Cognoter: theory and practice of a colab-orative tool

ABSTRACT

Cognoter is a program helps a cooperating group of people to organizing their thoughts for a presentation, e.g., a paper or talk. It is designed for use in the Colab, an experimental laboratory created at Xerox PARC to study computer support of cooperative real-time group problem-solving. Cognoter provides a multi-user interface and a structured meeting process. An annotated graph of ideas is built up by the group in three stages: brainstorming for idea generation, ordering for idea organization, and evaluation for choosing what will be finally be presented. Interesting aspects of Cognoter include direct spatial manipulation of ideas and their order relationships, support of parallel activity, and incremental progress toward a total ordering of ideas.

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