User Interface Design and Knowledge Integration in Electronic Groups: An Attention-Based View

The theory developed in this study seeks to construct an attention-based view of knowledge integration that underscores the importance of IS interface design. The assumption is that presenting ideas via user interface plays a key role in enabling and motivating knowledge integration in electronic brainstorming groups. Building on the attention-based view and motivation-ability framework, the current theory focuses on two major attributes of user interface: visibility and prioritization. While the first attribute is concerned with enabling knowledge integration via directing attention to a limited set of knowledge items, the second attribute intends to enhance the motivation for knowledge integration by exposing prioritized ideas to individuals’ attention. Knowledge integration at the group level is an essential process for establishing knowledge-based capabilities. To harness the collective value of the knowledge owned by individuals, organizations must facilitate knowledge integration. Lack of knowledge integration significantly reduces the value of knowledge sharing, which has long been the focus of organizational research. Unless attended to, processed, and integrated by recipients, the shared knowledge does not guarantee any benefit to the organization. However, pervasive use of online collaborative knowledge creation platforms (e.g., discussion boards, technical forums) has brought about an abundance of information that competes for attracting individuals’ attention. This information abundance made available electronically, calls for revisiting knowledge presentation via user interface to enhance knowledge integration. If not properly presented via user interface, information abundance distorts individuals’ attention and overshadows good ideas that are stored electronically among many others. This distortion will adversely influence individuals’ ability and motivation for knowledge integration.This theory developed in this study is distinct from previous research of computer-mediated knowledge integration in at least two ways: the frameworks explicitly separates knowledge integration and knowledge sharing and focuses exclusively on knowledge integration. Second, the attention-based view of knowledge integration is used to construct a motivation-ability framework for knowledge integration in the context of IS user interface

Attention-based View of Knowledge Integration in Virtual Teams

Knowledge creation and creativity are essential for organizations’ success. Ideation is the first step towards organizational creativity and many of the best ideas are created when individuals work together or ideate on a topic (Santanen et al. 2004). With individuals being repositories of often heterogeneous and asymmetric information, knowledge integration becomes a critical process for creating innovative ideas. This research maintains an attention-based view of knowledge integration (Ocasio 1997; Simon 1947). For ideas to be integrated, they have to be exposed to brainstormers’ attention and this paper investigates the extent to which channeling and directing individuals’ attention through manipulation of visibility of the ideas and prioritization influence knowledge integration behavior of the individuals

An Experimental Study of the Attention-based View of Idea Integration: The Need for a Multi-level Dependent Variable

Decision making involves creating a rationale for supporting a choice. Groups make many decisions that require individual members to interact and collaborate with one another. High-quality decisions require that group members pay attention to different perspectives on the decision topic, process diverse or even opposing ideas, and combine (i.e., integrate) those ideas into coherent arguments. Despite the availability of information systems (IS), such as electronic brainstorming systems (EBS), to support group decision making, researchers have relatively understudied their role in idea integration. In this paper, we focus on the role of IS user interface design in idea integration. Applying an attention-based view of idea integration, we present a model and subsequent experimental study to explore the interaction between idea visibility, prioritization, and idea integration and the moderating effects of information diversity and group size. While our results generally support the attention-based view, they also identify the need to refine the dependent variable and distinguish between different types of idea integration. The findings have implications for electronically enabled brainstorming and group decision making

Remix & Review: Networks of Interactions in a Creative Commons Music Community

Creative Commons (CC) aims to foster creativity through open sharing and use of creative works. Production of creative works in online communities has benefited from the flexible copyrighting framework offered by Creative Commons. The openness in sharing and the transparency of activities in CC-based online communities have made those communities excellent platforms for research on sharing and use behaviors. In this study, we explore patterns of users’ interactions on ccMixter.org which is a CC music community. Particularly we focus on remix and review behavior. Our goal is to compare and contrasts networks of individuals in two different types of interactions: (1) when a user in the network remixes a piece of music created by another user; and (2) when a user reviews a piece of music create by another user. We compare the two networks with respect to their core contributors, degree of centralization, and the potential links between remix and review activities for the more active or popular nodes. Our initial explorations are presented here and plans for future research are outlined

Are Shared Ideas Used? An Empirical Examination of the Effects of IS User Interface Features on Idea Integration in Electronic Brainstorming

Are shared ideas used? Despite the pervasive use of electronic media for idea generation and idea sharing, the extent and quality of idea integration and use in electronic brainstorming is relatively understudied. This study empirically examines an attention-based theory of idea integration that underscores the importance of IS user interface design. Building upon Cognitive Network Model of Creativity (CNM) and ability-motivation framework, the attention-based view of idea integration formulates a causal model for idea integration in the context of user interface. The causal model focuses on the effect of idea visibility and prioritization on idea integration and the extent to which those relationships are moderated by information diversity and group size. A full description of the experimental study and its implications are provided in the paper

Selective Exposure: Implications for Information Elaboration in Asynchronous Online Discussions

