CSCL applications are complex distributed systems that pose special requirements for achieving success in educational settings. Flexible and efficient design of collaborative activities by educators is a key precondition of providing CSCL-tailorable systems, capable of adapting to the needs of each particular learning environment.Furthermore, some parts of those CSCL systems should be reused as often as possible in order to reduce development costs. In addition, it may be necessary to employ special hardware devices, computational resources that reside in other organizations, or even exceed the possibilities of one specific organization. Therefore, the proposal of this article is twofold: collecting collaborative learning designs (scripting) provided by educators, based on well-known best practices (collaborative learning flow patterns) in a standard way (IMS-LD) in order to guide the tailoring of CSCL systems by selecting and integrating reusable CSCL software units; and implementing those units in the form of grid services offered by third-party providers. More specifically, this article outlines a grid-based CSCL system having these features and illustrates its potential scope and applicability by means of a sample collaborative learning scenario.
Research in the Computer Supported CollaborativeLeaming (CSCL) field is currently tackling three important prohlems which are closely related: dijjjcult integration of CSCL tools. scarce sofmare reuse and technificotion. This paper presents a Grid Collahorative Learning Environment (GRIDCOLE) that combines IMS Leaming Design (IMS-LD) and Open Grid Senices Architecture (OGSA) technologies in order to address these issues. More specifcal!v. GRIDCOLE allows users with no technical skills easy integration and use of applications that e$'ectively support collahorative leaming processes. IMS-LD is employed to formally describe the desi@ of these collaborative learning processes while applications are built using tools provided by third-pary suppliers as OGSA-compliant grid service.^ With this aim, GRIDCOLE architecture and ifs main functionalities are introduced. A simple protofype is also presented in order to show the feasihilig of the most important concepb introduced in this paper. Furthermore, a real collaborative learning scenario in which we plan to validate GRIDCOLE is introduced.
The choice of the most suitable middleware technology for a specific problem or domain is sometimes erroneously based on current trends instead of on a thorough comparison of the features offered by the different options. This could be the case of grid services technology, which is claimed to be a technological advance, but whose characteristics are not clearly contrasted with other middleware technologies. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether grid services technology truly present some required properties for CSCL (Computers Supported Collaborative Learning) application development in comparison with other service-oriented middleware technologies, as well as with other types of middleware paradigms (object-oriented or component-oriented). To this end, we present relevant requirements of CSCL applications and theoretical discussion about how well they are satisfied by the aforementioned paradigms and technologies. Finally, we introduce a case study in order to illustrate our conclusions.
Abstract. This paper presents our research efforts towards enabling the use of grid infrastructures for supporting Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) applications developed according to the principles of ComponentBased Software Engineering (CBSE). An illustrative example of a gridsupported component-based collaborative learning application is presented and discussed. This discussion leads to the study of application scheduling and component hosting problems for CSCL applications within a grid context based on the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
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