Cooperatively Controlled Objects In Support Of Collaboration

COOPERATIVELY CONTROLLED OBJECTS IN SUPPORT OF COLLABORATION by Lauren J. Bricker Chairperson of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Steven L. Tanimoto Department of Computer Science and Engineering Developing applications to support collaboration by two or more users involves special challenges. An application designer should anticipate the interaction between the user and the computer, as well as the interactions between the users. Secondly, there is a lack of system support for development of software that accepts simultaneous input from multiple users. The Colt system is designed to address both of these issues. The design of the Colt system is motivated by a model of computer-supported collaboration that measures communication and cooperation between the users during an activity. We present a definition and several examples of “Cooperatively Controlled Objects” that have been designed to support cooperative interactions. A user study is presented that illustrates the use of the model and Colt’s analysis tools. The Colt system itself is comprised of three parts, a design methodology, a software toolkit, and visualization and analysis tools. The design methodology aids developers in the creative process of planning a collaborative activity. The toolkit supports the implementation of collaborative programs by providing a shell application, a hierarchy of cooperative objects, and support for input from multiple users. Each cooperative object contains a mechanism to record a history of how users cooperatively controlled the objects. The visualization and analysis tools present different views of the object histories. These tools can be employed after program testing to see if the implementation meets the original design criteria. Colt is unique in its support for the development of co-present simultaneous computer based activities. Finally, we describe five programs developed with the Colt system that incorporate this cooperative control of objects.