Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The How-To has recently emerged as a genre of online content that describes how something is done. This study focuses on computer and electronics hobbyists and their use of How-Tos-how hobbyists use existing knowledge to solve technical challenges, how they document their new knowledge for one another, and how they exchange help and feedback. Our analysis describes How-To knowledge sharing as a fully decentralized expertise-location system in which the How-To functions as both a broadcast of the author’s expertise and a personal portfolio.

While ethnography is an established part of CSCW research, teaching and learning ethnography presents unique and distinct challenges. This paper discusses a study of fieldwork and analysis amongst a group of students learning ethnography as part of a CSCW & design course. Studying the students’ practices we explore fieldwork as a learning experience, both learning about fieldsites as well as learning the practices of ethnography. During their fieldwork and analysis the students used a wiki to collaborate, sharing their field and analytic notes. From this we draw lessons for how ethnography can be taught as a collaborative analytic process and discuss extensions to the wiki to better support its use for collaborating around fieldnotes. In closing we reflect upon the role of learning ethnography as a practical hands on – rather than theoretical – pursuit.

We show that asynchronous collaboration can be made more effective by providing cues to common knowledge. We demonstrate this by empirically comparing two user interfaces used to support collaborative work. Our position is that effective collaboration is characterized by more co-ordinated and speculative interaction, and that cues to common knowledge help participants develop common ground for interaction. We also suggest that more effective collaboration is indicated by increased reliance on expectations of others’ knowledge which is characterized by implicit references to shared documents and ideas.