SPP Netzbasierte Wissenskommunikation in Gruppen I. Introduction One of the most common lines of research on the field of collaborative learning and working is to develop applications of new technology. 'Collaborative technology' refers to groupware and network environments as well as associated teamwork methods that allow the participants to produce knowledge to a shared working space. This working space contains objects of the collaborative work and different information about the objects. In this shared space, participants solve problems and build knowledge together as well as engage in intensive interaction and dialogue. The group component members may never meet face-to-face but they will be highly reliant on others in the group for the quality of their learning. Closely coupled work is often a feature of traditional co-located team work. Typical examples of such work might be creative 'brain storming' sessions or meetings to decide a strategy. When groups are co-located interaction and co-presence is not a problem. However, when the work becomes temporally or geographically distributed is what is meant by 'presence' can be problematical, as can the mediating effects of the technologies used to communicate. Although significant technological advances have been made (videoconferencing or avatars, to simulate co-presence, i.e. to create a 'telepresence' or a 'virtual presence'), many so called virtual teams still find that Collaborative Work is most effectively performed in face to face meetings where the issue of trust and the ambiguity that surrounds identity in the virtual world are most easily overcome. II. Knowledge Media Research Programs 1. The Carnegie Foundation's Knowledge Media Lab (KML) The Web-based KEEP (Knowledge, Exchange, Exhibit and Presentation) Toolkit provides educators and students a means to easily organize and display their work online in ways that can be shared with others taking advantage of the Internet and multimedia. This project snapshot was made using the KML tool. It can be seen at: http://www.cfkeep.org/html/snapshot.php?id=1399 2. The research program "Net-based Knowledge Communication in Groups" Over 40 German researchers within the constructs of the Special Priority Program (SPP) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), jointly examine the generic qualities of net-based knowledge communication and develop recommendations for its use. In a total of 15 projects, these scientists jointly examine the generic qualities of net-based knowledge communication and develop recommendations for its use. The projects are distributed in three teams: Team 1 "Divergence and Convergence in Net-based Communication" covers aspects related to cognitive science. Its interest is in the distribution and subsequent sharing of information and knowledge. The underlying social psychology perspective of "virtual identities" can be found in the research of Team 2. This team deals with "Coordinative Processes in Net-based Knowledge Communication", with respect to tasks usually analyzed within social psychology (e.g. group decision making), or with respect to social psychological methodologies (e.g. interaction analysis). Team 3's research is on "Methods and techniques for structuring collaborative processes in group learning" and participating research fields from both, educational and computer science approaches. Marc Eisenstadt 3. Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) in the UK For Eisenstadt, chief scientist at the KMi, a prototypical exercise in knowledge media is: students accessing, sharing, and creating knowledge, using a range of communications and computing tools, and pushing the frontiers of the available technology within plausible cost constraints. The following maps out the various categories of work that KMi is engaged in: Categories of work that KMi is engaged in. Within the area of Collaborative learning, one of their central aims is that of facilitating the social interactions needed to construct and communicate knowledge whether in an industrial or educational setting. Another research project, an electronic agent called "The Virtual Participant", participates in electronic conferences. It monitors the current topics of discussion, and when it recognises a topic that has been discussed previously, for example, in a previous year, it posts a message telling the conference about the previous discussion. The "Compendium" combines meeting facilitation and collaborative hypertext in an approach to capturing key aspects of meetings, integrating perspectives from multiple stakeholders in a project, and the construction of a collective memory resource. It is a collaborative project with international partners. Fle3 demo 4. The Learning Environments for Progressive Inquiry Research Group at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland The group's research focus is on computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). The group's approach to research and design of New Media and learning is theory-based but design-oriented. This means that besides the academic research papers the outcomes of the group are often software systems, software prototypes, applications and scenarios. The group's works are based on the social constructivist theory that sees learning as a participation in social processes of knowledge construction. One of the software systems the group has developed is the Future Learning Environment (Fle3), which is a learning management tool for collaborative group sharing learning environment. The Fle3 software is based on the concept of a "Future Learning Environment". The term "Future Learning Environment" is a loose conception of learning which differs from traditional content, teacher, and didactic-based teaching by emphasizing meta-cognitive, problem