Collaboration and Technology

Self-constructed external representation, especially when embedded in peer inter-actions, are supposed to be beneficial in learning and teaching and can positively affect the course and type of reasoning for various reasons, e.g. by providing a ground for explanations and self-explanations, by helping to disambiguate learners’ mental models of phenomena, by reducing working memory load, and by increasing and sharing the task focus. This paper reports on the results of research efforts in investigating conditions that are advantageous in collaborative drawing activities in learning scenarios for young students. We describe the design, technical implementation and empirical results of a study with 94 primary school students working on a collaborative drawing task in various conditions that include awareness information, prompting and scripted activities.

Several approaches have addressed the consistency and automatic enactment dimensions of CSCL scripts with data flow, but they have not appropriately tackled the problem of reusing such learning designs. For instance, workflow-based solutions such as LeadFlow4LD only capture particular case behaviors, instead of describing generic data flow situations. This limitation hinders the reusability of these designs because the workflow needs to be adapted for specific technical, teaching and social contexts. This adaptation is complex and time consuming, especially with a large number of students. In order to show the relevance of this problem, this paper analyzes the LeadFlow4LD approach through a real-world complex CSCL script. The study characterizes the reuse effort of CSCL scripts with and without data flow definition, in different social context settings. The findings illustrate how the data flow representation may affect the particularization of complex CSCL scripts, and pave the path for alternative, higher abstraction level representations of data flows, to reduce the reuse effort.

The development of groupware systems can be supported by the perspectives provided by taxonomies categorizing collaboration systems and theoretical approaches from the multidisciplinary field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). In the last decades, multiple taxonomic schemes were developed with different classification dimensions, but only a few addressed the socio-technical perspective that encompasses the interaction between groups of people and technology in work contexts. Moreover, there is an ambiguity in the use of the categories presented in the literature. Aiming to tackle this vagueness and support the development of future groupware systems aware of social phenomena, we present a comprehensive classification model to interrelate technological requirements with CSCW dimensions of communication, coordination, cooperation, time and space, regulation, awareness, group dynamics, and complementary categories obtained from a taxonomic literature review.

Can normal people use process models for self-directed cooperation, that is, without expert guidance? According to modeling experts and corresponding contemporary research, they cannot, because they lack competencies for such usage. While the importance of artifacts such as texts, pictures and diagrams to cooperative work has been shown in many studies in CSCW and related fields, there are no answers to this question from our discipline. This paper aims at exploring this contradictory situation by exploring how users without or with little modeling practice work with models. Based on an exploratory study, we show opportunities and barriers to self-directed cooperative work with models and derive requirements for tool support. These results are compared with existing work and show that despite the special characteristics of process models, patterns known from the usage of other artifacts can also be observed in cooperative work with models. Users also showed behavior typically attributed to modeling experts, thus transcending such generic cooperation tasks.

Designing software platforms to support the activities of partially virtual communities (PVC) is a challenging task since the supporting services must evolve continually according to the community evolution. Moreover, unsuitable supporting services usually lead the community to its demise. Therefore, these platforms must count on a flexible architecture that provides suitable services as a way to support interactions among community members, and thus contributing to keep the community sustainability. This article proposes a software architecture that helps software designers to address this challenge. Such a model can be used not only to ease the architectural design process, but also to evaluate already implemented PVC supporting systems. The article also shows a preliminary evaluation of both roles of the proposed model and discusses the obtained results.

Today, people use cooperation systems with many different devices and interfaces. Popular systems such as Twitter illustrate this, as they can be used with many devices, provide numerous interfaces and can be integrated into many systems and web pages. As smaller cooperation systems might also benefit from such opportunities, this paper introduces the concept of ‘access’ to capture the different ways to interact with systems and argues that access should be regarded as a major factor for the design of cooperation systems. It understands access as vehicle to support users in carrying out their social tasks in a way that fits their needs, thus choosing from a variety of means to access systems. From an analysis of related work and of four cases of access design, it describes initial insights into influencing factors and design qualities of access.

The software architecture of a software system and the coordination efforts necessary to create such system are intrinsically related. Making changes to components that a large number of other components rely on, the technical core, is usually difficult due to the complexity of the coordination of all involved developers. However, a distinct group of developers effectively help evolving the technical core of software projects. This group of developers is called key developers. In this paper we describe a case study involving the Apache Ant project aimed to identify and characterize key developers in terms of their volume of contribution and social participation. Our results indicated that only 25% of the developers may be considered as key developers. Results also showed that key developers are often active in the developers’ mailing list and often fulfilled the coordination requirements that emerged from their development tasks. Finally, we observed that the set of key developers was indistinguishable from the set of top contributors. We expect that this characterization enables further exploration over contribution patterns and the establishment of profiles of FLOSS key developers.

