Interpersonal Relationships in Group Interaction

The successful deployment of computer supported collaborative learning systems (CSCL) requires taking into account social factors, like preexisting and developing attitudes, relationships between users, incentive mechanisms, organizational flows of control and information. There are examples of solid user communities that formed around pieces of technology (e.g. slashdot.com), but there are also hundreds of examples of failed ones. In our experience with peer help system named I-Help [4], we discovered widely varying levels of user participation in different classes. Our conclusion from this experience was that it is important to study the sociological aspects of cooperation, to discover and describe existing relationships among people, existing organizational structures [1,7] and incentives for cooperative action [8] in the learning community. There are many research studies on the evolution of cooperation in CSCL environments. Methods have been proposed to support and manage students' metacognitive activities in collaboration e.g. detecting and helping resolve conflicts, assigning tasks depending on the expertise [5]. Environments have been developed, that create awareness of the other participants' actions or focus of attention [3], create models of how these acts relate to effective knowledge sharing and provide guidance on activities which will improve collaboration [2]. Most of this work is applied to settings where implicit social structures already exist, i.e. the users knew each other in advance. With the advance of tele-learning environments, there will be an increased need for CSCL environments supporting collaboration between users who have never met face to face and who don’t know each other. Building up social relationships in such environments happens during the process of collaboration is mediated through the collaborative environment and can be strongly influenced by the design of the environment. This can bring significant side effects in the processes of collaboration and learning. We are interested in how people actually develop attitude of liking or disliking other people and how they change their attitudes towards other people when they realized the others’ feelings towards themselves. There have been studies of CSCL environments using social analysis, e.g. [6], which measures the social network cohesiveness of the group to identify the prominent participants in collaboration.