Computer support for knowledge construction in collaborative learning environments

Organisations increasingly use multidisciplinary teams to construct solutions for complex problems. Research has shown that multidisciplinary teams do not guarantee good problem solutions. Common ground is seen as vital to team performance. In this paper an ICT-tool to support complex problem solving is studied. A framework for knowledge construction inspired the design of computer support for knowledge construction. The basic support principle consisted of making individual perspectives explicit, which serves as a basis for negotiating common ground. This principle was embedded in a collaborative learning environment in three ways, which differed from each other in the extent to which users were coerced to adhere to the embedded support principles. Coercion, as expected, was correlated with negotiation of common ground; the more coercion, the more participants would negotiate the meaning of contributions to the ICT-tool, and the more common ground they would have. Self-report data suggested that Intermediate coercion resulted in the least common ground. This may have been caused by some disruption of group processes.     

Overcoming Barriers to Self-Management in Software Teams

The basic work unit in innovative software organizations is the team rather than the individual. Such teams consist of "a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable". Work teams have many advantages, such as increased productivity, innovation, and employee satisfaction. However, their implementation doesn't always result in organizational success. It isn't enough to put individuals together and expect that they'll automatically know how to work effectively as a team. Lack of redundancy and conflict between team and individual autonomy are key issues when transforming from traditional command-and-control management to collaborative self-managing teams.     

Group development in virtual teams: An experimental reexamination

Virtual teams are thought to be experienced differently and to have poor outcomes because there is little or no face-to-face interaction and a tendency for virtual team members to use different communication techniques for forming relationships. However, the expanding use of virtual teams in organizations suggests that virtual teams in real world contexts are able to overcome these barriers and be experienced in much the same way as face-to-face teams. This paper reports the result of an experiment in which virtual teams participated in an exercise where they completed an information-sharing task ten times as a team. The results suggest that, contrary to one-shot, ad hoc virtual teams, longer-lived virtual teams follow a sequential group development process. Virtual team development appears to differ from face-to-face teams because the use of computer-mediated communication heightens pressure to conform when a virtual team is first formed, meaning trust is most strongly linked with feeling that the team was accomplishing the task appropriately. As the virtual teams developed, trust in peers was more strongly linked with goal commitment. Once the teams were working together effectively, accomplishing the task appropriately was the strongest link with trust in peers. I suggest that virtual team managers should cultivate virtual workspaces that are similar to those proven to work in face-to-face contexts: (1) teams should have clear, specific goals, (2) members should be encouraged or even required to communicate with each other, and (3) team members should feel that they might work with the other team members again.     

Adaptive learning algorithm of self-organizing teams

In order to improve the ability of achieving good performance in self-organizing teams, this paper presents a self-adaptive learning algorithm for team members. Members of the self-organizing teams are simulated by agents. In the virtual self-organizing team, agents adapt their knowledge according to cooperative principles. The self-adaptive learning algorithm is approached to learn from other agents with minimal costs and improve the performance of the self-organizing team. In the algorithm, agents learn how to behave (choose different game strategies) and how much to think about how to behave (choose the learning radius). The virtual team is self-adaptively improved according to the strategies’ ability of generating better quality solutions in the past generations. Six basic experiments are manipulated to prove the validity of the adaptive learning algorithm. It is found that the adaptive learning algorithm often causes agents to converge to optimal actions, based on agents’ continually updated cognitive maps of how actions influence the performance of the virtual self-organizing team. This paper considered the influence of relationships in self-organizing teams over existing works. It is illustrated that the adaptive learning algorithm is beneficial to both the development of self-organizing teams and the performance of the individual agent.     

