This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). To more effectively support virtual organizations with emerging technologies, we must understand how technological designs encourage transformative interactions between people. There is an analytic gap between microanalyses and aggregate analyses of the thousands of individual paths of activity distributed across time, space and media. This project provides a three-layered solution, the Traces framework, which consists of a theoretical foundation for analysis, a common data model, and software tools to trace out the movement, confluences, and transformations of persons, artifacts and ideas in sociotechnical systems. The Traces framework views sociotechnical systems as constituted by artifact-mediated interactions, which the data model captures. The software tools expose sequential patterns of interaction and their dependencies on features of the technological infrastructure. The project will study how the movements and confluences of persons and artifacts in digital environments affect the dissemination and transformation of ideas, and how ties between participants develop in the process. It will apply this framework to understanding sociotechnical systems used to support educators, and particularly how resources influence participation to advance the objectives of the communities. The project will offer the sociotechnical systems research community a framework that addresses the analytic gap by scaling up analyses of interaction, and facilitates multidisciplinary and cross-methodological collaborations.
Sociotechnical systems are pervasive in today's societies, but little is currently known about how they function or how best to design them. Understanding how they function will enable the development of tools and guidelines to help improve their effectiveness with further benefits to society. This project will focus on sociotechnical systems that support the professional development of PhD students and of K-12 educators, including educators serving underrepresented and rural students. Thus, the results of this research will directly enhance the infrastructure for virtual learning organizations.
