Do collaborators' annotations help or hurt asynchronous analysis
Ruogu Kang, Sara B. Kiesler · 2012
Our study investigated the use of annotations in an asynchronous crime-solving task. In Study 1, regardless of whether they anticipated a partner, participants had better performance if they annotated more about connections across documents. In Study 2, annotations that pointed to more connections across documents improved the performance of the second participant. Annotations that pointed to few connections across documents hurt performance, especially when people were more aware of their partners. This research suggests that future collaborative tools should help people discern useful from useless annotations.