Groupware Goes to School
Abstract.
Groupware for cooperative work (CSCW) and for collaborative
learning (CSCL) have many important commonalities as well as different
requirements. By transforming a generic CSCW platform into an environment to
support a particular vision of education as collaborative knowledge building,
we saw how functionality had to be adopted, transformed and refined to meet the
specific educational social setting. By “taking groupware to school,” we
discovered the need to extend the original system into a CSCL application that
could facilitate collaborative learning, knowledge building, perspective
intertwining, knowledge negotiation, portfolio sharing and knowledge artifacts
in active, structured virtual learning places. In the paper, we describe the
resulting system and reflect on issues of design and implementation that
differentiate our CSCL approach from its closely related CSCW basis.
1. From CSCW to CSCL
With widespread use of the Internet, groupware promises
to provide the kind of support to networked groups that individual productivity
software like word processors and spreadsheets grant individuals. The potential
of computer support for groups is perhaps even higher than that for individuals
because communication within groups has until now suffered from severe
constraints that may be eased by computer support. The question must still be
addressed as to what groupware should aim at beyond the reproduction of
pre-computer forms of group interaction.
We need a vision of how networked computers can facilitate
the discussion of all with all that does not require the coordination of a
manager or teacher and the collaborative building of knowledge that is not
restricted to the skills, memories and efforts of individuals. Perhaps CSCL can
provide a model for this. When we take groupware into the schools in a
principled and explorative way we may see how computer support can be designed
to transform teacher-centric learning into collaborative learning and transcend
knowledge management with knowledge building.
Academically, the exploration of groupware has historically
been split into two separate domains: CSCW and CSCL, which address issues of computer
support for cooperative work and collaborative learning, respectively. Each
domain has its own conferences, journals and adherents. CRIWG is one of the few
places that these come together. This distinction has not been based on a
conceptual analysis that might motivate and justify such a division. Certainly,
the two domains have at least sufficient commonalities that they can borrow
extensively from one another.
Why should CSCW and CSCL be distinguished? There is at least
a superficial rationale for this. CSCW is concerned with the world of work,
where people must accomplish commercially productive tasks, while CSCL is
concerned with the world of schooling, where students must learn basic skills
that will in the end allow them to function effectively in the world of work
and in adult society generally. These are very different social contexts.
Perhaps the clearest lesson of groupware research to date has been the
importance of taking into account the social context – the motivations,
prevailing practices, political constraints – in which software is to be used.
By this criteria, the two domains are indeed distinct and should be treated so.
However, it is also true that in today’s “knowledge society”
work is often knowledge work that requires constant learning (Brown & Duguid,
1991; Zuboff, 1988).
In the interesting cases, work – whether individual or cooperative – is not the
repetitive carrying out of well-known tasks that were learned once and for all
in school, but work itself centrally involves various learning tasks. Work may
require just-in-time learning, where existing information must be found to
solve a current problem. Or it may involve inquiry learning, where solving a
wicked, ill-structured or non-routine problem requires the building of new
knowledge. Similarly, the learning that is needed to prepare students for an
effective role in tomorrow’s knowledge society cannot consist merely of the
transfer of existing knowledge into passively receptive minds, but must guide
the students to develop personal and social skills that will allow them to find
information relevant to unanticipated problems and to engage in inquiry
processes. In this sense, the application domains of CSCW and CSCL are closely
related; it is not just a matter of both having to support activities of
groups.
This paper reports on the results of trying to extend a
basic CSCW system for a typical CSCL application. We started with BSCW, a
well-known and widely used groupware system (Appelt,
1999; Appelt & Klöckner, 1999; Klöckner, 2001). Used by over 200,000 people since 1995 when it was
developed at the Institute for Applied Information Technology – FIT (previously
a GMD Institute, now a Fraunhofer Institute near Bonn, Germany), BSCW provides
a system of autonomously managed Web-based workspaces that can be used by
members of a workgroup to organize and coordinate their work. These workspaces
are central access points for shared documents, including folders for
organizing them and a wealth of functionality for knowledge management.
Although BSCW has been used in many classrooms, especially
at universities in
·
the collaborative reflection on this information
(sharing and annotating),
·
the building of group knowledge (discussion from
perspectives) and
·
the determination of what is to count as
produced knowledge artifacts (knowledge negotiation).
