Observing Collaboration in Small-Group Interaction

Analyzing roles of individuals in small-group collaboration processes

The papers in this issue present innovative approaches to analyzing the roles of individuals in small-group collaborations supported by computer technologies. In reading these articles, you may find it interesting to consider the ways in which their methods conceptualize the relationship of collaborative group learning to the roles of its individual participants. Taken together, these studies e...

Small group collaboration and presence in a virtual environment

Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can be classified into personal presence and co-presence. Personal presence is having a feeling of “being there” in the CVE oneself. Co-presence is having a feeling that one is in the same place as the other participants, and that one is collaborating with real people. In this paper we describe an experiment to investigate the effects that s...

Observing nurse-patient interaction

Small Group Design Meetings: An Analysis of Collaboration

The development of schemes to support group work, whether behavioral methods or new technologies like groupware, should be based on detailed knowledge about how groups work, what they do well, and what they have trouble with. Such data can be used to suggest what kinds of tools people might need as well as to provide a baseline for evaluating the effects of schemes for improvement. We present d...

Pavlovian-Instrumental Interaction in ‘Observing Behavior’

Subjects typically choose to be presented with stimuli that predict the existence of future reinforcements. This so-called 'observing behavior' is evident in many species under various experimental conditions, including if the choice is expensive, or if there is nothing that subjects can do to improve their lot with the information gained. A recent study showed that the activities of putative m...