Selective exposure is an inhibitor to teaching and learning in an IT-enabled learning environment because in electronic environments, students have greater freedom over what they choose to access and read. This study will use in-class field experiments in order to examine the impact of information presentation and familiarity of the source on the quality of information elaboration through the mediating factor of selective exposure. Selective exposure is an individual’s tendency to seek confirmatory (as opposed to non-confirmatory) information related to a choice that has been made by the individual. Information elaboration requires attending to the decision-related information, processing that information, and analyzing the information to present a coherent argument related thereto. The integrative quality of information elaboration depends on the extent to which non-confirmatory and confirmatory opinions are attended to, processed, and combined to lead to a decision. This research will contribute to the literature on IT-enabled teaching and learning

The Impact of User Interface Design on Idea Integration in Electronic Brainstorming: An Attention-Based View

This paper introduces an attention-based view of idea integration that underscores the importance of IS user interface design. The assumption is that presenting ideas via user interface plays a key role in enabling and motivating idea integration in electronic brainstorming (EBS), and thus advances productivity. Building upon Cognitive Network Model of Creativity and ability-motivation framework, our attention-based theory focuses on two major attributes of user interface: visibility and prioritization. While visibility enables idea integration via directing attention to a limited set of ideas, prioritization enhances the motivation for idea integration by providing individuals with a relevant and legitimate proxy for value of the shared ideas. The theory developed in this paper is distinct from previous research on EBS in at least two ways: (1) this theory exclusively focuses on idea integration as the desired outcome and studies it in the context of IS user interface; and (2) rather than debating whether or not EBS universally outperforms verbal brainstorming, the proposed theory revisits the links between user interface and idea integration as an attention-intensive process that contributes to EBS productivity. Idea integration by individuals within a group is an essential process for organizational creativity and thus for establishing knowledge-based capabilities. Lack of such integration significantly reduces the value of idea sharing, which has been a predominant focus of the EBS literature in the past. The current theory posits that the ability of electronic brain-storming to outperform nominal or verbal brainstorming depends on its ability to leverage information system (IS) artifact capabilities for enhancing idea integration to create a key pattern of productivity. The developed theory provides a foundation for new approaches to EBS research and design, which use visibility and prioritization, and also identify new user interface features for fostering idea integration. By emphasizing idea integration, designers and managers are provided with practical, cognition-based criteria for choosing interface features, which can improve EBS productivity. This theory also has implications for both the practice and research of knowledge management, especially for the attention-based view of the organization.

Traces of Students’ Performances in Online Activity Logs

In this study we examine the question of whether or not students’ activities on an online learning content management systems (LCMS) can be an indicator for students’ performances in the course. We measure performance by grades in three different exams and we use variety of measures for quantifying the online activities. The data is collected from two sections of a two hundred level information systems course in a Midwestern university. Our data analysis results are partially consistent with findings of prior literature in this area that suggests importance of students’ consistent access to the course material throughout the semester. Our mixed results, however, calls for a closer examination of the measures that have been developed and used in the literature and their effectiveness in inferring students’ performance based on students’ online activities. The analyses presented here and similar models can help instructors plan course-related actions and implement interventions after close examinations of the data that is freely available to them through online learning content management systems

Modeling User Behavior in Web 2.0 Collaborative Knowledge Creation Application

Web 2.0 has provided variety of pathways for individuals to contribute ideas, information and solutions to other individuals around the world. Online communities such as Yahoo Answers, Google mail.ru, 3form.org are examples of places where Web surfers go and share information and brainstorm on the problems or questions posted by others. Although many ideas are created and shared through Web 2.0 communities, with time and attention being two scarce resources, individuals face some challenges when seeking the right information. In this article we investigate two concepts of idea integration and idea visibility that we believe are critical to the success of knowledge sharing communities. Ideas proposed and recorded in these communities rarely converge to comprehensive solutions; although pieces of information are available, there is not enough motivation for the contributors to integrate their ideas with those previously suggested and to create a more comprehensive idea or solution. Little or no integration of ideas leads to information redundancy and to generation of long list of ideas and solutions that in addition to causing cognitive overload, significantly decreases the visibility of the ideas that might be relevant to the information seeking individuals but are hardly exposed to the viewers

DynaShare: Task and Instance Conditioned Parameter Sharing for Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task networks rely on effective parameter sharing to achieve robust generalization across tasks. In this paper, we present a novel parameter sharing method for multi-task learning that conditions parameter sharing on both the task and the intermediate feature representations at inference time. In contrast to traditional parameter sharing approaches, which fix or learn a deterministic sharing pattern during training and apply the same pattern to all examples during inference, we propose to dynamically decide which parts of the network to activate based on both the task and the input instance. Our approach learns a hierarchical gating policy consisting of a task-specific policy for coarse layer selection and gating units for individual input instances, which work together to determine the execution path at inference time. Experiments on the NYU v2, Cityscapes and MIMIC-III datasets demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach and its applicability across problem domains