Facing ICT Challenges in the Era of Social Media

Preface

World Wide Web is becoming a utility, not unlike electricity or running water in our homes. This creates new ways of using the web, where Social media plays a particular role. This gives an unprecedented opportunity to study the emerging social phenomena in the virtual world. In addition, it opens new avenues for improving public services such as schooling. This book includes some of the latest developments in employing the information and communications technologies for examining both virtual and real-life social interactions. Investigating modern challenges such as online education, web security or organized cybercrime, this book outlines the state of the art in social applications and implications of ICT. ← 9 | 10 →

← 10 | 11 →

Issues of Collaboration in a Virtual Environment

Blaž Rodič

Faculty of Information Studies in Novo mesto, Slovenia

Abstract

With the globalization of the economy, more and more employees are working with team members half way around the world. This paper examines the benefits and issues in using information technologies, including Web 2.0, to support collaboration of teams in a virtual environment, the emerging methods and technologies and socio-technical issues associated with collaboration and teams in virtual environments, and proposes a new categorization of e-collaboration tools, which supplements the older classifications. In order to reduce the negative effects, developers and users of e-collaboration tools for virtual environments should address human interaction issues as well as social issues and organizational issues.

Keywords

e-collaboration, virtual teams, virtual environment, HCI, globalization

1.  Introduction

Advancing research in the area of human-computer interaction, smart environments, multi-modal interaction, ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing nowadays is converging into the dawning era of human computing (Pantic et al., 2006). Human computing escalates the complexities of human-human and human-machine interaction in the already complex software engineering and system integration (Clancey, 1997). Emerging e-collaboration systems are expected to be increasingly adapted to the nature of human cognition and communication and present a quantum leap beyond modern productivity-oriented workplace technologies in which performance is the key objective and the user experience comes after business process logic and formalized workflow.

To understand the current limitations, i.e. opportunities for improvement in e-collaboration tools and concepts and possible issues, we first need to define e-collaboration itself. Kock (2005) stated that e-collaboration consists of the following elements: ← 11 | 12 →

• The collaborative task: A task that parties can work on together. For example, jobs beyond the capacity of one organization, or jobs that require complementary skill sets;
• The e-collaboration technology: Existing or new IT infrastructure such as teleconferencing, discussion boards and instant messaging;
• The participants: Organizations that are collaborating, industry associations and government agencies. Characteristics of the participants and size of the group can also have an effect on the collaboration.
• Mental schemas of the participants: The knowledge and experience of the participants and the degree of similarity between participants. For example, expert or novice understanding of the task.
• The physical environment: The location of the participants. For example, the geographical location of the toolmakers was dispersed and therefore they needed to apply more effort to e-collaboration, whereas the IT organizations were within the same geographical area;
• The social environment: the perceptions of trust and the behaviour among the participants as well as peer pressure among participants.

An ever-increasing number of e-collaboration systems and solutions have been developed recently. E-collaboration can be categorized according to the time and space where/when the participants are present. The space dimension is discrete, while the dimension of artificiality (nature of a participant’s presentation in the software) can use several different combinations of realistic and synthetic representations. We have combined the model of shared spaces proposed by Benford et al. (1998), which focuses on synchronous communication with the categorization of several types of groupware tools. Our proposed categorization of groupware is shown in Table 1. This new categorization gives a better insight into the relation between the dimensions of artificiality, space, time, and the type of tools available. Several examples of tools are listed in multiple categories, as their flexibility allows usage under synchronous and asynchronous conditions and the choice of representation is left to the user. It is also evident that some modes of collaboration are supported by more tools than other modes. E.g. tools made specifically for asynchronous collaboration at the same location are rare, as location is generally not relevant for asynchronous collaboration. ← 12 | 13 →

Table 1: Proposed categorization of e-collaboration systems according to time, space and artificiality