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More than we realize it, knowledge is often constructed through interactions among people in small groups. The Internet, by allowing people to communicate globally in limitless combinations, has opened enormous opportunities for the creation of knowledge and understanding. A major barrier today is the poverty of adequate groupware. To design more powerful software that can facilitate the building of collaborative knowledge, we need to better understand the nature of group cognition — the processes whereby ideas are developed by small groups. We need to analyze interaction at both the individual and the group unit of analysis in order to understand the variety of processes that groupware should be supporting. This paper will look closely at an empirical example of an online group problem-solving experience and suggest implications for groupware design.

The viability of the use of instant messaging (IM) clients (e.g. Skype and MSN Messenger) to conduct online synchronous interviews is debatable due to the limitations inherent in computer-mediated communication. This data collection technique was utilized in the researcher's master's thesis project, which explored the concepts of trust and risk in the online hospitality network, The CouchSurfing Project. Semi-structured interviews were conducted over Skype and MSN Messenger with respondents from five different countries. Various challenges and benefits of IM were experienced by the researcher and the respondents. In the opinion of the researcher, it was found that the advantages had outweighed the disadvantages due to the circumstances of the thesis project.

This paper discusses the data collection techniques, sampling and process of identifying the population in a study to determine the image quality, authenticity, and metadata characteristics of photogrammetric three-dimensional (3D) data in cultural heritage domain. The study was carried out as the researcher's master's thesis conducted at Tallinn University. This paper presents a brief overview of significant issues regarding methodology applied in this study and justifications for the decisions made. Details of sampling techniques and sources of the population are described along with the procedure of conducting semi-structured interviews. A discussion of advantages and disadvantages of applying text-based synchronous and asynchronous interviews as data collection technique are explored.