Language differences in the presence of shared workspaces

There has already been a great deal of research investigating the use of shared visual context while completing collaborative tasks such as solving a puzzle or a murder mystery. Most of this work focuses on video conferencing (so each participant can see every other participant), or sharing videos of each participant's real-world workspace (in the context of a puzzle, each participant can see the puzzle that every other participant is working on). There is a smaller body of research that looks into shared digital workspaces for collaboration tasks, and a lot of this work focuses on heavily constrained work spaces that have been developed or adapted for a particular task. We are interested in how the presence of a less-constrained shared workspace such as a digital whiteboard affects the way people interact with others. We are also interested in how people adapt their language and behavior if the medium they are using is not conducive to the task they need to solve. Specifically we are interested in how different group and goal-oriented tasks are more appropriate to be completed via text, a shared visual workspace, or a combination of the two and how groups compensate for a poor match between task and communication medium.

In order to study our question, we plan on using a 3 by 3 factorial design. There will be three forms of media richness: chat only, digital whiteboard only, and digital whiteboard with chat. There will also be three tasks that are yet to be determined. In choosing tasks we plan on choosing one task that will be easiest under the whiteboard condition, one that will be easiest under the chat condition, and a third that will be easiest under the mixed condition. Under these conditions, we will observe the similarities and differences in the language used and exchanged between the participants of our study, their use of the whiteboard, and how efficiently they completed the task. Our team hypothesizes that the language used will vary within the different spaces and that certain tasks are better suited to be completed under certain conditions.

As our team continues to solidify our research question and procedure, there are still matters that are uncertain and yet to be clarified. While we believe that dictating street directions to a person would be most feasible via an on-line whiteboard and telling a story would be most appropriate via chat, we need further guidance in selecting our tasks. Also, while our team members have shown interest in this research space, we are still trying to answer the question "why?" We want to ensure that we can make practical recommendations based on the findings of our study. We question if finding differences in language usage under the three noted conditions will suggest any kinds of modifications in present day conventions of groupware and collaborative tasks.