciprocity, brokering, bridging, gatekeeping and dyads can be teased out in an analytically helpful way by using letters to reveal the variations and nuances of these concepts in micro-levels interactions. It also considers network size, arguing that existing assessments of this based on frequency of contact, emotional intensity and time since last contact are not in fact particularly important in relation to the analysis of these networks and their epistolary communications. Rather, it is what happens in networks and the letters associated with them, with network members using and deploying their letter-writing in strategic and instrumentally ways. The key arguments made by the thesis concerning letters and networks are: that the size of a network is important but not deterministic; that the balance of reciprocity in letter exchanges and correspondence is highly complex, with this emergent through letter-exchanges, letter content and also enclosures of different kinds; that the purpose of a network and the existence of central figures within it creates propulsions and constraints; that brokering is neither necessarily positive nor always proactive action; that the complex nature of interpersonal ties and how these change over time affects both letters and networks; that letters and their writers can be future-orientated rather than retrospectively focused; and, that this orientation towards the future can influence decisions concerning the retention and archivisation of letters - a fundamental issue in epistolary research - and subsequently what can be gleaned from them concerning networks