Competition matters! Self-efficacy,effort, and performance in crowdsourcing teams

Advances in information technologies (IT) have enabled organizations to seek solutions for their business problems from beyond their own workforce through digital crowdsourcing platforms. In the most common form of crowdsourcing, teams that offer solutions compete for rewards. Thus, a question of interest is whether competition is a key crowdsourcing characteristic that influences how teams allocate their effort and achieve desired performance. Motivated by this question, we investigate how competition moderates the relationship between self-efficacy and effort using comprehensive, time-variant data collected from crowdsourcing teams that completed a project under competitive and non-competitive conditions. Under competitive conditions, self-efficacy shows a positive effect on effort, which in turn, affects performance positively. Whereas, under noncompetitive conditions, self-efficacy has a negative effect on effort and subsequently on performance. Our results also show a recursive relationship between self-efficacy and performance, in which performance subsequently affects self-efficacy positively. Thus, inducing a sense of competition through competitive reward structures and IT-based “gaming elements” helps improve team effort and subsequent performance. We also tested for mediation of team motivation in the self-efficacy and effort relationship, and we found that motivation partially mediates the relationship. Based on our findings, implications for both theory and practice are discussed.     

Using Project-Based-Learning in a mobile application development course—An experience report

In this paper, we report the experience gained in a Mobile Application Development course. We involved students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno, who in teams had to conduct a project. The goal of this project was to design and develop applications (or simply app) for Android-based devices. The adopted teaching approach was based on Project-Based-Learning and enhanced collaboration and competition. Collaboration took place among members of the same team (intra-team), while competition among different teams of students (extra-team). To allow intra-team collaboration, students used GitHub as Computer-Supported-Collaborative-Learning tool. It provided support for implicit and explicit communication among members in each team and for distributed revision control and management of software artifacts (e.g., source code and requirements models). Developed apps underwent a final public competition prized by IT managers of national and international software companies. This is how we implemented extra-team competition. IT managers expressed a positive judgment on both students׳ competition and developed apps. Also, students provided very good feedback on used teaching approach and support GitHub provided.     

Relationship between decentralized controller design usingH∞ and stochastic risk-averse criteria

Considers discrete-time decentralized risk-averse LEQG (linear exponential of quadratic cost Gaussian) teams, and shows that the team-optimal solutions are identical to one of the solutions for minimax team problems. The author first gives the result for static teams, and extends the result to dynamic teams, with a quasi-classical information pattern, using a dynamic programming argument. In the process, the author also establishes differences between the two problems by pointing out the existence of multiple solutions to the minimax team problem, while there exists a unique solution to the LEQG team problem     

How Benign Structures can Support and Retain Creative Performance in Teams

We suggest that the concept of benign structure is important in understanding how creative leadership can intervene to support and sustain creative performance. We describe this insight with reference to the leadership observed in project teams of various kinds. Our interpretation of the evidence is that creative leadership produces benign structures which help teams pass through two structural barriers (‘press’) that bear on team performance. The weaker barrier requires help on inter-personal relationships. The stronger barrier requires help so that performance levels go beyond established and accepted norms. The benign become most obvious in the application of creative problem solving techniques.     

Speech acts, communication problems, and fighter pilot team performance

Two aspects of team communication, speech acts and communication problems, and their relation to team performance in a team air combat simulator were studied. The purpose was to enhance the understanding of how team performance is related to team communication. Ten Swedish fighter pilots and four fighter controllers of varying experience participated. Data were collected during fighter simulator training involving four pilots and one fighter controller in each of two teams. Speech acts were collapsed over seven categories and communication problems over five categories. Communication was studied from two perspectives: critical situation outcome and mission outcome. Some problems were closely related to particular speech acts. Speech act frequency, especially meta-communications and tactics, was highest when winning. However, the timing of tactics in critical situations needs further research. Communication problem frequency was highest for runs which ended equally. The most common problem was simultaneous speech, possibly because of the simulator radio system. The number of speech acts was related to enhanced performance but in a complex manner. Thus in order to work efficiently team members need to communicate, but to communicate sufficiently and at appropriate times. This work has applications for fighter pilot and controller team training and the development of communication standards.     

