elektronická verzia publikácie - FIIT STU - Slovenská technická ...

Personalized Collaboration 253
Not everything is so clear cut and social bookmarking and social tagging systems presumably
are somewhere in between.
Structured vs. Unstructured
Collaborative activities generally begin as an unstructured collaboration which is a free flowing
interaction, in computer-mediated setting usually in the form of free textual conversation.
To understand and reason about such an unstructured flow of data, it needs to be
analyzed into higher level indicators such as topics discussed, depth of knowledge shared,
and relationships among the participants.
In structured collaboration a specific structure is imposed on the way participants are
allowed to interact, such as in brainstorming which should ideally proceed in stages that do
not get in the way of idea generation early on, thus allowing to build on one another's
ideas later, and finally producing possibly novel solutions to the problem at hand. In computer-mediated
environment the interaction can be structured by the use of shared workspaces
(Figure 9-1), which provide a problem-related learning material for synchronous
interaction. In shared workspaces the interactions of individual users are analyzed on the
level of actions upon the objects in the workspace. Even inherently unstructured interaction
types such as textual conversation can be unobtrusively structured, in this case for
example by the use of sentence openers (Figure 9-4).
Figure 9-1. Shared workspace application CardBox (Mühlenbrock, 2001).