Promoting the coordination of computer-mediated interdisciplinary collaboration

The goal of this research is to promote the coordination of computer-mediated interdisciplinary collaboration of partners with complementary expertise. Efficient collaboration is shown to depend strongly on the quality of the coordination activities. A first experiment investigated the effects of different technical realizations of computer-mediated collaboration on the coordination of activities. It revealed that especially a well-balanced sequence of phases of joint work and individual working phases was central for the quality of the problem-solving process. The goal of a second experiment was to test the effectiveness of promoting this coordination by vicarious learning from an exemplary computer-mediated collaboration. By combining two strands of research -- studies on worked-out examples and work on vicarious learning from dialogue and discourse -- we show a new and theoretically well-founded way to strengthen collaborative competence.