Investigating strong collaboration with the Annotated Egret Navigator

The Annotated Egret Navigator (AEN) is a system designed to support strong collaboration among a group as they cooperatively build, review, revise, and improve a structured hypertext document. AEN was used as the central instructional and research system for a graduate seminar on collaborative systems at the University of Hawaii during Fall, 1994. AEN was used for over 285 hours during the second half of the semester alone, and users generated over 800 nodes and 800 links. Lessons learned about strong collaboration include: (1) Users as well as artifacts should be visible; (2) Provide direct and indirect authoring mechanisms; (3) Provide context-sensitive change information; (4) Provide access to intermediate work products; (5) Maintain database integrity; (6) An agent-based architecture may be necessary for systems supporting strong collaboration; and (7) The WWW is not effective for strong collaboration.