Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses because the knowledge relevant to a problem is usually distributed among stakeholders. Bringing different and often controversial points of view together to create a shared understanding among these stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. New media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and resolving complex design problems can extend the power of the individual human mind. Based on our past work and study of other approaches, systems, and collaborative and participatory processes, this article identifies challenges we see as the limiting factors for future collaborative human-computer systems. The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is introduced as an integrated physical and computational environment addressing some of these challenges. The vision behind the EDC shifts future development away from the computer as the focal point, toward an emphasis that tries to improve our understanding of the human, social, and cultural system that creates the context for use. This work is based on new conceptual principles that include creating shared understanding among various stakeholders, contextualizing information to the task at hand, and creating objects to think with in collaborative design activities.

This paper surveys and evaluates some techniques for eliciting requirements of computer-based systems, paying particular attention to how they deal with social issues. The methods surveyed include introspection, interviews, questionnaires, and protocol, conversation, interaction, and discourse analyses. Although they are relatively untried in Requirements Engineering, we believe there is much promise in the last three techniques, which grew out of ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics. In particular, they can elicit tacit knowledge by observing actual interactions in the workplace, and can also be applied to the system development process itself.

We seek to take some initial steps towards a theory of information that is adequate for understanding and designing systems that process information, i.e., information systems in a broad sense. Formal representations of information are needed in designing, using and maintaining such systems, especially when they are computer based. However, it is also necessary to take account of social context, including how information is produced and used, not merely how it is represented; that is, we need a social theory of information. Ideas from ethnomethodology and semiotics, as well as logic and the sociology of science, are used to explore the nature of information.

Abstract: The broad field of “computers in education ” includes a diversity of approaches to using computers for learning. Each approach is based on an epistemology: a theory of how knowledge is gained. In this presentation, I will characterize the uses of technology and their corresponding epistemologies. I will single out intersubjective epistemologies as timely for research and practice, and call for development of technologies that offer social affordances and resources for meaning-making. The study of intersubjective meaning-making requires interactional analyses, but in new forms that transcend some of the assumptions and limitations of microanalysis and that can be coupled with other methodologies. The presentation illustrates these ideas with my research program on representational affordances for collaborative learning.

: Social Sciences are increasingly interested in understanding the characteristics of Computer Mediated Communication and its effects on people, groups and organisations. The first effect of this influence is the revolution in the metaphors used to describe communication. After describing these changes, the paper outlines a framework for the study of computer-mediated communication and considers the three psychosocial roots of the process by which interaction between users is constructed -- networked reality, virtual conversation and identity construction. The paper also considers the implications of these changes for current research in communication studies, with particular reference to the role of context, the link between cognition and interaction, and the use of interlocutory models as paradigms of communicative interaction: communication is not only -- or not so much -- a transfer of information, but also the activation of a psychosocial relationship, the process by which interlo...

This paper discusses the relationship between formal, context insensitive information, and informal, situated information, in the context of Requirements Engineering; these opposite but complementary aspects of information are called "the dry" and "the wet." Formal information occurs in the syntactic representations used in computer-based systems. Informal situated information arises in social interaction, for example, between users and managers, as well as in their interactions with systems analysts. Thus, Requirements Engineering has a strong practical need to reconcile the dry and the wet. Following some background on the culture of Computing Science, the paper describes some projects in the Centre for Requirements and Foundations at Oxford. One of these is a taxonomy for Requirements Engineering methods. Another is applying techniques from sociology and sociolinguistics to requirements elicitation, and in particular, to determining the value system of an organisation. These pro...

This work is based on the premise that the interactional construction of meaning is as important in online settings as it is face-to-face, especially in collaborative learning. Yet most studies of online learning use quantitative methods that assign meaning to contributions in isolation and aggregate over many sessions, obscuring the situated procedures by which participants accomplish learning through the affordances of online media. Methods for studying the interactional construction of meaning are available, but have largely been developed for brief episodes of face-to-face data, and need to be adapted to online learning where media resources, time scale, and synchronicity differ. In order to resolve this tradeoff, we have prototyped an abstract transcript notation to support sequential and interactional analysis of distributed and asynchronous interactions. The paper describes applications to data derived from asynchronous interaction of dyads and small groups. 1.

e the quality of software artifacts. There are many studies researching better e-mail communication. Bullten and Bennett (1990) have reported that it is important to classify several e-mail messages into several topics and to arrange the classified messages. Keyword filtering by subject information is one of the methods for classifying messages. Since the subject written in an e-mail message often suggests the topic of the message, e-mail users can group e-mail messages by topics and classify them into several folders. However, it is difficult for users to arrange several kinds of e-mail folders by using the function (Mackay 1988). For this point, methods for arranging several e-mail messages according to their contents have been proposed. For example, InformationLEN is a type of e-mail message filtering system in which e-mail messages are semistructured according to the worker's purpose of use (Malone et al. 1986). The Coordinator is an e-mail support system into which a conversati

An experiment on how communication affects cooperation in a social dilemma shows that computer mediated communication (CMC) and face to face communication have markedly different effects on patterns of collective behavior. While face to face communication sustains stable cooperation, CMC makes cooperative agreements in groups extremely fragile, giving rise to waves of opportunistic behavior. Further analysis of communication protocols highlights that the breakdown of ordinary communication rules plays an important role in explaining the fragility of cooperation in electronic contexts. 1 1 We thank Lin Ostrom and James Walker for providing us information about their original experiments. Claudia Keser, Marino Pavanati, Alessandro Tonchia and Enrico Zaninotto helped us in different phases of our work. The research was supported by a grant of the Fondazione Rosselli, Italy. 1- Introduction. It has become a widely accepted hypothesis that, as computer mediated communication spreads in organizational life, the relevance of hierarchical relationships declines, leading

Stock markets are very important in modern societies and their behaviour have serious implications in a wide spectrum of the world’s population. Investors, governing bodies and the society as a whole could benefit from better understanding of the behaviour of stock markets. The traditional approach to analyze such systems is the use of analytical models. However, the complexity of financial markets represents a big challenge to the analytical approach. Most analytical models make simplifying assumptions, such as perfect rationality and homogeneous investors, which threaten the validity of analytical results. This motivates the use of alternative methods. For those reasons, the study of such markets is a fertile field to use the agent-based methodology. In this work, we developed an artificial financial market and used it to study the behaviour of stock markets. In this market, we model technical, fundamental and noise traders. The technical traders are non-simple genetic programming based agents that co-evolve (by means of their fitness function) by predicting investment opportunities in the market using technical analysis as the main tool. Such traders are equipped with