Agora: supporting multi-participant telecollaboration

One way in which collaboration can take place is that several people gather around a table to tackle a shared problem. We have designed the Agora Telecollaboration System to allow several spatially separated collaborators to work as though they were deliberating on and cooperating in the solution of a problem gathered around one table (Kuzuoka et al. 1999). We first clarified which conditions must be met to allow collaboration on a problem on the same desktop, by observing how collaboration actually works. We then designed a telecollaboration system to fulfill each of these conditions. Finally a series of experiments to find out if the system did indeed successfully support remote collaboration was conducted.