If socio-technical congruence can bring about benefits such as better performance to a software development project, then actions that improve the level of congruence have a potential to increase the overall project value. However, those actions may also incur a cost, and bring additional risks into the project. We propose a number of alternative actions for increasing sociotechnical congruence...

CSCL is based on the idea that computer applications can scaffold and implement advanced socio-cognitive processes for knowledge sharing and knowledge building. But do we really understand these processes that are supposed to be implemented? This paper will focus on the "epistemological infrastructure" of CSCL. We will analyze three models of innovative knowledge communities in order to better ...

This paper is an invitation to carry out science and engineering for a class of socio-technical systems where individuals — who may be human or artificial entities — engage in purposeful collective interactions within a shared web-mediated social space. We put forward a characterization of these systems and introduce some conceptual distinctions that may help to plot the work ahead. In particul...

Although known item searching for music can be dealt with by searching metadata using existing text search techniques, human subjectivity and variability within the music itself make it very difficult to search for unknown items. This paper examines these problems within the context of text retrieval and music information retrieval. The focus is on ascertaining a relationship between music rele...

The Internet is rapidly transforming a range of human activities; socio-cognitive theory assumes that engagement in transformed activities, over time, transforms human cognition. Four hundred and six college students completed four modified cognitive assessment system subtests, each assessing one dimension of the PASS model of cognitive processing (i.e., planning, attention, simultaneous and su...

Online knowledge building communities (OKBC) reunite participants engaged in collaborative discourse. OKBCs can be made „smart“ by adding tools that predict how likely an OKBC is to integrate newcomers in existing dialogues and socio-cognitive structures. Starting from Bakhtin’s dialogical approach and polyphony theory, and building on the concept of interanimation of voices, this study explore...