A Critical Incident Network for Computer Supported Collaborative Leadership Learning

"Increasingly frequent and diverse coalition contingency missions demand broader strategic leadership skills in senior officers. The knowledge to deal with such critical incidents is largely tacit, based on voluminous experience, and demands up-to-dateunderstanding of the myriad political, cultural, economic, and operational factors involved. An emerging technology for improving such leadership skills can be provided by discussion and sharing of knowledge and experiences in a computer-supportedcooperative learning environment that embeds an intelligent text-understanding software agent based on Latent Semantic Analysis.In Phase I a prototype web-based system will be built that (a) helps to identify critical incidents and vignettes, (b) presents vignettes in a distributed cooperative learning environment, (c) monitors and enhances their discussion by connecting relevantcomments to each other and to archival information, and (d) continually assesses and tutors the strategic thinking of individual participants and the group as a whole. Phase 1 will establish online data sources and collection paths needed for the project,automatically poll these sources for relevant material, and download it to a database accessible to the intelligent software agent. Friendly user testing by the target senior officer population will address the prototype's usefulness and usability. When perfected and operational, an electronic distributed cooperative