ED-MEDIA 1999 Proceedings Book - Association for the ...

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Experiences with the BSCW Shared Workspace System as the Backbone of a Virtual Learning Environment for Students. Wolfgang Appelt and Peter Mambrey GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology Schloß Birlinghoven, D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany appelt@gmd.de mambrey@gmd.de Abstract: The BSCW system is a Web based groupware tool for asynchronous and synchronous cooperation. We describe the system and the experiences we made with it serving as the backbone of a virtual learning environment for students. The field study took place in summer 1998. It demonstrated the usefulness of the system for students and teachers as well as the need for further research and socio-technical redesign. 1. Introduction The World Wide Web (WWW) is an addressing system, network protocol, document mark-up language and clientserver architecture. In some sense it is also a collaboration technology, allowing people to share information in a manner which is not restricted to a particular system environment. The WWW has a number of advantages as the technological foundation for tools to support collaborative information sharing and teleteaching applications: • WWW browsers are available for all important platforms and provide access to information in a platform independent manner; • Browsers offer a simple and consistent user interface across different platforms; • Browsers are already part of the computing environment of students. GMD has developed the BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) Shared Workspace system within the last four years with the goal to transform the Web from a primarily passive information repository to an active cooperation medium. The BSCW system is an application which extends the browsing and information download features of the Web with more sophisticated features for document upload, version management, member and group administration and more, to provide a set of features for more collaborative information sharing accessible using standard Web browsers. Since Web technology supports primarily asynchronous cooperation – people communicate and cooperate at different points in time – it can be used most rapidly for the construction of so-called virtual workspaces: information repositories for groups where they deposit any kind of information for their co-operation tasks and which they visit on a regular basis to retrieve the necessary information they need for fulfilling their tasks. In the meantime, the BSCW system has become quite popular particularly in the academic area and is used at a number of universities for a variety of applications. We have used the system to establish a virtual learning environment [1; 2] for M.A. students of the Social Science Department of the Gerhard-Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany [3]. The system should technically assist the collaborative learning of the class and furthermore guarantee for all (students and teacher): • The availability of all working materials and results; • The transparency of the participants' actions to offer an orientation frame and social context; • The awareness about the history of documents; • The immediacy to communicate one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many; • The ubiquitous access independent from a prescribed place. The students agreed to be part of the field trial and its evaluation. By this we wanted to gain knowledge about the collaborative learning of students via synchronous and asynchronous media (see chapter 3).
2. Functionality of the BSCW System The BSCW Shared Workspace system is an extension of a standard Web server through the server CGI Application Programming Interface. A BSCW server (Web server with the BSCW extension) manages a number of shared workspaces, i.e. repositories for shared information, accessible to members of a group using a simple user name and password scheme. In general, a BSCW server will manage workspaces for different groups, and users may be members of several workspaces (e.g. one workspace corresponding to each project a user is involved with or, in the case of teleteaching, each course that a student has selected). A shared workspace can contain different kinds of information such as documents, pictures, URL links to other Web pages, threaded discussions, member contact information and more. The contents of each workspace are represented as information objects arranged in a folder hierarchy. In addition to the normal download of information from a Web site, users can also upload information from their local file system into a BSCW workspace. For example, a teacher may upload exercises into a workspace. Students download them onto their computers and later upload the "homework" they were expected to perform back into a workspace for review by the teacher. The following are the main features of the system (for more details see [4]): • Authentication: People have to identify themselves by name and password before they have access to BSCW workspaces. • Version management: Documents within a workspace can be put under version control which is particularly useful for joint document production. • Discussion forums: Users may start a discussion on any topic they like and the system presents the threads in a user friendly manner. • Access rights: The system contains a sophisticated access rights model which allows, for example, that some users may have complete control over an object in a workspace whereas others have only read access or no access at all. • Search facilities: Users can specify queries to find objects within BSCW workspaces based on names, content or specific properties such as document author or document modification date. Furthermore, queries may be submitted to Web search engines and the result of the query can be imported into workspaces. • Document format conversion: These facilities allow users to transform a document into their format of choice, e.g., a proprietary document format into HTML, before downloading it. • Interface to synchronous communication: Through this interface users can specify synchronous sessions and launch respective tools, e.g., audio/video conferencing software or shared whiteboard applications. • Customization: Through user preferences the users can modify the system interface to some extent, e.g., whether or not they want to use an Javascript or ActiveX enhanced interface. • Multi-language support: The interface of the system can be tailored to a particular language by straight-forward extensions. Several languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Catalan) have been created by users of the system and are publicly available. A cooperative system should provide awareness information to allow users to coordinate their work. The event service (activity reports) of the BSCW system is an attempt to provide users with information on the activities of other users, with respect to the objects within a shared workspace. Events are triggered whenever a user performs an action in a workspace, such as uploading a new document, downloading ('reading') an existing document, renaming a document and so on. The system records the events, and presents the recent events to each user. 'Recent' in this context means events which have occurred for an object since the user last 'caught up' action, an operation by which users can tell the system they are aware of the events that have occurred so far and no longer wish to see them in the workspace. Events can be caught up at different levels, from individual objects to complete workspace folder hierarchies. Each event entry describes what was done, when and by whom. Although this approach for providing group awareness is very simple, feedback from users of the BSCW system indicates that information such as 'A uploaded a new version of document X', or 'B has read document Y' is often very useful for group members in coordinating
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Designing and Implementing Web-Base
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