The focus of the ITCOLE Project differs from that of BSCW,
which is on the archiving and sharing of existing knowledge artifacts. Thus,
while we wanted to take advantage of important forms of CSCW support like
knowledge sharing and social awareness, we also wanted to go beyond the
management of established knowledge to the creation of knowledge that is
innovative within a learning community that develops, defines, sanctions and
shares its knowledge.
This paper reports on how we designed a CSCL system by
transforming a CSCW system. It begins with a scenario (section 2), illustrating
the vision of how our new system, called Synergeia, might be used to facilitate
collaborative knowledge building in a typical collaborative classroom. The
system is named Synergeia in recognition that the whole can be much more than
the sum of its parts. Thus, the system strives to support the synergistic
construction of knowledge at the group level that is quite distinct from what
any of the students could produce on their own. The scenario anticipates the
pedagogical concepts that are then presented in the next section (section 3).
For instance, the “folders” of BSCW are referred to as “virtual learning
places” because the metaphor is no longer one of passive storage containers,
but of locations within which active knowledge building is supported. The
functionality associated with the pedagogical concepts is described with the
respective concepts. Other Synergeia functionality for students, teachers,
administrators and researchers is then summarized (section 4). Following a
brief discussion of the system infrastructure (section 5), reflections on the
attempt to adapt CSCW to CSCL are presented (section 6).
The Synergeia groupware is already going to school. Teachers
and students in
2 Scenario of CSCL Support
Synergeia is designed to support collaborative knowledge
building. However, it must also be flexible enough that teachers in various
countries can use it for a broad spectrum of educational approaches. The
scenario illustrates what might be called the “default usage” of Synergeia.
This means that Synergeia was designed to make it especially easy for teachers
to set Synergeia up for structuring knowledge building this way, although other
ways of using it are also supported.
Meet Carla, a student in a course on The Human Brain. Her
teacher has enrolled her in the course and assigned her to a workgroup on the
role of Vision. When Carla first logs in, she can see a folder for her course
on “The Human Brain.” In addition, there is a “personal knowledge building
perspective” for her to jot down her own ideas.
Carla clicks on her course to view its contents. She sees a
folder for her project group within that course called “The Vision Team.” She
notices in the size column that there are already some items in the group
learning place, so she clicks on “Group: The Vision Team” and goes there (see
Figure 1). Carla works with the other students in her project team to collect websites
and other documents about how vision works as part of the human brain. As they
collect new information, the team members discuss what they have found and
begin to build theories about vision in the group knowledge building
perspective (see Figure 2). This discussion motivates them to do more Web
searches and to try to answer questions that they pose to each other.
Gradually, they converge on an understanding of their topic and put together a
portfolio of what they have learned, to share with the other members of the
course.
As they begin to explore the physiology of vision, different
students come upon different explanations. Some find discussions of vision in
terms of light dynamics, lenses and the stimulation of the retinal sensors;
others read about chemical reactions in the sensors and nerve connections;
while others discover presentations involving electrical charges in neurons. As
these different findings come together in the group knowledge building
perspective, the concepts and claims in the notes interact. Efforts to question
one another and to synthesize multiple notes raise new questions, hypotheses
and insights.
Carla is a shy girl who does not normally participate much in face-to-face
class discussions. She is afraid that her ideas are not very good and she
hesitates to share them until she has had time to think about them and to
compare them with other ideas or to check them out by collecting more
information. So when she sees an interesting idea in the group learning place,
she often copies it into her personal perspective and works on it there, where
no one else will see it right away. During the week, her personal area fills
with the results of new web searches, documents she has collected or edited,
notes that she has copied from the group area, and ideas she has jotted down in
her own knowledge building area. When she is happy with some of her ideas, she
copies them and related documents into the group area to see what her team
mates will say about it. Now she has some confidence that her ideas are thought
through and can stand up to inspection by others. Even if her suggestions are
not adopted unchanged in the end, they will be taken into the group discourse
as serious contributions.
At some point in the collaborative knowledge building process, Carla thinks
that the group members have something almost ready to present to the course as
a “knowledge artifact” or part of their team “knowledge portfolio.” So she puts
this information together in a folder named “Good documents we found about
vision” and makes a proposal to share this with the course. Now the group area
contains a proposal folder named “The Vision Team’s proposal 1” (see Figure 1).
