Dr. Goggins’ research interests are centered on socio-technical systems and theory to support physically distributed small group collaboration and creativity. He pursues this agenda through design based research methods (Simon, 1969; Barab & Squire, 2004; Stahl, 2006), quantitative analysis of joint performance outcomes among small groups (Carroll et al., 2005) and deep ethnographic studies of small online group formation and development.

 

Dr. Goggins’ areas of interest include: sociotechnical support for small group development (distributed work), particularly in the medical and scientific research settings; social computing, particularly support for the development of virtual communities of practice; theoretical development of Laffey, Lin & Lin’s (2006) social ability construct, integrating with Kaptelinin & Nardi’s (2006) explication of activity theory as a basis for understanding our relationship with technology; and new technologies to increase visual feedback of group status for online collaborators. Present efforts here focus on design of 3D virtual environments and tuning real time SNA based process and structure feedback algorithms for online collaborative workers.