Requirements for a virtual collocation environment

We analyze how physically collocated teams work together now and what services they require to work together across distances, focusing on real time interactions because those interactions justify collocating teams today. We explain how Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) are organized in system development programs and how their physical collocation facilitates communication, collaboration, and coordination within the team. Interactions within IPTs take two forms: scheduled meetings and opportunistic interactions. Scenarios of scheduled IPT meetings help motivate and identify requirements for supporting distributed meetings. Opportunistic interactions are far more common than scheduled meetings and more difficult to observe and analyze because they are not scheduled or predictable.     

Factors affecting the quality of software project management: an empirical study based on the Capability Maturity Model

Rigorous project management can help raise a software product development process from an initial, immature stage that is unstable and unrepeatable to an optimized maturity level characterized by continuous improvement and innovation. Goals and actions related to a repeatable project management process have been outlined in the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The CMM provides good guidelines for initiating software process improvement particularly in the project management area; however, the successful implementation of the CMM guidelines is often not accomplished without significant organizational change involving increased emphasis on change management, teams and employee empowerment. This paper is empirically based on observations, surveys, and interviews of project team managers and project team members in a large, multinational organiplanning, change management, quality management, team work, and process control. Findings presented in this paper are correlated with the CMM guidelines as well as organizational factors that were found to enable or impede the successful deployment of various aspects of a project management improvement plan. The role of education and training in process and quality techniques as well as project management tools that support group work is also examined. This paper provides some insight into the issues faced by organizations based on traditional hierarchy or matrix management as they attempt to move into a more process-driven, quality-oriented development environment. As organizations move towards global markets they need increased emphasis on quality, value, teams, standards and global project management strategies based on structured guidelines to handle process flow within and between projects, departments, organizations, and national boundaries.     

Description of dynamic shared knowledge: an exploratory study during a competitive team sports interaction

This exploratory case study describes the sharedness of knowledge within a basketball team (nine players) and how it changes during an official match. To determine how knowledge is mobilised in an actual game situation, the data were collected and processed following course-of-action theory (Theureau 2003). The results were used to characterise the contents of the shared knowledge (i.e. regarding teammate characteristics, team functioning, opponent characteristics, opposing team functioning and game conditions) and to identify the characteristic types of change: (a) the reinforcement of a previous element of shared knowledge; (b) the invalidation of an element of shared knowledge; (c) fragmentation of an element of shared knowledge; (d) the creation of a new element of shared knowledge. The discussion deals with the diverse types of change in shared knowledge and the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of common ground within the team. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCE: The present case study focused on how the cognitions of individual members of a team coordinate to produce a team performance (e.g. surgical teams in hospitals, military teams) and how the shared knowledge changes during team activity. Traditional methods to increase knowledge sharedness can be enhanced by making use of 'opportunities for coordination' to optimise team adaptiveness.     

Factored reasoning for monitoring dynamic team and goal formation

We study the problem of monitoring goals, team structure and state of agents, in dynamic systems where teams and goals change over time. The setting for our study is an asymmetric urban warfare environment in which uncoordinated or loosely coordinated units may attempt to attack an important target. The task is to detect a threat such as an ambush, as early as possible. We attempt to provide decision-makers with early warnings, by simultaneously monitoring the positions of units, the teams to which they belong, and the goals of units. The hope is that we can detect situations in which teams of units simultaneously make movements headed towards a target, and we can detect their goal before they get to the target. By reasoning about teams, we may be able to detect threats sooner than if we reasoned about units individually. We develop a model in which the state space is decomposed into individual units’ positions, team assignments and team goals. When a unit belongs to a team it adopts the team’s goal. An individual unit’s movement depends only on its own goal, but different units interact as they form teams and adopt new goals. We present an algorithm that simultaneously tracks the positions of units, the team structure and team goals. Goals are inferred from two sources: individual units’ behavior, which provides information about their goals, and communications by units, which provides evidence about team formation. Our algorithm reasons globally about interactions between units and team formation, and locally about individual units’ behavior. We show that our algorithm performs well at the task, scaling to twenty units. It performs significantly better than several alternative algorithms: standard particle filtering, standard factored particle filtering, and an algorithm that performs all reasoning locally within the units.     

