Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s.

No description available.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T16:01:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo7171_1.pdf: 2257765 bytes, checksum: a7bdaaafadc2ed751bde88c9d07af1c4 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Aprendizado Colaborativo Apoiado por Computador tem se firmado como um paradigma de ensino. Neste articulam-se diferentes conceitos de aprendizagem e interação em grupo. Os ambientes colaborativos síncronos visam facilitar a construção de conhecimento e o desenvolvimento de competências entre participantes de um grupo. Componentes síncronos de aprendizagem (também chamados de sistemas de groupware) podem ser caracterizados por prover um conjunto de objetos virtuais compartilhados. Estes são manipuláveis por ferramentas e constituem-se num espaço compartilhado de interação entre usuários. O problema que estamos focando consiste levantar, a partir da interação entre usuários, requisitos que colaborem com a definição de uma arquitetura de componentes colaborativos síncronos que resolva problemas de comunicação, consciência de colaboração, manutenção do espaço compartilhado, controle de acesso ao espaço compartilhado, definição de papéis e percepção (awareness). Este trabalho utilizou técnicas de design para usabilidade com o intuito de resolver problemas relativos à interação mediada por componentes síncronos de aprendizagem, propondo um conjunto de requisitos para construção de novos sistemas que favoreçam a interação em grupo através de análises centradas nas necessidades dos usuários

This thesis concerns groupwork, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and social relationships. The use of the computer, especially when it involves the web, is claimed to be one of the most powerful tools for providing teachers and learners with an interactive and independent learning environment. This claim is justified by the immediate and wide accessed to resources. Although CSCL involves many technologies and functions, it is agreed that its universal feature is to encourage students to seek in-depth learning. The main purpose of this research is to empirically investigate the influences on learning outcomes in CSCL environments, specifically to understand how affordances for collaboration contribute to user experience as well as performance in groupwork; and to study social relationships and how they may affect learning performance. The main motivations behind this research are: 1) contradictions in the literature about the effectiveness of using the technology in groupwork, and 2) the shortcomings of existing collaborative environments, such as a poor sense of presence and limited non-verbal communication. Evaluations of collaborative technology have tended to follow either an ethnographic approach to investigate the context of use in depth, or more focused experimental analyses directed towards specific questions about collaboration. However, this research followed the mixed methods approach which has been successfully applied in HCI (Murphy et al., 1999; Ormerod et al., 2004), so this approach is suitable for investigating CSCL affordances and requirements. A series of seven field studies was conducted, using both quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (observations and interviews) methods. Synthesising the analysis of the seven studies involved experimentally comparing the affordances of some existing collaborative technologies (Blackboard and SecondLife). Overall, the results offer four main contributions. First, a conceptual model of the factors that impact performance in CSCL environments is developed, including three main dimensions: technology, group and learner features. Second, the key theoretical findings in this research show that social relationships and overall group activities do not correlate directly with performance, so our results appear to agree with previous findings that social relationships have no positive effect on learning performance. However, some social familiarity does appear to promote group interaction and performance. Comparing the use of technologies with face-to-face collaboration produced a complex picture. The 3D virtual world did not produce the expected benefit, probably because of usability problems encountered with the avatars. In contrast, the text-based virtual world was perceived as being more usable, even though for some groups it was considered to be boring and not a stimulating user experience. Although face-to-face collaboration was expected to be most effective, and indeed it was quickest and rated best on experience and positive emotions, it did not produce more accurate results. Third, was the mixed methods research approach and the discourse analysis method used to analyse the Blackboard threads in this research. Finally, the research provides guidelines for both educators and designers of CSCL environments. Although the exploratory nature of the study resulted in certain limitations, the study enriches existing knowledge in the area of CSCL and provides theoretical, methodological and practical insights that suggest promising opportunities for future research.

No description available.

Muitos dos atuais sistemas computacionais de apoio ao ensino podem ser considerados parte de uma evolução que tem enfatizado a exploração de sistemas hipermídia em geral, e da Web em particular. A pesquisa associada ao trabalho aqui reportado tem como objetivo explorar as tecnologias de Hipermídia e Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) para viabilizá-las em um ambiente que suporte o acesso de alunos a hiperdocumentos de conteúdo didático de forma cooperativa ¾ o ambiente StudyConf. Para promover a interação entre alunos que visitam um determinado hiperdocumento, o StudyConf controla suas navegações e gera, dinamicamente, sessões de discussão entre os mesmos. O StudConf mantém o registro das discussões realizadas na forma de hiperdocumentos estruturados, os quais podem ser utilizados, por exemplo, para a geração cooperativa de documentos, conforme proposto em várias ferramentas Computer Supported Cooperative Learning (CSCL). O trabalho aqui reportado colaborou, ainda, para o desenvolvimento de uma técnica que tem como objetivo orientar o projeto de aplicações hipermídia que manipulam informações na Web. / Many of the current computational systems dedicated to support teaching and learning can be considered part of an evolution that has emphasized hypermedia systems in general, and the World Wide Web in particular. The work here reported aims at exploiting the technologies of hypermedia and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in an environment that supports collaborative access from students to hyperdocuments ¾ supported in a tool called StudyConf. In order to promote interaction among students that navigate on the same hyperdocuments, StudyConf controls their navigation and generates dynamic discussion sessions with the students that visit the same material. StudyConf registers the discussions as structured hyperdocuments, which can be used to exploit proposals regarding the collaborative authoring of contents that are present in several Computer Supported Cooperative Learning (CSCL) tools. The work here reported has also contributed to the proposal of a technique aimed at guiding the development of general web-based hypermedia applications.

No description available.

No description available.

abstract: This thesis is an initial test of the hypothesis that superficial measures suffice for measuring collaboration among pairs of students solving complex math problems, where the degree of collaboration is categorized at a high level. Data were collected in the form of logs from students' tablets and the vocal interaction between pairs of students. Thousands of different features were defined, and then extracted computationally from the audio and log data. Human coders used richer data (several video streams) and a thorough understand of the tasks to code episodes as collaborative, cooperative or asymmetric contribution. Machine learning was used to induce a detector, based on random forests, that outputs one of these three codes for an episode given only a characterization of the episode in terms of superficial features. An overall accuracy of 92.00% (kappa = 0.82) was obtained when comparing the detector's codes to the humans' codes. However, due irregularities in running the study (e.g., the tablet software kept crashing), these results should be viewed as preliminary. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2014