Feed-Back About the Collaboration Process from a Group Awareness Tool. Potential Boundary Conditions for Effective Regulation

Abstract

During collaborative learning the learners of a group need to monitor and regulate their interaction processes which requires collecting feed-back about past interaction and using it to adapt the collaboration. In this chapter, we argue that group awareness tools achieve this by visualizing information about the group’s interaction. However, the boundary conditions under which groups benefit from these tools still lack a systemic investigation. Based on prior research on group awareness tools and two small-scale field experiments we propose potential boundary conditions that affect whether groups take up the information from a group awareness tool, process this information, and eventually translate it into actions that adapt the current ways of interaction in the group. The resulting overview points out potential starting points for future research on the design of group awareness tools, on processes that are necessary to leverage group-level feedback, and on effective regulation of collaboration.