3.
Some methodological issues relating to collaboration
appraisal
The question of how to evaluate
collaboration is a topic of interest in several fields of human and
organisational sciences, as well as in CSCW. On the basis of this large body of literature, we discuss
some methodological issues and difficulties encountered in
appraising
1
collaboration
.
3.1 Difficulties in “quantifying” collaboration
A large body of methodology developed to assess collaboration processes and collaborative tools has
been focused on quantifying a restricted subset of fine
-
grained interactions. An example, given in a
rece
nt review by Hornb
æ
k (2006), concerns the measure of “communication effort”: number of speakers’
turns; number of words spoken; number of interruptions; amount of grounding questions. Expert
-
based
approaches to assessing the ergonomic quality of computer
-
s
upported collaborative tools have also been
based on particular actions or behaviours that are specific to group activities (as opposed to usability
features related to the task
-
world). For example, Pinelle & Gutwin (2008), in their heuristics
-
based
method
, proposed more than 40 typical actions that should be supported by tabletop groupware to
support teamwork, such as “point to object during conversation to discuss content” or “rotate and move
objects’ to another person”.
A first difficulty with these qua
ntitative approaches based on behaviour coding is that explicit categories
of analysis often remain
ad hoc
with respect
to the considered situation, i.e. they are difficult to apply in
all situations, and need to be adapted to specific situation