Presence and awareness support in virtual business teams

A virtual business team (VBTeam) is a learning-through-working community with geographically dispersed membership, engaged in business-task-driven learning. Groupwork is typically performed in an asynchronous mode, where participants' contributions and interactions are being produced at the individual's convenience, in terms of place and time. Asynchronous co-working plus co-learning brings additional strengths to the collaborative-learning setting (Westera en Sloep, 1998), but there are barriers in developing a sense of community to keep members attentive, motivated and inspired to complete the tasks. The central problem area in our research relates to the design of technical infrastructures that allow for the building or emergence and the maintenance of social presence and awareness in teams, apart in time and space, a collaborative-learning condition as yet rarely researched.