In addition to the folder named “Good documents we found
about vision,” this proposal folder contains a voting interface and a knowledge
building area for discussing what changes are needed before the group members
are ready to agree to send this folder to the course learning place as their
“knowledge portfolio.”
Once the team has decided to send their portfolio to the
course learning area, it can be discussed by everyone in the course and
evaluated by the teacher as a product of the group’s knowledge building effort.
This might be the end of a curriculum unit, or it might lead to further inquiry
and knowledge building. The same groups might continue to work together or the
teacher and students might create new groups in new learning places. Our
scenario ends here, but the learning continues.
3 Pedagogical Requirements for
Synergeia
The adaptation of BSCW for school classrooms involves
responding to a particular pedagogical vision, and providing support for the
particulars of that vision. To understand the difference that the CSCL setting
makes to system design, one must understand the pedagogical concepts that drive
the adaptation. The central concepts of collaborative knowledge building are
presented in the current section, along with a description of the support
implemented for them in Synergeia.
Note that although Synergeia is most useful and powerful if
used to support what is here called “collaborative knowledge building,” the
system has been designed to be flexible so that teachers with different
curricular goals and pedagogical approaches can adjust it to their needs. The
design process tried to incorporate the following influences:
·
Adoption of pedagogical principles of
collaborative knowledge building and progressive inquiry.
·
Incorporation of effective functionality from
related CSCL and CSCW systems, both commercial and research.
·
Adaptation to the social settings of
constructivist European classrooms.
·
Support for social practices involved in
collaborative learning such as that described in the preceding scenario.
·
Flexibility for teachers in different countries
and pedagogical cultures to adapt the system to their varying approaches.
3.1 Collaborative Knowledge
Building
The design of Synergeia is guided by an educational
approach that stresses the construction of knowledge within a community of
learners, typically including students and more experienced teachers. The idea
is that new knowledge will be created through the investigations and discourse
of the group. While there are important roles for individual student thinking
as well as for teacher guidance, there is also emphasis on sharing, critiquing
and building upon each others’ ideas to arrive at deeper knowledge of a topic
within a learning community (Bereiter, 2002;
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996). “Group learning” is to be understood here in an
emphatic sense: it is the group that learns, knowledge is constructed by the
group itself. Whereas CSCW supports the sharing and archiving of knowledge that
is contributed by cooperating individuals, CSCL supports the functioning of a
collaborative group so as to build knowledge that is the shared creation and
property of the group. Primarily, group knowledge arises in discourse and is
preserved in linguistic artifacts, whose meaning is interpreted within group
processes (Stahl, 2002a, 2002b).
Because knowledge building proceeds largely through
discussion, each personal, group and course perspective automatically contains
its own knowledge building area in Synergeia. These knowledge building
areas have extended the basic threaded discussion facility of BSCW. While threaded
discussion support is derived from CSCW, it requires more nuanced and
specialized support in CSCL. Notes from one perspective can now be copied to
other virtual learning places in other perspectives, and notes from elsewhere
can be pasted here. Notes in these areas are now included in system searches,
because they form an important part of the knowledge in the system.
The user interface of the threaded discussion areas in
Synergeia has been carefully designed to encourage thoughtful, focused, deep
knowledge building. Below the current note is a display of all other notes
entered in the same knowledge building area. The notes can be displayed as
indented threads, indicating which notes reply to which other notes.
Alternatively, the notes can be sorted by author, date or thinking type.
Sorting by author shows quickly who is contributing the most; by date shows the
order in which ideas were written; by thinking type indicates which parts of
the knowledge building process have or have not been emphasized so far. In each
of the sorted displays, the display of the content of the notes can be toggled
on and off so that one can see either just the list of the notes or the full
content of the whole discussion. This is useful so that one can quickly get an
overview of the structure of complex discussions or see the full content of
brief discussions.
As seen in Figure 2, the note that is currently being read
is at the top of the screen. With it are a number of buttons for building
further knowledge, such as adding a “Reply to this Note.” The background color
of this part of the display corresponds to the note’s thinking type. The
different thinking types are described on a help page reached with the
“Thinking Type Descriptions” button; the corresponding background colors can be
seen there.
3.2 Thinking Types
It is important for students to reflect upon the role
that a note they are entering will play in the knowledge building process. Both
note titles and categories should be chosen carefully (Gerosa, Fuks, & de
Lucena, 2001).
