Journal of Management Information Systems - Special section: Exploring the outlands of the MIS discipline
Envisioning probe kit: creativity and storytelling to capture the inner thoughts of people
INTERACT'07 Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part II
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Effective use of distributed collaboration environments requires shared mental models that guide users in sensemaking and categorization. In Lotus Notes -based collaboration systems, such shared models are usually implemented as views and document types. TeamRoom, developed at Lotus Institute, implements in its design a theory of effective social process that creates a set of team-specific categories, which can then be used as a basis for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and team memory. This paper reports an exploratory study in collective concept formation in the TeamRoom environment. The study was run in an ecological setting, while the team members used the system for their everyday work. We apply theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, and use a modified version of an experiment on concept formation, devised by Lev Sakharov, and discussed in Vygotsky (1986). Vygotsky emphasized the role of language, cognitive artifacts, and historical and social sources in the development of thought processes. Within the Vygotskian framework it becomes clear that development of thinking does not end in adolescence. In teams of adult people, learning and knowledge creation are continuous processes. New concepts are created, shared, and developed into systems. The question, then, becomes how spontaneous concepts are collectively generated in teams, how they become integrated as systems, and how computer mediated collaboration environments affect these processes.