CAPTURING THE TRADEOFF BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE SHARING EFFICIENCY AND AUTONOMY IN SURGICAL TELEMENTORING

Abstract

With great advances in telecommunication technologies in the recent 15 years, tightly coupled, synchronous collaborative work in highly technical domains, such as engineering, design, and medicine, has begun to embrace remote collaboration practices, aiming to gain greater access to expertise that is often distributed across locations. However, current teleconferencing systems provide limited support for team knowledge sharing, i.e., the process for team members to collectively contribute to developing a shared understanding of the work, through which expertise, or in-situ knowledge, is acquired. The objective of my dissertations research is to elucidate the impact of geographic distance on team knowledge sharing in instructional collaborative tasks, where a local novice is acting upon objects mentored by a remote expert. With a thorough examination of individual team members? language use in distributed training, this dissertations demonstrates that distance makes the team grounding process less efficient by increasing explicit acknowledgments from the remote trainer. These acknowledgments lead to ambiguity in the team coordination, as the trainees jump in and take control over the task process, before they gain sufficient understanding of the context. I discuss these results through the lens of Common Ground Theory and Self-determination Theory and illustrate the dilemma that instructional tasks are facing - more trainee'sautonomy is associated with less communication efficiency, yet indicating a better learning experience. In this, I propose a two-dimensional design space, considering both the trainee'sautonomy and the team'scommunication efficiency. This facilitates future work on developing technologies that support the objectives of the training, as well as understanding the interdependencies between these two theories.