Working with Groupware |  | Author: J.H. Erik Andriessen
Publisher: Springer
Category: Book
List Price: $139.00
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Rating:  1 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 206
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.5
ISBN: 185233603X
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.019
EAN: 9781852336035
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Product Description
This book looks at the social aspects of how virtual and geographically dispersed groups work together using information and communication tools (groupware). It introduces the basic concepts and brings together ideas from various disciplines to provide an integrated approach to the evaluation and design of groupware technology. Key topics include: * Why some collaboration technologies succeed and others fail * The conditions needed for successful distributed collaboration * How to take a systematic, user-oriented, design-related approach to the evaluation of computer supported collaboration Primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Information and Communication Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, Communication Sciences, Human Factors, Interface Design and Multimedia Systems, this book will also be of interest to researchers, practitioners and lecturers in social and organisational sciences.
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| Customer Reviews:
Theoretical, but useful June 30, 2010
Bob Savage (Watertown, MA United States)
We no longer face the choice of whether or not to use groupware; society has made that decision for us. Choices about how we use the tools available to us, and opportunities to maximize the effectiveness of those tools towards creating the social context for our actions, however, remain.
The scope of this book is both surprisingly specific and surprisingly broad. At its core its purpose is to establish a framework for evaluating groupware (collaborative technologies). To develop this framework, the problem of studying the impact of collaborative technologies is exposed via a survey of decades of empirical studies and multiple theoretical perspectives. This survey of theories, from diverse fields of study, very roughly constitutes:
1) the match between tools and user or task,
2) the nature of social interaction and cooperation, and
3) the design, introduction, and adoption of technology.
Finally, having explored these aspects separately, they are integrated into a single evaluative model.
I should warn potential readers that this is a theoretical book. The author is careful to state which theories hold after empirical investigation, and some of those empirical studies are briefly presented, which grounds the text a little in concrete examples, but there are some who might chafe at the amount of theoretical background that is presented prior to the evaluative model itself.
In the end, yes, this book will help you increase the likelihood of success with your project to establish a wiki (or a workflow enactment system, or a video-conferencing system), but it also might help you do much more. It might help you increase the utility and effectiveness of tools you have already introduced, but which are currently languishing. It might even help you think about the kind of organization you are creating; if so, it could help you make a positive impact on the social experiences of those in it, which might, in the end, be far more important than productivity and ROI.
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