Antecedents of team innovation in health care teams

We extend previous research on team innovation by looking at team‐level motivations and how a prosocial team environment, indicated by the level of helping behaviour and information‐sharing, may foster innovation. Hypotheses were tested in two independent samples of health care teams (N₁ = 72 teams, N₂ = 113 teams), using self‐report measures. The examples of team innovation given by the individual team members were then rated for innovativeness by independent health care experts to avoid common method bias for the outcome variable. Subsequently, the data was aggregated and analysed at team level. The study was part of a larger data‐gathering effort on health care teams in the UK. Results supported the hypotheses of main effects of both information‐sharing and helping behaviour on team innovation and interaction effects with team size and occupational diversity. Differences in findings between types of health care teams can be attributed to differences in team tasks and functions. The results suggest ways in which helping and information‐sharing may act as buffers against constraints in team work, such as large team size or high occupational diversity in cross‐functional health care teams, and potentially turn these into resources supporting team innovation rather than acting as barriers.     

Team decision theory and information structures in optimal control problems--Part I

Information structures of organizations are studied and applied to problems of dynamic team decisions. For a causal system it is shown that there is a partially ordered precedence relation existing among the decision makers. The team decision problem with linear information structure and quadratic payoff function is dealt with. The primitive random variables are assumed to be jointly Gaussian. The optimal solutions for the teams in which precedents' information is available for the followers are obtained. It is shown that the well-known linear-quadratic-Gaussian stochastic control problem and static team decision problem are special cases of the structure considered.     

Dynamic multi-robot team reconfiguration using weighted voting games

We consider the problem of dynamic reconfiguration of robot teams when they encounter obstacles while navigating in formation, in an initially unknown environment. We have used a framework from coalition game theory called weighted voting games to analyse this problem and proposed two heuristics that can appropriately partition a robot team into sub-teams. We have experimentally verified our technique on teams of e-puck robots of different sizes and with different obstacle geometries, both on the Webots simulator and on physical robots. We have also shown that our technique performs faster and generates considerably fewer partitions than an existing robot coalition formation algorithm.     

A replicated quasi-experimental study on the influence of personality and team climate in software development

This article reports a replication of a quasi-experimental study analyzing how personality factors and team climate influence software development team effectiveness, product quality and team member satisfaction. The replication was designed on the basis of the original quasi-experimental study, both of which were run in an academic setting. In the original study, data were collected from a sample of 35 three-member developer teams. All these teams used an adaptation of extreme programming (XP) to the academic environment to develop the same software system. In the replication, the data were collected from a sample of 34 three- or four-member developer teams working on the same software project. Student teams used a common object-oriented software development paradigm to solve the set problem and applied the Unified Process. In both studies all teams were formed at random, and their members were blind to the quasi-experimental conditions and hypotheses. The replication of this empirical study aims to verify the results of the original quasi-experiment. It examines, first, whether personality factors (neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experience and conscientiousness) are related to the quality of the developed software and team member satisfaction and, second, whether the preferences, perceptions and preferences-perceptions fit for the four team climate factors (participative safety, support for innovation, team vision and task orientation) are related to the quality of the developed software and team member satisfaction. The results of the replication corroborate some of the findings of the original study. On the one hand, the results revealed that there is a significant correlation between the extroversion personality factor and software quality, but no significant correlation between the extroversion personality factor and team satisfaction. Also, we found that the perception of team climate where participative safety is high is related to better quality software. We observed significant relationships between the perception of the four team climate factors and team member satisfaction. Additionally, the results showed a positive relationship between software quality and teams in which the real climate perception at the end of the project is better than preferences stated by team members at the outset of the project for the participative safety factor. Finally, we found that teams where the real climate is better than the stated preferences for the team orientation factor exhibit a direct and positive relationship to team member satisfaction.     

