CoLab: A New Paradigm and Tool for Collaboratively Browsing the Web

Abstract

Abstract-Widespread adoption of Web technologies, particularly in professional and educational areas, has motivated new research efforts with the objective of designing new interaction mechanisms based on Web technologies. Within this framework, collaborative Web browsing (cobrowsing) aims at extending currently available Web browsing capabilities in order to allow several users to "browse together" on the Web. Such a browsing paradigm can have many useful applications, for instance, in e-learning, for collaboratively searching and retrieving documents, and for online assistance (helpdesk). A cobrowsing system should provide all the facilities required for allowing users to establish and release, in a very simple and flexible way, browsing synchronization relations as well as interactions with continuous media presentations embedded within Web pages. This paper presents the design, modeling, and implementation of the cobrowsing system called CoLab. CoLab provides all the functionalities required for allowing users to collaboratively browse the Web, and a first experimental version of the tool has been implemented and is fully operational.

An Extensible Co-browsing Environment with Conference Support

“…In order to achieve the integration of existing collaborative systems without dealing with their lowlevel features, in [3] we proposed LEICA, a "Looselycoupled Environment for Integrating Collaborative 1 Researcher financially supported by a scholarship from CNPq, Brazil (#506789/04-7). 2 Cooperation between LAAS-CNRS and UFSC funded by grant from CAPES-COFECUB.…”

“…CoLab [1] is a co-browsing system based on a simple and a powerful synchronization model allowing the dynamic organization of users in a co-browsing session into workgroups. This is done by allowing users to create and to release synchronization relations among them.…”

“…In [1], we proposed CoLab, a co-browsing tool based on a synchronization model that allows establishing/releasing browsing synchronization relations between the members of a session. In order to create a minimal operation environment it is necessary to complement CoLab with a messaging or audio/video-conference tool allowing users to discuss about the co-browsed content.…”

“…Moreover, we integrated our Conference Controller with CoLab aiming at the creation of an effective co-browsing environment. This integration was accomplished using the LEICA integration environment [1].…”

A Flip Blended Learning Approach for ePUB3 eBook-based Course Design and Implementation

“…Many approaches that deal with these needs have been presented; most of which focus mainly on specifying/directing the learning activities, including for instances (1) SCORM (SCORM 2004(SCORM , 2015SCORM, 2015) that uses sequencing control modes to represent the learning activities in an activity tree; (2) rule-based systems (Hoyos-Rivera, et al, 2006;Marinković and Tomaš, 2011) that use access rules to specify and direct a specific process of learning activities; (3) relationship-based systems (Romero, et al 2014) that use logic relationships to define a course structure with the relationships among its containing course components; and (4) workflow-based systems (Cao, et al, 2009) that employ the power of workflows to define a stream of activities that constitute a learning process.…”