Collaboration is important for productivity, quality, and knowledge sharing in software development. In this context, the use of social networks analysis can help to track the level of collaboration in a development project. In this work, an exploratory study was conducted, in the context of free/open source software, using EvolTrack-SocialNetwork tool, to investigate collaboration in software teams. The preliminary results indicate a potential to increase one’s ability to understand the course that the collaboration is taking.

Users of social network sites, such as Facebook, are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the growing number of updates generated by their friends. It is very easy to miss potentially interesting updates, it is hard to get a sense of which friends are active and especially, which are passive or completely gone. Such awareness is important to build trusted social networks. However, the current social network sites provide very awareness of these two kinds.

This paper proposes a interactive method to visualize the activity level of friends. It creates a time- and an activity-pattern awareness for the user, as well as an awareness of the lurkers. The proposed visualization help the user to browse her friends depending on how recently they have posted and how much interactions their updates have caused.

Support systems for cooperative work lack consistent modeling tools for user interface creation and execution that are flexible enough to combine both data processing and the logical aspects of a user interface and, at the same time, dialog and cooperation modeling aspects. This paper introduces a new concept to model user interfaces for cooperative work: the so-called multi-user interfaces aimed at distributed scenarios involving mobile devices implementing cooperative work. These multi-user interfaces are modeled in a hierarchical structure of dialog models and interaction logic based on a formal modeling language called FILL. For execution and verification, FILL models are automatically transformed to reference nets, a type of Petri nets, making the entire user interface and cooperation model accessible to simulation and verification tools. This new approach seeks to integrate more closely modeling and implementation based on a formalized interface design and user-machine dialogue. Formal graph rewriting concepts allow both the user interface and the collaboration model to be easily adapted in various ways by the modeler or user.

Group formation is a difficult task that arises in many different contexts. It is either done manually or using methods based on individual users’ criteria. Users may not be willing to fill a profile or their profile may evolve with time without users updating it. A collaboration may also fail for personal reasons between users with compatible profiles as it may be a success between antagonist users that may start a productive conflict inside a team. Existing methods do not take into account previous successful or unsuccessful collaborations to forge new ones. The authors introduce a new model of collaborative trust to help select the “best” fitted group for a task. This paper also presents one heuristic to find the best possible group since in practice considering all the possibilities is hardly an option.

Analysis of collaborative activities is a popular research area in CSCW and CSCL fields since it provides useful information for improving the quality and efficiency of collaborative activities. Prior research has focused on qualitative methods for evaluating collaboration while machine learning algorithms and logfile analysis have been proposed for post-assessment. In this paper we propose the use of time series analysis techniques in order to classify synchronous, collaborative learning activities. Time is an important aspect of collaboration, especially when it takes place synchronously, and can reveal the underlying group dynamics. Therefore time series analysis should be considered as an option when we wish to have a clear view of the process and final outcome of a collaborative activity. We argue that classification of collaborative activities based on time series will also reflect on their qualitative aspects. Collaborative sessions that share similar time series, will also share similar qualitative properties.

In this paper we present the concurrency control used in the computer-supported collaborative learning framework Metafora. Metafora is an environment that supports complex learning scenarios utilizing multiple learning tools, such as a tool for the planning of learning activities, a graphical argumentation tool and several microworlds in the domains of science and mathematics. Since Metafora is a web-based framework, specific requirements have to be fulfilled for smooth collaboration and inter-tool communication. For smooth collaboration we will describe our optimistic concurrency control approach that allows concurrent modification of shared objects in a workspace as far as possible. While move and edit actions can be performed in parallel, a Social Concurrency Conflict Resolution (SoCCR) protocol enables collaborative editing of text nodes in the planning space. We will illustrate this with an example of user interaction in the Metafora system involving the concurrency mechanism.

