Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

Situiertes, exploratives Lernen ist aktives Lernen. Durch die Einführung von Mobile Learning soll die Aktivierung noch weiter gefördert werden. Dieses Ziel wird jedoch häufig nicht erreicht. Stattdessen gerät der Lernende durch den Einsatz von Mobiltechnologie unbeabsichtigt in eine passive Rolle. In diesem Artikel wird dieser Mangel von Mobile Learning am Beispiel des Mobile Learningsystem mExplorers und einer Reihe verwandter Projekte dokumentiert. Über acht Feldversuche im Zeitraum vom Oktober 2003 bis Oktober 2006 wurde über einen kontinuierlichen Verbesserungsprozess ein stetiger Anstieg der Lernaktivierung erreicht. Den Ausgangspunkt der Untersuchung bilden der Vergleich mit der Literatur und die Ergebnisse der einzelnen Elemente des mExplorers. Es wird gezeigt, wie mit Hilfe verschiedener Elemente im Bereich Lernform, Technologierolle, Motivationsform, Gruppensteuerung und Kommunikationsform die Aktivierung immer mehr gesteigert werden kann.

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The success of knowledge transfer is crucial in the area of knowledge management. Not only companies in outsourcing-relations have the need of successful knowledge transfer. Organizations have the need of successful knowledge transfer too in order to create market advantages. This thesis introduces a graph-based knowledge browser for a CMS to support the topic of knowledge transfer by providing „shared material“ for generating knowledge and providing easy access to knowledge by visualizing knowledge as associative networks. Knowledge is presented as graph or radial layout in hyperspace. Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and SVG are used for the implementation.

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The increasing usage of audio and chat communication in private and commercial cooperative settings requires new insight into choosing the appropriate media for collaborative tasks. The paper presents the results of two series of experiments comparing audio and chat communication with varying group sizes. The experimental data indicates that chat scales up better to an increase in group size than audio. We propose that the media richness theory appropriately predicts the productivity of small groups, while the media characteristics proposed by the theory of media synchronicity as well as media speed can be used to predict larger group productivity.

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Chatkommunikation ist inzwischen weit verbreitet im privaten Umfeld und wird zunehmend populär auch im geschäftlichen Bereich. Audiokommunikation bietet dank VoIP neue Möglichkeiten der Gruppenkommunikation. Doch die Auswirkung der Medienwahl zwischen beiden Medien ist weitgehend unbekannt. Auch die Effekte der Gruppenkommunikation über diese Medien sind ungeklärt. Ausgehend von den etablierten Theorien stellt dieser Text die Ergebnisse eines Experiments zur Untersuchung von Produktivität und Zufriedenheit vor. In diesem mussten mit Audio und Chat und unterschiedlichen Gruppengrößen kritische Hinweise ausgetauscht werden, um einen Mordfall zu lösen. Aufgrund der Resultate wird ein Brückenschlag zwischen den Theorien vorgenommen und neue Faktoren für die Produktivität identifiziert.

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In diesem Paper wird eine Auszeichnungssprache für multimediale und modularisierte Fallstudien, die in der Wirtschaftsinformatik-Lehre eingesetzt werden, vorgestellt. Während die meisten Fallstudien für eine spezifische Lehr-Lernsituation geschrieben sind, sollen die Fallstudien, wie sie hier beschrieben werden, flexibel und modular für verschiedene Aufgabenstellungen und in unterschiedlichen Lehr-Lern- Szenarien einsetzbar sein. Hierfür ist eine flexible Darstellung der Fallstudien notwendig; sie kann durch die von uns entwickelte Auszeichnungssprache CaseML sicherge- stellt werden.

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Mobile learning has a lot of potential for supporting learning in situations such as in a museum, at a tourist sight or when exploring biological phenomena at a riverside. There learners can interact with their environment and still make use of the advantages of computational power. However, we have found many of such projects hindered by placing the technology too much in the focus of the learner. Instead of interacting with the environment, we found the learners interacting with the device, heads down and ignoring the environment. We found the issue of focus to be a massive problem, one which needs a completely new metaphor for the design of an educational and technical setting. Until now, the mobile devices have been interpreted as small desktops, always in the foreground of the learners' focus. Instead, we propose a different approach, deduced from the usage of mobile phones. Mobile applications need to be designed explicitly to free the learners' focus and push the application to the background. The good news is that the actual changes to be made in existing systems are not as fundamental as one may think.

During the last years chat based instant messaging has become a part of the normal communication culture. Instant messaging based chat is now rapidly becoming a mainstream communication medium even in business environments. The same is becoming true for Voice over IP enabled audio communication. Skype, a high quality VoIP software has been downloaded over 200 million times and internet providers start to sell transparent VoIP products, which are usable with ordinary telephones. But these new technologies require new communication choices. We conducted an experiment to observe the effect of these new communication media on groups of four using chat or audio communication to work on tasks of uncertainty or equivocality. The results showed that audio groups were significantly more productive than chat groups for tasks of equivocality, while chat communication groups proved to be at least as productive as audio groups on tasks of uncertainty. Therefore we wanted to explore further, why these effects happened and what factors influenced the productivity of the groups. Based on our previous research and the media richness theory and the theory of media synchronicity the paper poses the hypothesis, that audio communication is faster, while chat communication is more efficient.

Mobile technologies offer the opportunity to collaborate spontaneously any time and any place. While researchers have begun to understand the skills and motivational consequences of distributed office meetings, we are only beginning to understand them for ad-hoc collaboration. This paper reports on an analysis of two exploratory experiments dating from 2004 and 2005. Ad-hoc collaboration requires specific skills for process facilitation, communication, planning, media usage, multi-tasking, as well as specific social skills. Those skills need to be different in their characteristic than those skills necessary for traditional face-to-face and distributed meetings. A fast action and reaction cycle leads to raised excitement and motivation despite the difficulties the group has in organizing their work.

The success of the collaboratively created encyclopaedia Wikipedia has already questioned the model of strict separation between professional content authors and readers. Distributed content creation using digital media promises faster updates, more opinions and expertise and large amounts of information produced at virtually no cost. But virtual communities on the Internet have long been offering an additional benefit: information in discussion spaces is tailored to a specific information need. However, there is a lack of empirical data about information quality provided by virtual communities. We present a design to assess information completeness of two media using independent evaluators. The design is applied to compare guidebooks with virtual communities about travelling. The results show that information completeness of virtual communities is up to popular guidebooks.