Mariano Pimentel

R-U-Typing-2-Me? Evolving a Chat Tool to Increase Understanding in Learning Activities.

Very often, when using a chat tool where more than one participant is talking simultaneously, it is difficult to follow the conversation, read all the different messages and work out who is talking to whom about what. This problem has been dubbed “Chat Confusion.” This article investigates this problem in debate sessions in an online university course. Chat Confusion has been singled out as the main limitation to using chat in educational activities. Confusion needs to be reduced for understanding to increase, making it easier to track what is being discussed during a learning activity. This study investigated the phenomena responsible for causing this confusion. A version of the Mediated Chat tool was developed for each problem identified and was subsequently tested in online courses. This article describes the Mediated Chat development process, the problems identified, and the results obtained from the case studies.

No need to read messages right now: helping mediators to steer educational forums using statistical and visual information

In an education environment, a forum provides a valuable tool that can be used to foster reflection and a deeper analysis of subjects being discussed. However, as an asynchronous communication tool, participation can occur at any time, demanding a constant attention of the teacher to satisfactorily mediate the group and the discussion. In addition, a reasonable number of messages can be posted in a short period of time, making it hard to follow up and coordinate the discussion. This paper proposes an approach based on statistical and visual analysis of messages characteristics to alert the teacher about potential problems.

Analyzing Discourse Structure to Coordinate Educational Forums

In this paper, aspects related to discourse structure like message chaining, message date and categorization are used by teachers to coordinate educational forums in the AulaNet environment. These aspects can be computationally analyzed without having to inspect the content of each message. This analysis could be applied to forums in other educational environments.

Inter- and intra-relationships between communication coordination and cooperation in the scope of the 3C Collaboration Model

Based on the 3C collaboration model, this article descries the mapping of a variety of collaboration forms onto inter-relationships between communication, coordination and cooperation. In order to investigate how to provide computational support for these three functional collaboration dimensions the analysis shifts from the inter-relationships between these three dimensions to their intra-relationships. Finally, Gestalt psychology principles are used to discuss the suitability of the approach to human perception.

Development of groupware based on the 3c collaboration model and component technology

Groupware is evolutionary and difficult to develop and maintain. Thus, its code becomes unstructured and difficult to evolve. In this paper, a groupware development approach based on components organized according to the 3C collaboration model is proposed. In this model, collaboration is analyzed based on communication, coordination and cooperation. Collaboration requirements, analyzed based on the 3C model, are mapped onto software components. These components aid developers to assembly groupware. The RUP-3C-Groupware, which is a groupware development process, is used for that purpose. This process is a RUP extension focused on groupware domain, and is the result of 8 years of experience with the development of collaborative services for the AulaNet Project. The proposed approach is applied as a case study to the development of the new version of the AulaNet environment. In order to instantiate the environments communication services, 3C based component kits were developed for the case study. The components allow composition, re-composition and customization of services to reflect changes in the collaboration dynamics.

Mediated chat development process: avoiding chat confusion on educational debates

The objective of this research is to reduce confusion in chat conversation, which is the main problem regarding the use of chat tools for holding online course debates. This problem is investigated using a Groupware Engineering approach. A number of successive versions of the Mediated Chat tool have been developed as part of this research. This research aims at producing an enhanced chat tool designed for educational debates through which a chat conversation could be followed more easily.

KIPO: the knowledge-intensive process ontology

A business process is a sequence of activities that aims at creating products or services, granting value to the customer, and is generally represented by a business process model. Business process models play an important role in bridging the gap between the business domain and the information technology, increasing the weight of business modeling as first step of software development. However, the traditional way of representing a process is not suitable for the so-called Knowledge-Intensive Processes (KIP). This type of process comprises sequences of activities based on intensive acquisition, sharing, storage and (re)use of knowledge, so that the amount of value added to the organization depends on the actor knowledge. Current research in the literature points to the lack of approaches to make this kind of process explicit and strategies for handling information that is necessary for their understanding and support. The goal of this paper is to present KIPO—a knowledge-intensive process ontology, which encompasses a clear and semantically rich definition of KIPs, and to discuss the results of a case study to evaluate KIPO with regard to its applicability and capability of making all relevant knowledge embedded in a KIP explicit.

Towards an engineering approach for groupware development: learning from the AulaNet LMS development

This paper presents the AulaNet learning management system, its architecture and the collaboration model that guided its development and that was refined during this process. A case study of an online course indicates the necessity to have an architectural support for collaboration aspects and a collaboration-based engineering approach to groupware development. This approach, groupware engineering, is based on software engineering and on concepts originated in the field of CSCW.

Studying Response-Structure Confusion in VMT

Online text chat has great potential for allowing small groups of people in school or at work to build knowledge and understanding together. However, chat participants often post in parallel, making it difficult to follow the conversational flow and to identify who is talking to whom about what. The loosely ordered succession of turns contributes to “response-structure confusion.” Parallel posting results in overlap of different topics; as a wave of discussion swells, another washes over it, causing ambiguity of linguistic references. Some chat environments implement tools to reduce the confusion. This paper presents an investigation into the effect of a graphical referencing tool for combating response-structure confusion. The paper documents the problem in a classroom setting and demonstrates the tool’s effectiveness in a research lab.

Dos processos de colaboração para as ferramentas: a abordagem de desenvolvimento do projeto CommunicaTEC

This paper presents CommunicaTECs development approach. A collaboration process is modeled to be performed through a computer tool, and an exploratory case study is carried out aiming at identifying the problems in the process and the necessary changes to be implemented in the tool. To exemplify this approach, two exploratory studies are described in which new flows have been proposed for the collaboration processes. Tool mechanisms have been developed to meet the demands of the new processes. This paper discusses the usefulness and limitations of the BPMN for the modeling of collaborative processes and for tool development.