Unpacking the Role of Feedback in Virtual Team Effectiveness

Feedback is a cornerstone of human development. Not surprisingly, it plays a vital role in team development. However, the literature examining the specific role of feedback in virtual team effectiveness remains scattered. To improve our understanding of feedback in virtual teams, we identified 59 studies that examine how different feedback characteristics (content, source, and level) impact virtual team effectiveness. Our findings suggest that virtual teams benefit particularly from feedback that (a) combines performance-related information with information on team processes and/or psychological states, (b) stems from an objective source, and (c) targets the team as a whole. By integrating the existing knowledge, we point researchers in the direction of the most pressing research needs, as well as the practices that are most likely to pay off when designing feedback interventions in virtual teams

Killer Apps: Developing Novel Applications That Enhance Team Coordination, Communication, and Effectiveness

As part of the Lorentz workshop, “Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics,” held in Leiden, Netherlands, this article describes how Geeks and Groupies (computer and social scientists) may benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration toward the development of killer apps in team contexts that are meaningful and challenging for both. First, we discuss interaction processes during team meetings as a research topic for both Groupies and Geeks. Second, we highlight teamwork in health care settings as an interdisciplinary research challenge. Third, we discuss how an automated solution for optimal team design could benefit team effectiveness and feed into team-based interventions. Fourth, we discuss team collaboration in massive open online courses as a challenge for both Geeks and Groupies. We argue for the necessary integration of social and computational research insights and approaches. In the hope of inspiring future interdisciplinary collaborations, we develop criteria for evaluating killer apps—including the four proposed here—and discuss future research challenges and opportunities that potentially derive from these developments

Sharing emotions impacts computer-supported collaborative processes: effect of an emotion awareness tool

There is a large consensus among researchers on the significant role of emotions in group effectiveness and performance. Emotion awareness tools (EATs) have been developed in recent years allowing members of a group to identify with their own- and their partner's emotions through a computer-mediated collaboration. In this study, we report the impact of an EAT on socio-cognitive and relational processes, and its differential effect depending on gender. This study shows that the EAT was beneficial for processes contributing to the quality of working relationships and the mutual modeling process, by which group members gain a better awareness of their partner's knowledge

Need Finding for an Embodied Coding Platform: Educators’ Practices and Perspectives

Eight middle- and high-school Computer Science (CS) teachers in San Diego County were interviewed about the major challenges their students commonly encounter in learning computer programming. We identified strategic design opportunities -- that is, challenges and needs that can be addressed in innovative ways through the affordances of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). Thematic Analysis of the interviews yielded six thematic clusters: Tools for Learning, Visualization and Representation, Pedagogical Approaches, Classroom Culture, Motivation, and Community Connections. Within the theme of visualization, focal clusters centered on visualizing problem spaces and using metaphors to explain computational concepts, indicating that an AR/VR coding system could help users to represent computational problems by allowing them to build from existing embodied experiences and knowledge. Additionally, codes clustered within the theme of learning tools reflected educators’ preference for web-based IDEs, which involve minimal start-up costs, as well as concern over the degree of transfer in learning between block- and text-based interfaces. Finally, themes related to motivation, community, and pedagogical practices indicated that the design of an AR coding platform should support collaboration, self-expression, and autonomy in learning. It should also foster selfefficacy and learners’ ability to address lived experience and real-world problems through computational means

Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online

This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations

Shared Mental Models in Creative Virtual Teamwork

This paper presents an experiment on the impact of Shared Mental Models (SMM) on creative virtual teamwork. We tested whether the usage of an online whiteboard influences the building of SMM in the initial phase of virtual teamwork. As SMM are the foundation for successful collaboration in teams, we transferred the construct on measuring the team task and team goal in a creative virtual team process. In the first section of the paper a theoretical discussion on SMM, creativity and virtual teamwork will be presented. Subsequently, our experiment on virtual teamwork via the use of a virtual tool and its impact towards SMM will be introduced and the results will be discussed. We identified that specific creative competencies of virtual tools enhance the level of SMM but still lack in perceived efficiency compared to physically present teamwork. The findings recommend further research on the applicability, effectiveness and capabilities of creative virtual tools

Moody Man: Improving creative teamwork through dynamic affective recognition

While a significant part of communication in the workplace is now happening online, current platforms don’t fully support socio-cognitive nonverbal communication, which hampers the shared understanding and creativity of virtual teams. Given text-based communication being the main channel for virtual collaboration, we propose a novel solution leveraging an AI-based, dynamic affective recognition system. The app provides live feedback about the affective content of the communication in Slack, in the form of a visual representation and percentage breakdown of the ‘sentiment’ (tone, emoji) and main ‘emotion states’ (e.g. joy, anger). We tested the usability of the app in a quasi-experiment with 30 participants from diverse backgrounds, linguistic analysis and user interviews. The findings show that the app significantly increases shared understanding and creativity within virtual teams. Emerged themes included impression formation assisted by affective recognition, supporting long-term relationships development; identified challenges related to transparency and emotional complexity detected by AI

Collocated Collaboration Analytics: Principles and Dilemmas for Mining Multimodal Interaction Data

© 2019, Copyright © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Learning to collaborate effectively requires practice, awareness of group dynamics, and reflection; often it benefits from coaching by an expert facilitator. However, in physical spaces it is not always easy to provide teams with evidence to support collaboration. Emerging technology provides a promising opportunity to make collocated collaboration visible by harnessing data about interactions and then mining and visualizing it. These collocated collaboration analytics can help researchers, designers, and users to understand the complexity of collaboration and to find ways they can support collaboration. This article introduces and motivates a set of principles for mining collocated collaboration data and draws attention to trade-offs that may need to be negotiated en route. We integrate Data Science principles and techniques with the advances in interactive surface devices and sensing technologies. We draw on a 7-year research program that has involved the analysis of six group situations in collocated settings with more than 500 users and a variety of surface technologies, tasks, grouping structures, and domains. The contribution of the article includes the key insights and themes that we have identified and summarized in a set of principles and dilemmas that can inform design of future collocated collaboration analytics innovations

Applications of Virtual Reality

Information Technology is growing rapidly. With the birth of high-resolution graphics, high-speed computing and user interaction devices Virtual Reality has emerged as a major new technology in the mid 90es, last century. Virtual Reality technology is currently used in a broad range of applications. The best known are games, movies, simulations, therapy. From a manufacturing standpoint, there are some attractive applications including training, education, collaborative work and learning. This book provides an up-to-date discussion of the current research in Virtual Reality and its applications. It describes the current Virtual Reality state-of-the-art and points out many areas where there is still work to be done. We have chosen certain areas to cover in this book, which we believe will have potential significant impact on Virtual Reality and its applications. This book provides a definitive resource for wide variety of people including academicians, designers, developers, educators, engineers, practitioners, researchers, and graduate students