With the growing popularity of phenomena subsumed by the term web 2.0, the question arises whether existing applications and processes of cooperative and collaborative work can benefit from these new web applications. It is a commonality to all of these applications that people voluntarily and intensively use them for collaboration, that they provide a low usage burden and that they are not depended on particular devices. Therefore, their potential to foster collaborative work in groupware applications can be regarded as fairly high. Nevertheless, for an meaningful and beneficiary integration of web 2 functionality into groupware applications and processes, an understanding of these mechanisms is crucial.
In the talk, I will provide three examples, in which we use such functionality to foster collaboration in CSCW settings: making use of social tagging mechanisms for knowledge management with heterogeneous content, using tagging to provide multiple levels of information structure and integrating a web bases word processor into fine-granular content of a CSCL application. The talk will focus on the first example, which is my ongoing PhD project. After that, I will briefly sketch the latter two examples. I will conclude the talk with some observations and considerations derived from these examples.
Bio
Michael Prilla works as a research assistant in the Information and Technology Management work group of the Institute for Applied Work Sciences at the Ruhr University of Bochum. He holds a diploma in computer science at the University of Dortmund.
His main research interest is computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) with a special focus on the interplay of process models and knowledge management. Other fields of interest in this scope are the applications and phenomena of web 2.0 – especially social bookmarking – and the transition from personal to group information management.