Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper shows how Task Analysis can be a powerful tool for the design of collaborative applications supported by wirelessly interconnected handhelds. We define a methodology for the design of such activities. It basically consists in performing a Task Analysis on an Interaction Model to obtain the set of all possible interactions between actors. Then a class of activities is defined by selecting a subset of tasks. These, applied to a specific topic, determine a set of specific tasks which constitute an instance of the class of activities. The specific tasks build the desired activity and define the possible face to face interactions that can happen during the activity execution. These specific tasks also allow us to define an observation guideline that assists the system validation. We show with an example how such a methodology is applied for a collaborative learning activity mediated by a teacher and wirelessly interconnected handhelds.

This study expands on the current body of research examining technology-supported teams, individual creativity, and group diversity. By incorporating each of these elements into the experimental design, our objective was to determine how technology can best be leveraged to promote creativity in virtual teams.A lab experiment was conducted using 80 student teams by manipulating anonymity and capturing diversity characteristics. Preliminary results are presented which suggest that homogeneous teams generated more ideas; however, diverse teams were more satisfied with their output. Coding of the creativity of the ideas is on going.

Groupware applications that provide support for in-class collaborative knowledge construction are becoming an important research topic for the CSCW and CSCL communities. They provide support for lightweight interaction among participants, and for these participants with an increasing set of pervasive features of augmented classrooms, thus creating new opportunities to teach, learn and collaborate. Regarding in-class interaction, however, most current technologies focus on providing support for participation that is demanded by the lecturer (which we term Requested Participations), and that is limited to short interactions. Thus, support for Spontaneous Participation, or for longer interactions is limited or absent. In this paper, we present InClass-RTD, a system that provides support for spontaneous participation in the form of threaded discussions during the lecturer’s presentation. We present scenarios that motivated its development, and its design and implementation as a service of an Augmented Classroom. Additionally, results from a 3-month preliminary trial showed that InClass-RTD allowed the participation of 80% of the group, with an average of 8 spontaneous participations per student from a group of 10. We also found that the system allowed an average of 54 participations per hour. Future work considers the development of additional visualization techniques, and performing in-depth analysis to evaluate it’s pedagogical in-class potential.

Collaboration in distributed settings has become a reality in organizational life, yet we still have much to learn. One important area of study is the integration of Collaboration Engineering in distributed, or virtual, teams. Collaboration Engineering offers promising guidelines for process structure, but its application in distributed arenas is just beginning to be studied. We report on the design and development of a new collaboration environment for the incorporation of Collaboration Engineering principles, as well as the results of an initial study that examined leadership and process structure effects on the development of shared understanding. We discuss both technical and environmental challenges for research on Collaboration Engineering in distributed environments.

DIAS is an Asynchronous Discussion Forum Software, mainly developed in order to offer extended monitoring and interaction analysis support, by providing a wide range of indicators jointly used in various situations, to all discussion forae users (individual user/students, groups, moderators/teachers or even researchers/observers), appropriate for their various roles in different activities. In this paper we describe some of the integrated Interaction Analysis (IA) features and we provide information concerning case studies, some of which are in progress.

We propose an analytic method to evaluate synchronous shared workspaces design. The method uses human-performance models, developed in the Human-Computer Interaction field, to make time predictions about collaborative actions performed in selected critical scenarios. We apply this method to two case studies: the design of a collaborative game and the redesign of a collaborative tool for software engineering requirements negotiation. The benefits and limitations of the method are discussed, as well as some implications for design.

A number of studies have indicated that awareness of others’ activities plays an important part in collaboration. Consequently, awareness has been a frequent theme in cooperative work research. Researchers have acknowledged that proximity has a strong effect on collaboration, and that maintaining awareness of peers becomes harder in distributed environments. Many awareness systems require configuration by the user and work only in predefined shared environments. In this paper, we present an investigation into the determination of awareness targets, through email-based user interaction analysis. The final goal is to be able to draw inferences as to who and what a user would be interested in maintaining awareness of, enabling a system to automatically determine awareness foci and adjust itself according to its user.

Awareness is now acknowledged in the CSCW domain as an important element to take into account. This paper explores and refines the concept of workspace awareness. A categorization is proposed based on two criteria: the granularity and the ability to identify the cooperating entities. Two concepts are defined on this basis: Workspace Individual Awareness (WIA) and Workspace Global Awareness (WGA). New kinds of metrics are then described to support WGA and a prototype implementing WGA is shortly discussed.

Shared Knowledge Awareness is defined as the consciousness on the shared knowledge that a particular student has when carrying out a collaborative learning activity in a CSCL environment. In fact, an adequate level of Shared Knowedge Awareness can be promoted by including in the interface of this environment some specific features that improve the student perception related to such knowedge. This paper proposes some basic design guidelines that should be taken into account when designing a CSCL interface in order to promote an adecuate user’s behavior with respect to his/her Shared Knowledge Awareness. Besides, a set of usability principles is identified and linked to every suggested guideline to evaluate its quality (in terms of “easiness to use and learnability”) in an actual interface. Two different experiments are included as real-life examples that are analized within the proposed approach.

In this paper we present an architecture for the integration of tutoring and process scaffolds into existing collaborative applications. The architecture allows to combine existing research results concerning collaborative processes and their formalization, and existing and tested collaborative learning environments. The architecture allows to control the learning environments either by a human or a pedagogic agent. Both types of tutors are using the same set of primitives – either via an intuitive user interface or a slim Java interface. To prove the soundness of the architecture an example is given using IMS LD collaboration scripts with Coppercore as a workflow engine controlling the Cool Modes environment. A description of the possible applications of the architecture in intelligent tutoring systems gives an insight into the opportunities opened by such a flexible approach. The paper closes with an outlook concerning the use of the architecture with more and different learning systems and process control engines.