Discussion within the knowledge building areas is scaffolded with a set of thinking
type categories for the notes. Before someone can enter a note, they
have to decide what category of note they want to add to the existing
discussion. For instance, do they want to state the problem that is to be
pursued, propose a working theory, deepen the knowledge that is already there,
or make a meta-comment about the knowledge building process that is taking
place? It is possible to have different sets of thinking types for different
approaches to knowledge building. For instance, the preceding examples
illustrate categories of inquiry learning notes. Other categories are
appropriate for brainstorming, debate, design rationale, etc. Thinking types take
on a much more important role in Synergeia than in BSCW, where they were
limited and rarely used.
3.3 Virtual Learning Places
The most basic function that Synergeia offers is a set
of workspaces on the Internet where people can share ideas, documents, web
links and other objects. Whether people using Synergeia are in the same room
during the same class period or they are in different countries working at
different times, they can share their work and collaborate within these virtual
learning places. Teachers and students can create new places
whenever they want for any special needs they have. Places can be created to
store new collections of documents. Synergeia offers several special kinds of
learning places, such as Courses, Groups, Proposals and
A major advantage of Synergeia over threaded discussion
systems in commercial groupware systems is that the discussions in Synergeia
are separated into personal, group and course perspectives in different virtual
learning places, so that different topics are not mixed together and it is
easier to keep up with relevant discussions without being overwhelmed by
contributions of many other people who are investigating other issues. The same
is true of the documents, web links, etc. that are collected in the various
learning places.
It is important that the network of learning places be
structured in a way that seems natural to the students using them. The basic
structure of learning places follows the normal structure of schools, with
students in projects within courses. It should be easy to see what is available
and relevant, and to navigate to it easily. Therefore, when a student logs in,
that student’s personal learning place is displayed; the personal place
includes a list of the student’s courses and the course learning place includes
the student’s groups. It should also be easy to copy documents and ideas from
one place to another. At the same time, because these places are generally
shared, it is also important to protect the contents so that one person cannot
change or delete someone else’s work arbitrarily – as can occur in BSCW.
By default, Synergeia defines appropriate connections
between places and reasonable access rights to them when people are registered
for courses and groups. Each user, group and course automatically has its own
knowledge building area – additional areas can be added or the automatic ones
can be deleted. Also, plain places that do not have the special characteristics
of groups and courses can easily be added. Thus, the structures, navigation
paths, access rights and facilities within Synergeia are designed for usage
within the social practices prevailing in school settings, with adequate
flexibility to allow for broad variations within these settings.
3.4 Perspectives
The approach to building knowledge in Synergeia is
based on the idea of intertwining personal and group perspectives (Stahl & Herrmann,
1999).
All knowledge involves interpretation from specific perspectives (Nygaard & Sørgaard,
1987; Stahl, 1993).
In collaboration, personal interpretations of what is said in group discourse
interact to form shared understandings. (Stahl, 2002b)
The default structure of Synergeia provides a network of
virtual learning places that are set up for personal, group and course uses.
These perspectives support a range of pedagogical models that are favored in
the different countries participating in the ITCOLE Project:
·
Community
of learners (
·
Progressive
inquiry (
·
Conceptual
change (
·
Shared and
individual regulation process (
Thus, there are private personal
learning places where only one person can add notes, documents or
sub-folders and can come back and look at these, modify them, or copy them to a
group place. These are places to develop your personal perspective on a topic
without worrying what other people will think about what you are doing. Because
your personal ideas and documents are in Synergeia, they can be easily related
to ideas in other learning places. Allowing the system for group work to be
used for personal reflection as well has two major advantages. First, it
encourages system use and familiarity. A major problem with groupware systems
can be that they require users to log in every day to see what is new there; if
people do not use the system for their normal activities then they tend not to
log in frequently enough. Also, if people have to use too many different
systems for their work then it is difficult to become proficient in them all.
Second, by conducting both personal and group work in the same system, people
can easily move ideas and documents back and forth between the two. In
particular, Synergeia is designed to allow quick cut and paste of items and
sets of items from any visible learning place to any other.
Then there are the group
learning places where most of the collaboration and knowledge building gets
done. Here everything is shared with the other members of the team or work
group. Students who are not in the group cannot modify or comment on work in
the group until the group decides to share something with the whole course.
Knowledge usually emerges from a group perspective (Stahl, 2002a).
