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Personalized Collaboration 257
Figure 9-4. Sentence openers in text-based communication (Soller, 2000).
After selecting the opener, the student fills in the rest of the sentence. Students observe
the group conversation as it progresses in the large window above the text box displaying
the students’ names and utterances. The sentence opener interface structures the group’s
conversation, making the students actively aware of the dialog focus and discourse intent.
Sentence openers provide a natural way for users to identify the intention of their contributions
without fully understanding the significance of the underlying communicative
acts. Peer interaction is evaluated into performance indicators on the basis of the types
of conversation acts used to communicate. As a kind of learning, a student who uses
a structured sentence opener interface for a period of time internalizes the structure of the
activity, and will continue to use the phrases from the interface even after it is removed.
9.2 Group Formation
Group formation is a broad concept involving allocating participants into groups, evolution
of the group throughout the course of collaborative activities, and a possible dissolution
after the group project ends. It is believed that to form an effective team time is
needed, with the group of people pursuing several developmental stages of team formation
(Tuckman, 1965).
Nevertheless, researchers believe that an opportunistic model in which groups form,
break and recombine during the process as needs and goals of the participants change may
uncover opportunities for collaborations that might otherwise go unnoticed (Moreno,
2003) and thus may lead to a higher level of collective responsibility and flexible collaboration.
9.2.1 Group Creation
Several approaches to allocating participants into groups currently exist depending on the
amount of work that needs to be done. The easiest job in creating groups is when they are
already in place and thus no further work needs to be done. This is the case of web communities
which are in a sense self-emerging.