David Thaw

Communities of practice environment

Methods and apparatus, including systems and computer program products, for implementing environments that provide user groups with the ability to post, discuss, and manage group content, and the ability to organize and make group decisions, based on the content of documents. One method includes managing documents according to a respective document state for each document in the environment. The possible document states include a submitted state, a voting state, an approved state, and a not approved state. A group member submitting a document to the group places the document in the submitted state. When the group coordinator enables voting on the document, it moves to the voting state. If the members approve the document, it moves from the voting to the approved state; and otherwise, the document moves from the voting to the not approved state.

CoPE: Democratic CSCW in Support of e-Learning

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and e-learning have overlapping, but not identical design and use profiles. We suggest that democratically organized CSCW systems provide an ideal platform for organizing and encouraging group interactions in e-learning situations where physical meetings are not feasible. Few attempts at democratic CSCW systems have been made, we argue, largely because the necessary development resources are concentrated in large hierarchical organizations which have little apparent use for such systems. The CoPE CSCW system does seem to provide a promising platform for extension to e-learning environment, and there is an ongoing effort to do this.

Supporting Communities of Learning Practice by the Effective Embedding of Information and Knowledge into Group Activity

Communities of learning practice is an innovative paradigm focused on providing appropriate technological support to both formal and especially informal learning groups who are chiefly formed by non-technical people and who lack of the necessary resources to acquire such systems. Typically, students who are often separated by geography and/or time have the need to meet each other after classes in small study groups to carry out specific learning activities assigned during the formal learning process. However, the lack of suitable and available groupware applications makes it difficult for these groups of learners to collaborate and achieve their specific learning goals. In addition, the lack of democratic decision-making mechanisms is a main handicap to substitute the central authority of knowledge presented in formal learning. From the literature, the provision of specific support to informal collaborative learning has, to the best of our knowledge, been little investigated. To fill this gap, we present an ongoing work that will result in a democratic Web-based groupware learning system especially designed to provide support for informal collaborative learning over the Internet. Moreover, an important purpose of this software is to provide advanced mechanisms of information management from the group activity for its further use in extracting and providing effective knowledge on interaction behavior. Indeed, this issue represents a fundamental requirement for current collaborative learning environments in order to adequately regulate the learning process as well as to enhance learning grouppsilas participation by means of providing appropriate awareness and feedback. In this paper, we describe the main guidelines that conducted the requirements and design of this application as well as introduce the underlying groupware platform, called CoPE, that provides the essential functional support for democratic groupware.

Communities of Practice Environment (CoPE): Democratic CSCW for Group Production and E-Learning

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Democratic Group Production and e-Learning have overlapping but not identical design and use profiles. We suggest that democratically organized CSCW systems provide an ideal platform for organizing and encouraging group interactions in e-Learning and other democratic group production situations where physical meetings are not feasible. Few attempts at democratic CSCW systems have been made, we argue, largely because the necessary development resources are concentrated in large hierarchical organizations which have little apparent use for such systems. The CoPE CSCW system does seem to provide a promising platform for extension to e-Learning and other characteristically similar environments, and there is an ongoing effort to do this.

CoLPE: Support for Communities of Learning Practice by the Effective Embedding of Information and Knowledge about Group Activity

Communities of Learning Practice is an innovative paradigm focused on providing appropriate technological support to both formal and especially informal learning groups who are chiefly formed by non-technical people and who lack of the necessary resources to acquire such systems. Typically, students who are often separated by geography and/or time have the need to meet each other after classes in small study groups to carry out specific learning activities assigned during the formal learning process. However, the lack of suitable and available groupware applications makes it difficult for these groups of learners to collaborate and achieve their specific learning goals. In addition, they lack of advanced mechanisms of information management from the group activity for its further use in extracting and providing effective knowledge on interaction behavior. Indeed, this issue represents a fundamental requirement for current collaborative learning environments in order to adequately regulate the learning process as well as to enhance learning group’s participation by means of providing appropriate awareness and feedback. In this chapter, we first describe the main guidelines that conducted the requirements and design of this. Then, we employ this tool in a real on-line learning environment to support a collaborative activity based on an asynchronous discussion. Finally, the experience and the evaluation results of using this application are reported, showing promising opportunities to support the formal and also informal discussion processes occurring in current communities of learning practice.