Exploring Knowledge Learning in Collaborative Information Seeking Process

Knowledge learning is recognized as an important component in people’s search process. Existing studies on this topic usually measure the knowledge growth before and after a search. However, there still lacks a fine-grained understanding of users’ knowledge change patterns within a search process and users’ adoption of different sources for learning. In this on-going project, we are exploring answers to both questions in collaborative information seeking (CIS) since the CIS tasks are usually exploratory, which triggers learning, and involve diverse learning resources such as self-explored search content, partners’ search content and explicit communication between them. Through analyzing the data from a controlled laboratory user study with both collaborative and individual information seeking conditions, we demonstrated that users’ knowledge keeps growing in both conditions, but they issue significantly more diverse queries in the collaborative condition. Our analysis of users’ queries also revealed that the adoption of different learning resources varies at different information seeking stages, and the adoption is influenced by the nature of search tasks too. Finally, we propose several insights for system design to enhance knowledge learning in collaborative information seeking process.