And there are also course
learning places, where all the smaller work groups or project teams within
the course contribute the knowledge they have built up. For instance, a teacher
who has a course with 30 students might divide them into 6 or 7 teams. Perhaps
each team would develop a portfolio to present their ideas to the course. Each
team might have the same task or they might divide up different aspects of the
larger course topic. After they develop their group portfolios, they can share
and debate within the whole course perspective. While CSCW systems provide
support within a generic group, a CSCL system should support various levels
from individual to large group, with fluid navigation and transfer of contents
among the levels.
3.5 Negotiating Knowledge Artifact
Portfolios
Sometimes it is pedagogically important for groups to
negotiate the promotion of knowledge from one perspective to another, such as
the decision to make products of a group available to the larger course. A
teacher can set up course learning places so that the only way that new
documents, maps and folders can be added is by a group developing a knowledge
portfolio or knowledge artifact in their group
learning place and then deciding to move this into the course place. Making
this kind of group decision is called knowledge negotiation in
Synergeia. There is a negotiation mechanism to help a group reach this decision
and move the knowledge they have created into the course learning place, where
it can be shared and discussed by all members of the course. By specifying the
negotiation option for a course, the teacher in effect declares that the only
knowledge allowed in this learning place is knowledge created by groups.
In CSCW negotiation, such as Herrmann’s or Wulf’s model (Herrmann, Wulf, &
Hartmann, 1996; Stahl & Herrmann, 1999; Wulf, Pipek, & Pfeifer, 2001), commenting on one’s voting
serves the purpose of expressing one’s supposedly pre-existing opinion. In
Synergeia, engaging in negotiation of knowledge building is participating in a
group reflection on shared knowledge. This can be seen in the thinking types of
the notes contributed. In CSCW the note format stresses who the author is and
may characterize the notes as a “pro” or “con” opinion (as even in BSCW); in
Synergeia the note must first of all be determined to be a particular aspect of
the knowledge building process, such as a problem statement, a working theory
or a summary statement. Knowledge negotiation is thereby explicitly structured
as a collaborative group effort, where notes written by individuals must fit
into the group process and are categorized by their function in the group
thinking, not the individual.
Negotiation in a knowledge building context is essentially
different from that in a knowledge management or group decision situation (Stahl, 2003). In other groupware settings,
negotiation is conceived of as a straw vote to determine how people’s
pre-existing opinions are distributed on alternative options that have been
proposed (Herrmann et al., 1996; Kraemer &
Pinsonneault, 1990; Wulf et al.,
2001).
In a collaborative knowledge building setting, however, it is a matter of further
refining the proposed knowledge artifact. Voting serves just to signify that
the participants are generally satisfied that the artifact represents their
group knowledge, and can it can be shared at the course level as a knowledge
portfolio contributed by their group. The important part of the negotiation
process is the evolution of the knowledge itself in parallel with the group
discourse about it.
When members of a group learning place have built a
knowledge artifact – such as a collection of websites, a PowerPoint slide
presentation, a concept map, or a portfolio of texts and pictures – they can
decide to copy it to their course learning space to share with members of other
groups in their course. This result of their collaborative work as a group may
be a final product that the teacher will evaluate or it may be an intermediate
product that they want to share and get feedback on from other people.
If a course has been defined to require negotiation, then
students in that course must go through a formal negotiation procedure to copy
a proposed knowledge artifact portfolio to the course learning space. The
purpose of this is to ensure that all or most people in the group agree to have
the proposed portfolio represent the knowledge that the group has built together.
(If negotiation is not required in the course, anyone can simply copy an item
from the group place into the course learning place.) To use the negotiation
procedure, a student must select items for their portfolio and execute the
“Negotiate” command. This will create a portfolio proposal in the group place.
The portfolio proposal interface includes a voting area that
allows group members to vote on submitting the portfolio when they are happy
with it. Within the portfolio are:
1.
the selected portfolio knowledge artifacts, and
2.
a negotiation knowledge building area for
discussing changes that should be made to the proposed portfolio.
