Building Groupware on THYME

Abstract

Abstract. The study of collaboration within a community of users, as it is mediated by a computer application, requires the construction of groupware applications to mediate the collaboration. It also requires the capability to analyze the collaboration as it is mediated by the computer application. As the understanding of collaboration within a group unfolds, ideally, the application can be quickly adopted to fit the changing requirements of the group. Whereas existing toolkits for building groupware applications provide support for building production-level groupware, they do not provide the mechanism for analysis and rapid development of new applications, which is necessary for the study of collaboration. This paper presents an engineering methodology and a set of key requirements for building groupware applications that enable the analysis of collaboration as mediated by these applications. We describe the THYME framework and show how it can help groupware developers to build applications rapidly and successfully. We also detail how a one semester Human Computer Interaction class used the THYME framework to construct synchronous groupware applications in a short amount of time and with great success.

A three-level analysis of collaborative learning in dual-interaction spaces

“…Most existing DIS environments are devoted to a single collaborative learning task and a single way to perform it which drastically diminishes their reusability. DIS environments may be used for many different tasks such as collaboratively completing design activities (e.g., Baker and Lund 1996;Zumbach et al 2002;Dimitracopoulou and Komis 2005), working together with simulations (e.g., Landsman and Alterman 2003;Jermann 2004;van Joolingen et al 2005), collaboratively exploring a space of debate (e.g., Amelsvoort et al 2008) or solving math problems (e.g., Cakir et al 2007). For each task, a wide variety of pedagogical scenarios may be followed.…”

“…The kernel also provides a set of tools (chat, shared text editor, shared whiteboard, generic shared diagram editor) and several optional mechanisms for floor control (Lonchamp 2007a), explicit referencing (Lonchamp 2007b), monitoring (Lonchamp 2008), and collaborative session history browsing, that can be selected and parameterized. Omega+ can be compared with other generic synchronous CSCL systems, either model based by the means of artifact models (e.g., Pinkwart 2003;Fidas et al 2002), process models (e.g., Farnham et al 2000), protocol models (e.g., Gogoulou et al 2005), or component based (e.g., Landsman and Alterman 2003). CoFFEE (www.coffee-soft.org) is an example of an open source deeply customizable synchronous CSCL environment which has been widely tested in schools, colleges, and universities (De Chiara et al 2007).…”