UC Davis

In the last decade, the proliferation of online collaboration has vastly broadened the landscape of knowledge work. Individuals form online communities and accomplish complicated intelligent work together, such as developing software or planning healthy diets. These collaborations vary in levels of joint interaction and collaboration strategies, partially dependent on the technologies as well. While technological advancements have enabled large-scale flexible participation, they have also resulted in a proliferation of unorganized and overlapping knowledge contributions. Also, it may hinder misleading information from separating from credible knowledge. This over- whelming abundance and disorganization pose considerable challenges both for individuals and the community to leverage the knowledge to solve problems and make high-stakes decisions. These tasks demand not only cognitive resources but also advanced meta-cognitive skills. These obstacles highlight the need to concentrate on structures and distilling knowledge, from creation and integration to dissemination.

In my thesis, I explore the designs and understand the impacts of computational and visualizaion scaffolds that structure and highlight relevant and semantic knowledge, taking into account the socio-cognitive dynamics among collaborators. I aim to use technological support and social-cognitive mechanisms to mitigate cognitive and attentional limitations in online community-based cooperative work.

To help individuals actively explore and understand knowledge shared in online communities, such as videos, we first dive into the sharing from both video producers and audiences, and explore the idea of structuring semantic representations of video contents and audience comments, which aids in discerning high-quality videos and supports diverse video exploration compared to conventional video watching experiences. Empirical study results also illuminate the adoption and priority of structured overview for interpretation. Moving the understanding forward, accessing relevant knowledge doesn’t guarantee analysis and knowledge integration. We investigate social nudging approaches to scaffold engagement in higher-order thinking for high-stakes topic analysis, and compare the influences between common documentation tools and a concept- mapping-based space which also plays as thinking scaffold, DeepThinkingMap. Two lab studies reveal the effectiveness of social nudging in fostering both reflective and critical thinking, and confirmed the synergetic effect of nudging with other thinking scaffolds. Finally, we shift focus to synchronous video-based interactions and non-verbal cues. Our secondary analysis of group brainstorming sessions demonstrates the significant impact of metaphoric hand gestures on both individual and partner creativity and found that the positive effect of metaphoric gestures is independent of media richness of communication medium.

In conclusion, this dissertation underscores the potential of computational and social support in reshaping how knowledge is explored, integrated, and co-created within online communities. Based on the empirical findings about the socio-technical-cognitive mechanisms and the design space, this dissertation paves the way for future research that promotes organized, reflective, and efficient knowledge collaboration in online communities.