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Personalized Collaboration 255
in artifact-centered discourses which may be so small that they would have never happened
in a detached thread discussion forum. The system follows the openness and transparency
as design principles, openness in using all available material on the Internet, and
transparency in that all students should see, benefit, and participate in activities happening
in the system. OurWeb works as a proxy to the Internet. Every visited page can be
added to the shared document pool for others to search. Also, students prepare projects for
collaborative document writing using an integrated Wiki in which others can participate.
Following our dimensions of collaboration processes, computer-supported collaborative
learning systems typically use computer-mediated synchronous explicit collaboration
of dyads and small groups that can be both structured (e.g. by the use of symbolic actions
in workspace work) and unstructured (e.g. free flowing dialogue). Additionally, some
degree of asynchronicity is involved as many synchronous tools are also often "abused" for
asynchronous work, e.g. instant messaging.
9.1.2 System Architecture
Collaborative-learning systems support and manage learners in various ways; they provide
performance indicators, appropriate feedback, etc. In collaboration management cycle
framework (Jermann, 2001), the process of managing collaboration compares the current
state of interaction to the desired state at every point during the collaboration process
(Figure 9-3).
Figure 9-3. The Collaboration Management Cycle (Soller, 2005).
In phase 1, users' actions are observed and recorded for later processing in phase 2 where
the set of one or more high-level indicators representing the current state is computed.
Indicators represent a quantitative analysis of the observed interactions such as level
of participation, social presence, and agreement between peers.
Next, in phase 3, the current state is compared to the desired state of interaction described
as ideal values of different indicators. For example, we might want students to
maintain high level of participation with enough symmetry between learners. Finally, in
phase 4, remedial actions are proposed to minimize differences between the current and
desired state of interaction.