solving and cooperation skills. The concept stresses student centered collaborative activities aiming to the production of knowledge and design artifacts by embedding meaningful tools and involving the use of information and communication technology (network computers and mobile devices) in the learning process. For many people, distributed cognition means cognitive processes that are distributed across the members of a social group. The fundamental question is how the cognitive processes we normally associate with an individual mind can be implemented in a group of individuals? A wide range of disciplines in the social sciences has explored this question. Treating memory as a socially distributed cognitive function has a long history in sociology and anthropology. Roberts proposed that social organization could be read as a sort of architecture of cognition at the community level. He characterized the cognitive properties of a society (its memory capacity and ability to manage and retrieve information) by looking at what information there is, where it is located, and how it can move in a society. III. Cognitive and socio-cultural issues Traditionally CSCW deals with problems such as: Participants may not have access to new technology; Even if available, the technology may not be intensively used; If technology is used, it sometimes supports less advanced practices (transmitting and copying information) rather than builds a new culture of inquiry. But several socio-cultural as well as cognitive problems are present here too: ITCOLE 1. Participants' attitude Often the studying and interacting with the net is based on very optimistic ideas of students participating in the online activities. The students are seen as motivated, independent, self-discipline, self-acting etc. Generally their studying skills are seen to be mature. The virtual learning environment is often described with adjectives like freedom, independent from time and place and flexible. But it can be very demanding. The feeling of freedom and responsibility from own studying can be very confusing. This sets high demands for the mechanisms available to support the student's learning process. Studying in the net can be a very positive and successful experience. But students can also get lost in the virtual cyberspace. Similarly, not all individuals may be equally adept at handling the uncertainty and responsibilities inherent in virtual work. Jarvenpaa and Leidner suggest that managers should carefully choose individuals for virtual teamwork; such qualities as responsibility, dependability, independence, and self-sufficiency, while desirable even in face-to-face settings, are crucial to the viability of virtual teamwork. 2. Argumentation Argumentation means agreeing on what the real problem is. It requires extensive discussion, as does agreeing on what might constitute a solution. Argumentation, at its simplest, is a discourse for persuasion. The precise form which this takes depends on the demands of the particular field and context of use. Scholarly peer review in journals is a particularly established form of author-reviewer argumentation. The devil lies in the detail -- specifically, the human detail. A decade's research by the hypertext and CSCW communities shows that it is hard to integrate CSCA tools into the cognitive and discursive flow of work. People often resist having to make their reasoning explicit (for all sorts of reasons, but one being that it's just plain hard cognitively). In the 1970s, Rittel characterised what he called 'wicked problems.' In contrast to 'tame problems', these are characterised by a number of properties which make them particularly slippery, resisting analysis in top down, methodological ways as required by many problem modelling and analysis techniques (e.g. in software design). The fundamental way in which we tackle such problems is to discuss them. Consensus emerges through the process of laying out alternative understandings of the problem, competing interests, -priorities and contraints. The application of more formal modelling and analysis tools is impossible before the problem can be articulated in a concise, agreed upon, well-bounded manner. IBIS (Issue-Based Information Systems) was a method developed by Rittel as a language, and a graphical representation, of the debate and negotiation which is central to the process of tackling wicked problems. Rittel's analysis and the development of IBIS were pioneering. However, IBIS is not of course the only notational scheme for graphical argumentation. Depending on the domain and context of use, it has a number of limitations which others have sought to address. Research into techniques and tools to support argumentation have some important contributions to make in understanding and facilitating these processes. CSCA is relevant not only to professionals tackling applied problems, but to scientists and scholars debating theoretical and research issues. 3. Cognitive load Cognitive load theory describes learning structures in terms of an information processing system involving long term memory. Whereas long time memory effectively stores all of our knowledge and skills on a more-or-less permanent basis, working memory performs the intellectual tasks associated with consciousness. Information may only be stored in long term memory after first being attended to, and processed by, working memory. Working memory, however, is extremely limited in both capacity and duration. These limitations will, under some conditions, impede learning. The fundamental tenet of cognitive load theory is that the quality of instructional design will be raised if greater consideration is given to the role and limitations, of working memory. Extraneous cognitive load in particular, is due to the instructional materials used (graphics rather than a text only presentation). By changing the instructional materials presented, the level of extraneous cognitive load may be modified and this may facilitate learning. 