Towards a Groupware Didactic - Experiences from the Training of Groupware in Cuparla

The adoption of groupware in organizations is the result both of targetted organizational and technical interventions and the spontaneous and unplanned appropriation moves of the users. Training ist the core of a groupware (organizational) implementation. Here the targetted actions of the implementors and the unplanned appropriation by users meet and the resulting contradictions need to be resolved. This paper summarizes the learning process of the groupware trainers during the implementation of the Cuparla groupware in the Stuttgart and Kornwestheim City councils. There are roughly three phases: In the first phase – we call it the "just do it" approach, trainers tried to train groupware like single user software. This approach failed, because it failed to communicate the collaborative nature of groupware. Groupware simply did not make sense to the users after the first training and the did not use it. Afterwards both the software was changed and the training was tailored to groupware. We came up with a macro structure training software functionality in the following order: 1. information features 2. communication features 3. colloboration and coordination features. The rationale behind this order is increasing the dependency on others: A single user can already benefit from information provided by the administration; E-mail already requires others to also use the computer as a communication medium. However, the dependency is both straightforward and simple. Cooperation (i.e. sharing documents) and coordination (e.g. using a group calendar) requires the co-use of others and the interdependency between users can be quite complex. Moving from the simple to the complex allowed us to build up a critical mass that made the groupware application beneficial to all users. We also developed a micro structure for a groupware didactic. It involves the embedding of real cooperative council activities into the training, the heavy use of metaphors, the role of the trainer as a moderator of collaborative activities and a tight link between the trainers and the software developers. The implementation left us with a lot of experiences in groupware implementation, but we did not have a framework to tie the results together. Therefore we are currently working on a groupware didactic. A promising basis for such a groupware didactic is the Theme-Centric-Interaction (TCI). Recently, TCI has become quite popular in moderation and group communication training. TCI explicitely gives the group and the group interaction a place in training. However, as TCI is neither a computer didactic nor does it tackle important issues of organizational implementation, it needs to be combined with other approaches to develop a comprehensive computer didactic.