Towards a Framework for Computer-Mediated Collaboration
                        David Kaufman
                  Graduate School of Education
                         UC Berkeley

Collaboration is widely seen as an indispensable vehicle to facilitate
efficient and creative work, harness expertise at a distance, and to
promote meaningful learning in complex domains. Recent advances in
communication technologies have paved the way for unparalleled levels
of collaborative activity and shared expertise across geographic
locations. There has been a surge of scientific interest in studying
collaboration. Researchers from established disciplines such as
psychology and computer science as well as newly emerging ones such as
computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) have contributed to the
genesis of a collaboration science. Collaboration refers to a wide
range of phenomena from individuals participating in loosely coupled
activities of short duration to groups deeply engaged in jointly
sustained practices over lengthy periods of time. How can we delineate
collaboration as an object of investigation? Following Smith (1994),
we can view collaboration as conveying the expectation of a singular
purpose and a seamless integration of parts, "as if the conceptual
object were produced by a single good mind". This suggests the need
for a critical level of coherence in differentiating collaboration
from mere cooperation or routine social communication. 

In this presentation, I will sketch a cognitive framework for the
study of computer-mediated collaboration. The framework will be
illustrated in the context of a study investigating the InterMed
Collaboratory, a multi-faceted Internet-based medical informatics
project involving four participating institutions. This investigation
characterized how participants from different informatics groups
jointly collaborated on a large-scale design project. The study
describes the use of different communication modalities, changes in
communication patterns over time, and the cognitive and sociocutural
challenges involved in conversational grounding and distributed
decision making. The emerging framework has the potential to
illuminate some of the underlying commonalties from other studies of
collaboration and to provide a basis for characterizing effective and
counterproductive collaborative practices.

Biography

Dave Kaufman is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education and
Cognitive Science Program at the University of California,
Berkeley. His efforts have focused on applying cognitive scientific
methods of analysis to a range of problems in the study of medical
cognition, human-computer interaction, and technology-mediated
collaboration. Dave Kaufman's research interests also include the
study of advanced knowledge acquisition and conceptual change in the
biological sciences, particularly in relation to evolution. His recent
publications include "Physicians' Knowledge and Decision Making for
Hypercholesterolemia and Coronary Heart Disease" in International
Journal of Medical Informatics (1999); "Toward a Framework for
Computer-Mediated Collaborative Design in Medical Informatics" in
Methods of Information in Medicine (with V. L. Patel et al., 1999);
"Conceptual Change in the Biomedical and Health Sciences," in Advances
in Instructional Psychology, Volume 4, edited by R. Glaser (with
V. L. Patel et al., 2000); "The Explanatory Role of Spontaneously
Generated Analogies in Reasoning about Physiological Concepts," in the
International Journal of Science Education; and "Assessment of a
Computerized Patient Record System: A Cognitive Approach to Evaluating
an Emerging Medical Technology," in M.D. Computing (with
A.W. Kushniruk et al., 1996).