Knowing That You Know What I Know Helps? Understanding the Effects of Knowledge Transparency in Online Knowledge Transfer

To accomplish collaborative work, collaborators need to know one another’s states of work for coordination. Similarly, in situations of knowledge transfer where experts need to instruct novices by passing implicit knowledge and personal experience about the task, one challenge lies in the knowledge gap between experts and novices. Both parties need to gain an awareness of each other’s state of task knowledge for effective knowledge transfer. In this paper, we aim to investigate how online knowledge transfer is supported by a design called knowledge transparency of a shared document workspace, which allows explicitly annotating and sharing ones’ knowledge state to make it visible to their collaborators. We conducted a laboratory study to examine how knowledge transparency affects knowledge transfer among experts and novices using an image editing task over an online document. The results shed light on how to support knowledge co-construction and communication for the purpose of knowledge transfer through interface design.