Students use the negotiation knowledge building area to
negotiate changes that they think should be made within the portfolio. They
make changes in the portfolio that they think will make it acceptable to all or
most people in their group. When they like the way the portfolio looks, they
vote to approve it. Each person who submits an approval or disapproval vote
must enter a statement justifying their vote; this statement is automatically
incorporated into the negotiation knowledge building area where it is included
in the negotiation discourse and can be discussed. When all or most of the
people in the group have voted for the portfolio, it is automatically copied to
the course learning place. The negotiation knowledge building area is copied
with the portfolio folder so that members of the course can see what was said
about the portfolio. Students may want to make summary comments in this area to
say what they think is important in the portfolio. If they still have
criticisms of the portfolio or if they would like course members to discuss
certain ideas about it, they can put that in the area as well.
3.6 Concept Maps
In building knowledge, it is often useful for a group
to discuss how the concepts they are using are related to each other. One
method for doing that is for the group to construct a concept map which
diagrams these relationships. Synergeia provides a whiteboard called MapTool
for people to work together simultaneously to sketch a concept map. The
whiteboard is accompanied by a chat window to support coordination of this task
and interpretation of the symbols in the map.
Students and teachers can open the MapTool in course and
group learning places and in proposal portfolios. To work with other members of
a proposed portfolio, work group or course, they go to the learning place for
that portfolio, group or course. At the top of the screen is a list of all
members of the place. Those who are currently logged in to Synergeia have their
names shown in bold; if they are active in MapTool, their name is in red. This
is a form of social awareness which has been added to BSCW; it lets people know
who is involved in MapTool in this learning place.
Each proposed portfolio, group and course learning place has
its own version of MapTool. When a MapTool session is first started, the last
map is automatically opened so that work on it can be continued if desired. You
can also reset the MapTool to start with a blank whiteboard. When other members
join an active MapTool session, they see the current state of the whiteboard
and the chat window, so they can catch up on what has already been done in
there.
At any time, the current state of the work in MapTool can be
saved. Then a student can go into the learning space and make a copy of this
map. The saved map can be opened as a JPEG graphics file. The student can save
this file in a Word document, a PowerPoint slide show, a larger graphic file or
simply as a JPEG file in a sub-folder. This way, collaborative work in MapTool
can be documented as part of a report or knowledge portfolio.
3.7 Roles and Personalization
Synergeia defines roles for students, teachers,
guests, mentors, etc. This gives people in these roles the power to execute
certain menu functions, such as to read, edit or delete objects in a learning
place. When someone is invited into or registered for a particular learning
place (such as a course or group) they are invited or registered as a member
with a specific role (such as student). It is possible to change a user’s role,
to define new roles and to add new sub-folders where the user has a different
role. Whereas roles in BSCW were generic and rarely used, in Synergeia they
capture important distinctions between people based on power and knowledge in
school settings. These roles must be adapted to different kinds of learning
spaces.
For youthful users, it is important to make software more
fun to use. Personalization and customization facilities allow users to adapt
the system to their own preferences and to feel that the systems is “theirs.”
Synergeia users can personalize the user interface by including a picture of
themselves in the upper left-hand corner of the screen next to their username.
This picture will represent them at other places in the Synergeia interface as
well, such as when knowledge building notes are sorted by author.
There are many functions for customizing the Synergeia
interface. A student can:
·
specify which columns to display for details
related to sub-folders and documents.
·
change the size of the displayed text.
·
sort the listed sub-folders and documents in
different orders.
·
toggle on and off the display of menu shortcut
icons below the main menu.
·
toggle the descriptions below the names of
sub-folders and documents.
·
toggle the contents below the titles of
knowledge building notes.
Students can set a variety of details about how the
Synergeia system will work for them. They can:
·
change their password.
·
set the location for their picture.
·
enter their email address or home page.
·
set their system preferences.
Students are automatically considered “beginners” as users
of Synergeia. This means that the menus they see are not full of options that are
intended for more experienced users. They can change to “Advanced” or “Expert”
status when they feel ready to access more menu items. For younger students in
primary school, a new “primary” profile has been defined; it makes the
interface simpler by removing many menu items and shortcuts to make student
usage simpler.
4 Additional Functionality in
Synergeia
Section 3 described the pedagogical requirements for
Synergeia that distinguish it from related work. Synergeia is focused on the
needs of small collaborative groups of students, guided by teachers who
structure and facilitate their interactions. By contrast, most commercial
systems are oriented to administrative concerns such as delivering pre-defined
content, tracking attendance and test results, handling homework assignments
and conducting student evaluation. At best, systems like LearningSpace and
WebCT provide basic CSCW functionality for sharing documents and communicating.
