edu, Abstract. Distributed cognition as an approach to collaborative work holds that a work unit is cognitive system in which cognitive activities are carried out jointly by workers with the use of tools. This approach has several direct implications to the study of collaborative work In this paper, we analysed staff interactions with a large display board in a Level I trauma centre operating room unit. Coordination needs are exacerbated by the unpredictability of incoming emergency surgery patients admitted to the trauma centre as well as other contingencies (such as changes in scheduled surgery cases or staffing) The public display board has evolved into a key component for supporting collaborative work. The physical and perceptual properties of the board are exploited by the clinicians to support rapid paced, highly dynamic work. The canvas-like appearances of the display board, combined with magnetic objects attached to the board, afford its users to taylor the board as an effective coordinative tool and to invent new ways of representing information Based on the concept of display-based cognition, our analysis illustrates the role of public displays in facilitating negotiation of scheduling, joint planning, and augmenting inter-personal communication.

To explore how people conceptualize a complex system, 232 university students were asked to sketch how a search engine works. While the sketches reveal a diverse range of visual and conceptual approaches, a subset of the sketches exhibit an underlying regularity for describing algorithmic processes. To explain this regularity, I propose the conceptual metaphor: A SEARCH ENGINE IS A SERIES OF TEXT TRANSFORMATIONS and describe a set of mappings from sketchable graphic markings to abstractions in the search engine domain. I believe that this metaphor can be applied to enable people to more effectively conceptualize, describe, and explore complex systems. 1.

Abstract: Synchronous communication using text chat—often combined with a shared whiteboard—is increasingly used in CSCL. This form of interaction and learning in small online groups of students presents novel challenges, both for the participating students and for researchers studying their work. Chats differ from talk-in-interaction since the composition, posting and visual inspection of text and graphical objects by any given actor is not observable by the other participants. These structural constraints on the organization of interaction require that actors deploy alternative procedures for achieving what turn taking achieves in talk-in-interaction. This paper describes how communication is organized in text chat, where postings have to provide instructions on how they are to be read. This organization is contrasted with turn taking in face-to-face communication. The notion of “reading’s work ” provides a guiding thread, which is explicated. Synchronous text chat seems to offer a particularly effective medium for joint learning activity, but it presents challenges for students using it because the group sense-making strategies to which they are accustomed in faceto-face interactions either do not work or work differently in the online setting, for reasons to be discussed. Similarly, sources of evidence normally available to educational researchers are not available from synchronous online interactions. Student groups develop methods of building their postings to convey instructions for how they are to be read. Chat researchers as well as chat participants must learn to pay heed to such instructions. As we will see, such instructions often involve the sequentiality of postings and the references among those postings (Sarmiento & Stahl, 2008). We have explored the use of text chat for discussions of mathematics in small groups of students for the past six years in the Virtual Math Teams Project (VMT) (Stahl, 2009). Although we have reported on the

Since Fall 2000, mechanical engineering students at Montana State University have been required to keep design journals of their senior design projects. The journals are being used now to investigate student design processes. Of particular interest is the representations students use to reason about their design problems at different levels of abstraction. We developed a scheme to code the journal data by three design levels (concept, system, and detail) and have applied it to six the team projects (21 individual journals). We then performed a frequency analysis of the different representational forms for design information found in the students' design journals. This paper describes the coding scheme and development, and reports some preliminary findings from the analysis.

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Abstract. The situations in which we search form a context: a complex set of variables describing our intentions, our personal characteristics, the data and systems available for searching, and our physical, social and organizational environments. Different contexts can mean that we want search systems to behave differently or to offer different responses. Creating search systems and search interfaces to be contextually sensitive raises many research challenges: what aspects of a searcher’s context are useful to know about, how can we model context for use by retrieval systems and how do we evaluate search systems in context? In this lecture we will look at why differences in context can affect how we want search systems to operate and ways that we can use contextual information to help search systems behave more intelligently to our changing context. We will examine some new types of system that use different types of user context to learn about users, to adapt their response to different users or to help us make better search decisions.

In this paper, we focus on the organization of activities that produce graphical representations on the shared whiteboard of a CSCL system with dual interaction spaces called VMT Chat, and the ways those representations are used as interactional resources by small groups during their collaborative math problem solving work. In particular, we will investigate how actions performed in one medium inform the actions performed on the other, and how participants coordinate their moves across dual mediums to make their actions mutually intelligible to each other.

This chapter presents a systematics of chat interaction. Online chats are advantageous sites for examining the organization of social interaction as achieved through computer-mediated communication. Chats differ from talk-in-interaction since the composition and visual inspection of text and graphical objects by any given actor is not observable by other participants. These structural constraints on the organization of interaction require that actors deploy alternative procedures for achieving what turn taking achieves in talk-in-interaction. Keywords: Co-presence, interaction, reading, CMC, text posting, indexical ground, systematics In CSCL online chat systems like VMT, participants can engage with each other in a variety of ways. Rather than interact through emergent talk and observable embodied action, they: • Exchange text postings through chat technology,

The joint organization of interaction within a multimodal

In order to collaborate effectively in group discourse on a topic like mathematical patterns, group participants must organize their activities so that they have a shared understanding of the significance of their utterances, inscriptions and behaviors—adequate for sustaining productive interaction. Some methodologies applied in CSCL research—such as the widespread coding-and-counting quantitative analysis genre—systematically ignore the sequentiality of actions and thereby miss the implicit referencing, which is essential to shared understanding. The VMT Project attempts to capture and analyze the sequential organization of references and inter-relationships among whiteboard inscriptions, chat postings, mathematical expressions and other elements of virtual math team activities in order to understand the mechanisms of group cognition. Here, we report the results of a micro-ethnographic case study of collaborative math problem-solving activities mediated by the VMT multimodal online environment. We employ ethnomethodological