ABSTRACT
This chapter is about analyzing communication. Communication is an important factor in group and team performance. In performing a team task, the members of a team need to work together, coordinate their actions and share information. In a real team task, the performance of one team member may even depend on the performance of the other team member and on the information this team member distributes. An important means to work together, coordinate actions, and share information is by communication. By analyzing communication in teams, one can learn about team performance and how to optimize this performance. In learning situations, like cooperative or collaborative learning, communication is also an important factor because communicating involves exchanging information, and by collecting information, people can learn about a particular thing. Analyzing the exchange of information may explain something about the way people solve problems and how they learn to do so. With regard to computer mediated education, communication analysis may be helpful to explore training interventions and to find out what kind of information presentation or elicitation is most effective for learning and for team training. Communication analysis may therefore be helpful designing tools that can support learning in a computer-mediated environment. More generally, knowing how to analyze communication enables us to reveal bottlenecks experienced by group members in achieving a team task. On the basis of this knowledge, tools as part of a computer-supported work environment can be designed—or improved—that effectively support group performance.
