- “How-To Sharing: Informal Systems of Expertise Location”, Cristen Torrey: “how-to = online content that describes how something is done”; question: how/why are how-to pages built, documented and broadcasted; ethnographic study / interviews for this; some results: Web 2.0 technologies and services (especially RSS feeds; photo/video hosting) play an important role; “google is my friend too”; documentation for keeping a record for oneself; documentation for building an online identity; implications of how-to-sharing: supporting mixed media is essential (all kinds of tools, well integrated); challenge: how-tos constitute a personal portfolio, authors motivations may not align well with organizational requirements for knowledge sharing – that is exactly the issue/problem in Enterprise 2.0!!! Opportunity: address ownership issues, …
Comment: lots of how-tos are collaboratively authored … hobby crafts projects should be distinguished from larger (collaborative) documentation projects … - “Seeing ethnographically: Teaching ethnography as part of CSCW”, Barry Brown: “ethnography = catch-all phrase for a range of different things, just as long as they involve field work of some sort”; interesting (meta-work): studying the students of a practical course on ethnography!!! (to learn about how to teach ethnography); students were asked to share their fieldnotes via a wiki – and it worked! (multimedia fieldnotes, up to 70 reads per fieldnotes, accountability of ‘hidden work’); wiki was extended for adding comments/notes to wiki pages (no editing other groups notes, but commenting on them), for better displaying history awareness information; one of the conclusions: wiki as a mundane workplace/schoolplace tool
- “Cues to Mutual Knowledge”, N. Bryan-Kinns: looking at asynchronous collaboration; experiment: first order cues to the activities of an individual, second order cues to the activitites of others, third order cues that support mutual-beliefs; does providing cues mean awareness support? I think yes; design of two shared workspaces for comparative experiment: Npathy (1st + 2nd), Mpathy (1st, 2nd, 3rd order cues – additional timeline which shows connection of read and write events); (positive) effect on number of contributed documents; increased co-ordinated use of documents; more implicit references
Interesting try to quantitatively compare awareness features (even when the whole talk did not use the word ‘awareness’)