Why does site visit matter in global software development: A knowledge-based perspective

ContextFace-to-Face (F2F) interaction is a strong means to foster social relationships and effective knowledge sharing within a team. However, communication in Global Software Development (GSD) teams is usually restricted to computer-mediated conversation that is perceived to be less effective and interpersonal. Temporary collocation of dispersed members of a software development team is a well-known practice in GSD. Despite broad realization of the benefits of visits, there is lack of empirical evidence that explores how temporary F2F interactions are organized in practice and how they can impact knowledge sharing between sites.ObjectiveThis study aimed at empirically investigating activities that take place during temporary collocation of dispersed members and analyzing the outcomes of the visit for supporting and improving knowledge sharing.MethodWe report a longitudinal case study of a GSD team distributed between Denmark and Pakistan. We have explored a particular visit organized for a group of offshore team members visiting onshore site for two weeks. Our findings are based on a systematic and rigorous analysis of the calendar entries of the visitors during the studied visit, several observations of a selected set of the team members’ activities during the visit and 13 semi-structured interviews.ResultsLooking through the lens of knowledge-based theory of the firm, we have found that social and professional activities organized during the visit, facilitated knowledge sharing between team members from both sites. The findings are expected to contribute to building a common knowledge and understanding about the role and usefulness of the site visits for supporting and improving knowledge sharing in GSD teams by establishing and sustaining social and professional ties.     

Challenges in cooperative coevolution of physically heterogeneous robot teams

Heterogeneous multirobot systems have shown significant potential in many applications. Cooperative coevolutionary algorithms (CCEAs) represent a promising approach to synthesise controllers for such systems, as they can evolve multiple co-adapted components. Although CCEAs allow for an arbitrary level of team heterogeneity, in previous works heterogeneity is typically only addressed at the behavioural level. In this paper, we study the use of CCEAs to evolve control for a heterogeneous multirobot system where the robots have disparate morphologies and capabilities. Our experiments rely on a simulated task where a simple ground robot must cooperate with a complex aerial robot to find and collect items. We first show that CCEAs can evolve successful controllers for physically heterogeneous teams, but find that differences in the complexity of the skills the robots need to learn can impair CCEAs’ effectiveness. We then study how different populations can use different evolutionary algorithms and parameters tuned to the agents’ complexity. Finally, we demonstrate how CCEAs’ effectiveness can be improved using incremental evolution or novelty-driven coevolution. Our study shows that, despite its limitations, coevolution is a viable approach for synthesising control for morphologically heterogeneous systems.

     

The effect of governance on global software development: An empirical research in transactive memory systems

ContextThe way global software development (GSD) activities are managed impacts knowledge transactions between team members. The first is captured in governance decisions, and the latter in a transactive memory system (TMS), a shared cognitive system for encoding, storing and retrieving knowledge between members of a group.ObjectiveWe seek to identify how different governance decisions (such as business strategy, team configuration, task allocation) affect the structure of transactive memory systems as well as the processes developed within those systems.MethodWe use both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. We collect quantitative data through an online survey to identify transactive memory systems. We analyze transactive memory structures using social network analysis techniques and we build a latent variable model to measure transactive memory processes. We further support and triangulate our results by means of interviews, which also help us examine the GSD governance modes of the participating projects. We analyze governance modes, as set of decisions based on three aspects; business strategy, team structure and composition, and task allocation.ResultsOur results suggest that different governance decisions have a different impact on transactive memory systems. Offshore insourcing as a business strategy, for instance, creates tightly-connected clusters, which in turn leads to better developed transactive memory processes. We also find that within the composition and structure of GSD teams, there are boundary spanners (formal or informal) who have a better overview of the network’s activities and become central members within their network. An interesting mapping between task allocation and the composition of the network core suggests that the way tasks are allocated among distributed teams is an indicator of where expertise resides.ConclusionWe present an analytical method to examine GSD governance decisions and their effect on transactive memory systems. Our method can be used from both practitioners and researchers as a “cause and effect” tool for improving collaboration of global software teams.