Collaboration and Interaction in Varied Environments: Guest Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Groupware is a term that was first used a few decades ago, but its importance and relevance have not waned. If anything, the term has expanded in meaning and we now have many conferences and journals devoted to the broad area of computer-supported collaboration. One of those conferences is the International Workshop on Groupware (CRIWG), first held in 1995 in Portugal. The workshop began among computer scientists interested in groupware and was uniquely characterized by its small size, interactive conversation, and emphasis on social interaction for community building. In 2006, the workshop – which by this time had broadened and expanded on its computer science roots – was held in a medieval castle in Medina del Campo, Spain, and it is from that event that the papers for this special issue were invited. Each invited paper underwent further development, substantial revision, and additional review for this special issue. We are delighted to present to you a set of papers that address central problems in collaboration and interaction in a variety of computer-supported environments. We begin this special issue with an article by Julita Vassileva and Lingling Sun, “Using Community Visualization to Stimulate Participation in Online Communities.” Vassileva and Sun address one of the most persistent challenges in online communities, namely the ability to sustain participation and on-going contributions within the community. The authors focus on visualization as a key to this challenge and ground their study in the theory of social comparison. Two different versions of a visualization tool are tested, and a very interesting and extensive analysis of the communities provides insight into the importance of this approach. The next two articles are set in the important context of learning environments. Jose Antonio Marcos-Garcia, Alejandra Martinez-Mones, Yannis Dimitriadis, and Rocio Anguita-Martinez focus on enhancing collaboration through supporting roles, in their article titled “A Role-Based Approach for the Support of Collaborative Learning Activities.” The authors present a framework for characterizing roles that different people play in collaborative learning contexts and then provide an analysis of two experiences that show that framework in action. Their results show how dynamic role transitions during group interaction can be analyzed and emergent roles can be identified. Overall, the analyses and framework provide a unique perspective on how people within collaborative learning environments can better understand their own roles, as well as those of others, and then use that understanding for continuous improvement of interaction.