4. Culture, context, history and emotion According to Howard Gardner a more or less explicit decision was made in cognitive science to leave culture, context, history and emotion out of the early work. These were recognized as important phenomena, but their inclusion made the problem of understanding cognition very complex. The "Classical" vision of cognition that emerged was built from the inside out starting with the idea that the mind was a central logic engine. From that starting point, it followed that memory could be seen as retrieval from a stored symbolic database, that problem solving was a form of logical inference, that the environment is a problem domain, and that the body was an input device. Attempts to reintegrate culture, context, and history into this model of cognition have proved very frustrating. The distributed cognition perspective aspires to rebuild cognitive science from the outside in, beginning with the social and material setting of cognitive activity, so that culture, context, and history can be linked with the core concepts of cognition. Kristof define a global virtual team to be a temporary, culturally diverse, geographically dispersed, electronically communicating work group (see figure). The notion of temporary in the definition describes teams where members may have never worked together before and who may not expect to work together again as a group. The characterization of virtual teams as global implies culturally diverse and globally spanning members that can think and act in concert with the diversity of the global environment. Finally, it is a heavy reliance on computer-mediated communication technology that allows members separated by time and space to engage in collaborative work. Can trust exist in global virtual teams? Noting the lack of shared social context in such teams, much of the theoretical and empirical literature on interpersonal and organizational trust would suggest a negative response to this question. Cummings & Bromiley maintain that a person trusts a group when that person believes that the group "makes a good-faith effort to behave in accordance with any commitments both explicit or implicit, (b) is honest in whatever negotiations preceded such commitments, and (c) does not take excessive advantage of another even when the opportunity is available". Several factors, such as shared social norms, repeated interactions, and shared experiences, have been suggested to facilitate the development of trust. Another factor asserted to promote trust and cooperation is the anticipation of future association. Such anticipation of future association is higher among group members who are co-located than among physically dispersed members. Co-location, or physical proximity more generally, is said to reinforce social similarity, shared values, and expectations, and to increase the immediacy of threats from failing to meet commitments. Furthermore, face-to-face encounters are considered irreplaceable for both building trust and repairing shattered trust. Definition: Global Virtual Team 5. Heterogeneous expertise A project from the research program "Net-based Knowledge Communication in Groups", called WebSharK, deals with Web-based sharing of knowledge in teams of heterogeneous experts with different backgrounds. The design of a company's web site means the planning and implementation of between several and possibly hundreds of web pages in HTML. This work typically involves a team of experts in different domains. Problems are usually encountered during this complex process of interaction among heterogeneous experts. The research is based on how shared knowledge is generated and used and also on how the process of knowledge communication can be supported. Web-based sharing of knowledge in teams of heterogeneous experts Also a project from the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) in the UK called "Enriching ODL by knowledge sharing for collaborative computer-based modelling and simulation" was intended to assist in the training of students and employees as dynamic system modellers and simulators (last access was October 2002). IV. Reflexions Virtual environments for supporting collaborative work offer a shared virtual world in which interactions can take place irrespective of physical proximity. Although significant technological advances have been made, many so called virtual teams still find that Hot Collaborative Work is most effectively performed in face to face meetings where the issue of trust and the ambiguity that surrounds identity in the virtual world are most easily overcome. Cognition and intelligent activity rely on socio-culturally developed cognitive tools, physical and conceptual artefacts as well as socially distributed and shared processes of intelligent activity embedded in complex social and cultural environments. Collaborative work is a complex social process, in which it is not easy to replace specific workspace and environmental factors using technical solutions, without influence the process itself, most of the time negatively. The existing systems that supports cooperation normally takes for granted specific and homogenous environments. Right now this is rarely achieved. People from several countries and academic disciplines take part in collaborative projects, where they should share a common work area. Is it possible to build a bridge between the research in CSCL/CSCW (computer-supported cooperative learning / computer-supported collaborative work) and the relevant research in cognitive science, psychology and education?