Because systems like Lotus Notes or Blackboard cater to corporate and professional
training applications, they provide generic discussion forums, without
specialized thinking types or workgroup perspectives structured in response to
classroom cultures. Alternative approaches like Swiki (Guzdial & Turns,
2000)
systems also lack the tailoring to classroom needs due to the generality of
their functionality. At the other extreme are CSCL systems that are more
specialized for particular pedagogies, like the STEP system to support
problem-based learning (Steinkuehler et al., 2002). CISLE/KnowledgeForum (Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 1996)
is very similar to Synergeia – because its developers began the tradition in
which the ITCOLE Project is firmly planted. Synergeia also incorporated features
from FLE (Muukkonen, Hakkarainen,
& Leinonen, 2000)
and WebGuide (Stahl & Herrmann,
1999),
research prototypes that led to its conception and prototyped much of the
functionality incorporated in it. Synergeia is unique in combining the features
of perspectives, multiple thinking type sets and negotiation with threaded
discussion to support collaborative knowledge building. It also features a rare
integration of synchronous and asynchronous support.
In addition to the pedagogically motivated features,
Synergeia provides a wealth of functions from BSCW. Some of these have been
modified or extended to allow students, teachers, administrators and
researchers to take advantage of the core Synergeia functionality.
Student actions have been modified to simplify the
uploading of the user’s picture; uploading, archiving and versioning of
documents, images and websites is already well supported by the inherited BSCW
commands. Likewise, the ability to search the Web, review hits, rate URLs and
store shared bookmarks was already available. Students can set up new virtual
learning places and invite friends to them, as well as starting new knowledge
building areas and initiating MapTool sessions. Social awareness is well
supported with BSCW’s info, events and history systems. In addition, Synergeia
added displays of the names of course and group members, with indications of
who is currently active in Synergeia or MapTool.
Considerable support for teachers has been added.
Teachers can register lists of students in the system and assign them to
courses and workgroups easily. Students no longer have to have their own email
addresses in order to be registered. Teachers can define course and group
learning places, with a number of options for negotiation and access; this
gives teachers considerable control in structuring the use of Synergeia. They
can, of course, seed a learning place with documents and a knowledge building
area with starting questions for discussion. When a new knowledge building area
is created, the teacher can select which set of thinking type categories will
be used: “knowledge building,” “scientific theory,” “negotiation,” “debate,”
“discussion” or “brainstorming.” Teachers can revise the parameters for
negotiation, such as the percentage needed for a majority vote. They can also
over-ride the voting process to move proposals from group to course places – or
even in the opposite direction.
Although Synergeia is currently run on a central server in
In addition, functionality has been added to assist researchers
who want to analyze the usage of Synergeia. There are now log files that track
all actions in BSCL, the contents of all knowledge building areas and all
actions in MapTool. The log files can be analyzed with special tools or copied
into a spreadsheet. Knowledge building areas can be printed out in various
formats.
5 The Synergeia Architecture
The present section briefly indicates how the technological
infrastructure of BSCW was extended in response to the needs of the classroom
setting. Technically, Synergeia consists of the following three components:
·
BSCW.
This is the Basic Support for Cooperative Work system. It is a Web-based system
designed to support teams of adult professionals working together and sharing
documents. It provides mechanisms for uploading, downloading, versioning and
archiving of many kinds of documents. It also supports Web searches,
annotations and ranking. BSCW is written in Python as an object-oriented set of
cgi scripts. It includes a persistent store for objects. The server runs in
Windows or Unix and the client can be displayed in any Web browser.
Interestingly, the BSCW technology is literally a technology of extensibility;
the cgi scripts extend the functionality of a core webserver like Apache or IIS
by means of standard HTTP calls. This makes BSCW an attractive basis for
further, open-ended extensions.
·
BSCL.
This is the set of functions and interfaces that adapts the BSCW software to
collaborative knowledge building in K-12 classrooms. It includes the functions
to create personal, group and course learning places and to register users in
these with specific roles. It also includes the knowledge building interface,
sets of thinking types and support for negotiation. BSCL is implemented as a
Python Package that extends BSCW and that interfaces with MapTool. Packages are
a flexible technology for modular extensibility in object-oriented languages
like Python. BSCL is one of several packages that extend BSCW and it is
possible to create new packages that extend BSCL itself.
·
MapTool.
