ABSTRACT
Computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) and computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) are facilitated through deployment of complex multi-user systems. In order to increase the effectiveness of these systems, we must know more about how people interact with structures in the technology and the work space to sustain interaction, alleviate cognitive load, and enable restructuring of social and environmental elements thereby creating new knowledge structures. The present study suggests a way to capture evidence of artifact usage, emergence of knowledge and process structures, and resource coordination patterns during computer-mediated group interaction to better understand how resource coordination facilitates collaborative cognitive tasks. It is proposed that interactive use of emergent and accumulated cognitive information traces in a virtual decision-making task environment results in formation of an emergent group mental model through a discourse-driven distillation process. This collective mental model is the synthesis of the distributed shared understanding of the collaboratively-negotiated problem solution that is instantiated in the final decision model as the physical representation of the problem solution.
