People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another's intentions, actions and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent and complex activities. We analysed awareness breakdowns in use of our Virtual School system---stemming from problems related to the collaborative situation, group, task and tool support---to motivate the concept of activity awareness. Activity a areness builds on prior conceptions of social and action a areness, but emphasizes the importance of activity context factors like planning and coordination. This ork suggests design strategies for notification systems to better support collaborative activity.

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. This paper describes the first results of a series of experiments on multi-modal computer-supported collaborative problem solving. Pairs of subjects perform a diagnosis task (solving a murder mystery in a MOO environment), communicating by typing and drawing. While collaboration is often described as the process of building a shared conception of the problem, our protocols show that the subjects actually create multiple shared sub-spaces. These spaces are connected to each other by a functional relationship: some information in space X has to be grounded in order to ground information in space Y. The reason to dissociate these spaces is that the grounding mechanisms are different, because the nature of information to be grounded is itself different. The second observation concerns the modality of grounding. Contrary to expectations that subjects would primarily use drawings to ground verbal utterances, we observed that they use three modes of interaction: (dialogue, drawing, and also...

: Collaboration is widely regarded as beneficial for learning. Collaboration is the mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve a problem together. It has been conclusively argued that a focus on the process of collaboration is necessary in order to understand the value of working together with peers for learning. In accordance with the approach of open distributed learning environments (ODLEs), we have developed a framework system for computer-supported cooperative learning and working. This distributed shared workspace system is well suited for monitoring and assessing group interaction in co-located and distant scenarios. It provides adaptable mechanisms for the automated micro-analysis of processes of collaboration as well as for visualization and feedback. The system has been used in determining conflicts in focus setting as well as initiative shifts in aggregation and revision phases during a sample of collaborative sessions on puzzle problem solving. Keywo...

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a new publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of different facets of learners’ interaction that are important for their learning is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. It also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by scaffolding technology as in the emerging area of context sensitive collaborative learning support triggered dynamically on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL discourse corpus that had been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multi-dimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools.

The paper studies undergraduate students ’ synchronous peer interaction using a shared activity space and a text communication tool. Several groups of students collaborated in order to accomplish a datamodelling task in the context of a Databases University undergraduate course. The paper presents the collaboration support environment, i.e. a concept-mapping tool, used in this study. Subsequently, evaluation of the effectiveness of the environment in the educational process is discussed along various dimensions, like group synthesis, task control, content of communication, roles of the students and the effect of the tools used. Special emphasis is given in the ways the tools and the representations used complement each other and support the process. A discussion on the use of computer-supported collaborative problem solving environments is also included.

Meaning making is central to the interactions that take place in CSCL settings. The collaborative construction of shared meaning is a complex process that has not previously been analyzed in detail despite the fact that it is often acknowledged as being the distinguishing element in CSCL. Here, a three-minute excerpt from a discussion among three students is considered in some detail. The students are reflecting on their analysis of mathematical patterns in a synchronous online environment with text chat and a shared whiteboard. Several interaction methods and group cognitive processes are identified. The analysis suggests a number of conditions and preconditions of such interaction. These are necessary for achieving the potential of CSCL as the accomplishment of high-order cognitive tasks by small groups of learners. An understanding of the conditions and preconditions of the small-group meaning-making process may aid in the design and analysis of CSCL activities, as well as in the development of a theory of group cognition.

. Workplace training is most effective when the training happens just in time as part of a worker's regular job activities. We are developing a just-in-time training system called PHelpS (Peer Help System) which can select peer helpers with whom the worker can interact. User modelling is central in the PHelpS system. For each worker, a user model is kept containing several kinds of information about the worker, in particular a knowledge profile of how well they can carry out various specific tasks. These user models permit the system to select a knowledgeable, available, and appropriate set of helpers if a worker signals that he or she needs help in carrying out a particular task. Many interesting user modelling issues arise in this work, most importantly employing the same user model in multiple ways, making the user models inspectable by a variety of users, doing knowledgebased matching and retrieval, and maintaining the accuracy of the user model over time. There are several social ...

We explore grounding and the sub-phenomena of miscommunication and repair from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. From a theoretical perspective, we classify several types of miscommunication, as action or perception failure, and part of a more general case of non-alignment of the mental states of agents. From an empirical perspective, we present a preliminary analysis of examples of miscommunication in multi-modal collaboration. These points of view converge towards a predictive model of grounding, which considers costs and benefits of performing grounding acts (including repairs of miscommunication). 1 Overview Our view of miscommunication is that it is just one aspect of the more general phenomena of communication and collaboration. There are a number of complexities to miscommunication, such as what it relates to, who notices and reacts to it and how, which can really only be fully explored within the context of the larger interactive processes One can get a full picture...

Abstract: Our attempts at describing the processes involved in learning and knowledgebuilding activities depend on our ways of conceptualizing the context in which such activities take place. Here we trace the development of the concept of “problem space ” from its inception within the information-processing perspective as a characterization of individual problem-solving activity. We review reformulations and extensions made to the concept within the Learning Sciences, and explore them as attempts to better describe small-group interactions in complex knowledge-building contexts. Using a detailed analysis of sustained, online collaborative problem-solving activity, we propose that a new aspect of the problem space needs to be carefully considered in order to fully account for these kinds of experiences: temporal and sequential orientation to inter-subjective meaning making.