This is a collaborative whiteboard that students in a group or course can work
on simultaneously (synchronously) to construct concept maps and other simple
diagrams. It includes a chat window for coordinating and discussing the
drawing. The maps are stored in BSCL learning places. Synchronous support for
the MapTool Java applet client is provided by the Ants system, using the Elvin
server. The inclusion of MapTool in the Synergeia system is an experiment in
extending BSCW with synchronous components, where user information, drawings
and chat data must be stored in and retrieved from BSCL’s database by MapTool.
6 What Groupware Can Learn by
Going to School
Much has already been learned about the differences and
similarities of CSCW and CSCL groupware support through the process of
designing and implementing Synergeia. The school setting has special characteristics
that make certain functionality particularly important and that require
specific transformations of other functions. Many such adaptations and
extensions have been illustrated in the preceding sections of this paper.
One unanticipated technical finding was the importance of
mechanisms for setting specific access rights for various kinds of folders. A
new version of BSCW (4.0) that was released during the beginning of the ITCOLE
Project included mechanisms for defining roles. These mechanisms – which to
date have only been explored in the development of Synergeia – proved
particularly helpful. From an implementation standpoint, many extensions to
BSCW for Synergeia are largely accomplished through the definition of special
domain-specific roles, with specific access rights within various kinds of
learning places.
A straight-forward application of the role mechanism was to
define roles for teachers, mentors, students and guests. New users are
registered in Synergeia with one of these roles. The role determines what
actions the user can undertake within his or her personal learning place. For
instance, a user who is registered as a teacher may create courses and groups
or redefine negotiation parameters; a student user may upload documents; and a guest
may only view contents in Synergeia. A teacher has special powers to delete
offensive materials, and so on. A mentor also has many of these powers that
students do not have, but does not have the ability to create courses and
groups. Users have more control over objects that they created than over other
objects, such as the ability to edit or delete them. A user can invite other
users to folders and can reset or modify roles, but can never assign abilities
that exceed that user’s existing abilities.
In addition to the standard roles, special roles were
defined for “course mates” and “restricted students.” These are used for
special circumstances. For instance, course mates can see in their course
learning places what groups exist that they do not belong to. Depending on the
option set by the teacher when the group was defined, users who had student
roles are re-assigned “course mate” roles, where they are able to see the name
of the group listed, or else they are re-assigned the “restricted student” role,
where they may enter the group learning place and view or copy – but not add to
or modify – the content there.
Similarly, in a course where the negotiation option was
selected, all student users are re-assigned the role of restricted student.
This means that they can see and copy all content, but cannot add or modify
anything (except through the group negotiation procedure). This re-assigned
role is inherited down into all sub-folders and sub-sub-folders, etc. (as is
usual for roles). This automatically prevents students in a course from
changing the contents of negotiated portfolios from groups, although they can
view these contents and copy them elsewhere to work further on them. In a
course knowledge building area, the restricted student roles are changed back
to normal student roles, so that students can participate in knowledge building
discussions within the course perspective.
The school setting requires much more complex control over
access rights than is instituted in the normal BSCW system. The role mechanism
provides a convenient, flexible and elegant means for defining and instituting
the needed sets of access controls.
This paper reflects the design of version 2 of Synergeia,
which will be released to European elementary and secondary schools within the
ITCOLE Project in summer 2002. It has already benefited substantially from
informal feedback from the review of version 1 by pedagogic partners in the
Project and from the use of version 1 by teachers and students in the winter
and spring 2002. The use of version 1 is currently being subjected to extensive
evaluation in each of the participating countries. It is expected that this
will reveal additional groupware requirements of the school setting.
Version 2 of Synergeia will “go to school” in 50 courses in
There are many fundamental commonalities between CSCW and
CSCL groupware requirements and the two can build upon each other’s
accomplishments. However, the school setting, seen from a specific pedagogical
perspective, brings with it considerations that call for particular treatments.
In the case of the development of Synergeia within the ITCOLE Project, we have
seen that it was necessary to develop a suite of functionality that adapted
generic CSCW forms of support to define a unique educational environment. It is
likely that as the CSCL extensions mature through testing and usage they will
feed back into suggestions for CSCW itself.
Acknowledgements
The ITCOLE Project is a collaboration of many people
from universities and schools throughout
A number of anonymous CRIWG reviewers made suggestions that
significantly improved the presentation of this paper.
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