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Organised during COOP 2010, 9th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, http://www.coopsys.org

This workshop aims to bring together researchers working across the cognitive, social and computational sciences on understanding collaborative activities. With the growing importance of technology mediation for group work and learning, developing methods for assessing the quality of collaboration is central to both CSCW and CSCL research. Groupware aims to support collaborative activities that are effective in terms of group efficiency, one aspect of which is the quality of the process of collaboration itself. This workshop thus aims to focus on understanding interrelations between group processes, outcomes of group-work and technology affordances, by comparing activity-based studies of the quality of collaboration in task-oriented computer-mediated interactions. Broader aims are to devise methods for training groups for more effective collaboration, and to enable participants in group-work to become reflexively aware of the nature of their participation. Aspects of this kind will contribute to the elaboration of theories and models of collaboration, as well as to methods for evaluating computer-supported cooperative/collaborative work and learning.

Across all scientific disciplines concerned by these issues, we invite participation and short papers on themes such as:
• models and dimensions of collaboration; collaborative processes and outcomes;
• descriptive, normative, experiential approaches to collaboration;
• collaborative skills, development, learning, training;
• appropriation of collaborative technologies, technological affordances for collaboration;
• quantitative and qualitative methods for evaluating collaboration (coding, scoring, …), collaborative effort and collaboration quality;
• analysis of quality of discourse, dialogue, conversation in collaborative situations.

Workshop

“Analysing the quality of collaboration in task-oriented computer-mediated interactions”