The paper I presented last week at GROUP 2007 was recently published in the ACM digital library. The presentation can be downloaded from this link.

Cherubini, M., and Dillenbourg, P. The effects of explicit referencing in distance problem solving over shared maps. In GROUP ’07: ACM 2007 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, November 4-7 2007), Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 331–340. [pdf]

Explicit Referencing is a mechanism for enabling deictic gestures in on-line communication. Little is known about the impact of ER on distance problem solving. In this paper, we report on a study where 120 students (60 pairs) had to solve a problem collaboratively, at a distance, using chat tools that differed in the way a user may relate an utterance to the task context. Results indicate that team performance is improved by explicit referencing mechanisms. However, when Explicit Referencing is implemented in a way that is detrimental to the linearity of the conversation, resulting in the visual dispersion or scattering of messages, its use has negative consequences for collaborative work at a distance. The role of a linear message history in the collaboration mechanisms was equally important than that of Explicit Referencing.