Applications and research efforts in Mobile Learning constitute a growing field in the area of Technology Enhanced Learning. However, despite a permanent increase of mobile internet accessibility and availability of mobile devices over the past years, a mobile learning environment that is easy to use, widely accepted by teachers and learners, uses widespread off-the-shelf software, and that covers various application scenarios and mobile devices, is not yet available. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting an approach and technical framework called “Mobile Contributions” (“MoCo”). MoCo supports learners to create and send contributions through various channels (including third-party solutions like Twitter, SMS and Facebook), which are collected and stored in a central repository for processing, filtering and visualization on a shared display. A set of different learning and teaching scenarios that can be realized with MoCo are described along with first experiences and insights gained from qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

The use of collaborative activities in education has proven to be an effective way to enhance students’ learning outcomes by increasing their engagement and motivating discussions on the learning topics under exploration. In the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), the use of information and communication technologies has been extensively studied to provide alternative methods to support collaborative learning activities, combining different applications and tools. Mobile learning, a subset of TEL, has become a prominent area of research as it offers promising tools to enhance students’ collaboration and it provides alternative views for teaching and learning subject matter in relevant and authentic scenarios. While many studies have focused on the pedagogical opportunities provided by mobile technologies, fewer are the efforts looking at technological related aspects. Hardware and software issues in this field still remain as challenges that require a deeper level of study and analysis. This paper presents and discusses the findings of a deep analysis based on the outcomes of three mobile collaborative learning activities and their requirements. These results have helped us to identify a number of arising challenges that need to be addressed in order to warranty Quality of Service (QoS) in these collaborative M-learning activities. Moreover, the paper offers a view on current practices in M-learning activities, which evidences the lack of research addressing software engineering aspects in mobile collaborative learning.

This paper discusses the potential and challenges of integrating collaborative and mobile technologies in order to support a wide variety of learning activities across contexts. We present and illustrate two examples of such integrations aiming to expand the functionalities of an existing CSCL environment by introducing mobile technologies. Our goal is to enable the design and enactment of pedagogical scenarios that include asynchronous learning, outdoor collaborative activities and tasks performed in class using personal response systems. These examples are used to identify and analyze different challenges related to software systems integration issues. The outcome of these efforts is a proposed cross context systems integration model that can serve as the basis for future work that leads towards the integration of additional mobile applications designed and implemented to support novel collaborative learning scenarios.

Ensuring a constant flow of information is essential for offering quick help in different types of disasters. In the following, we report on a work-in-progress distributed, collaborative and tangible system for supporting crisis management. On one hand, field operators need devices that collect information—personal notes and sensor data—without interrupting their work. On the other hand, a disaster management system must operate in different scenarios and be available to people with different preferences, backgrounds and roles. Our work addresses these issues by introducing a multi-level collaborative system that manages real-time data flow and analysis for various rescue operators.

The growing use of mobile devices by the population and the high popularity of the social media in current society, such as Facebook and Twitter, produces more and more information, plenty of them with contextual data. One of the major obstacles to the emergency response team during the response phase of emergency management is to obtain information that could lead to solving a particular situation involving emergency victims. In this paper we present a proposal which aims to collect information from social media and mobile devices, identify the contextual information and analyze them to indicate people who could help in the identification of victims. This work focuses on identifying the social network of victims and look for people who can provide important and reliable information about them, thus assisting the emergency team in its work. We use this contextual information to improve the recommendation process, identifying people with high degree of closeness.

Computer games are currently one of the computer science applications with the highest amount of users. The “serious gaming” approach tries to use the attraction (i.e. the fun factor) of such media not only for entertainment purposes, but also to convey serious content at the same time. Serious games have been established in vocational and advanced training over the last years and have a big potential for informal further vocational training. This paper presents a multi-agent-architecture for collaborative, serious and casual games. The focus is on casual games, since these are known to be small games with a high potential for frequent gaming by people of various social and educational background. To be flexible concerning the learning domain an ontology-based approach has been used. The ontology may easily be exchanged to adapt the game to another domain. Furthermore, the data created in the games can be used in a “wisdom of the crowd” approach to enhance the ontology. To test our architecture, an ontology on food safety and hazardous material regulations was created and the game was evaluated with a group of technician students of a professional training academy.

Scripting and monitoring are two well-known strategies to enhance collaboration in CSCL settings. Teachers are incorporating them increasingly into their practice, however it is not common to find both of them aligned. We are working on the definition of a learning design process that takes monitoring issues into account and leads to better and more efficient monitoring when the scripts are put into practice. Moreover, if the learning design is based on patterns, the information given by these patterns can help to shape this enhanced design process. This paper presents a pilot study where a participatory design approach was followed. The first author and a teacher co-designed a CSCL situation in higher education based on the Jigsaw pattern. The analysis of the co-design process gave us a first structure of the data to be considered in monitoring-aware learning designs and a set of measures for enhancing monitoring at design-time.