Peer-to-peer Face-to-face Collaboration

In this paper, we present a proof of concept application of a technique that is designed explicitly for face to face collaboration software architectures. The objective is to minimize the impact on the installation and deployment of the application, that, while internally keeping a client-server architecture (in order to allow the centralize coordination and monitoring), presents to the user (both teacher and learners) as uniform work environment, integrating client and server components in one piece of software. In order to further limit the impact on the configuration, we define a start and play protocol, to start-up the application with no network configuration; the start and play protocol takes advantage from the particular conditions of the face to face context i.e. LAN setting. The application is built on the Eclipse core (Rich Client Platform), and inherits its plug-in based architecture and its advanced tailoring features. 1 Face2face collaboration systems Current research in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has produced many studies and several classifications of the situations where the collaboration takes place. The space-time matrix (see Fig.1) is a well-known classification [4] that defines the four basic space-time situations. A lot of works have studied the different-time AND/OR different-place situations to reduce distances (both in time and space), while there are fewer studies about the same-time AND same-space situations. Of course, existing synchronous systems for remote situations can also be used in the co-located situations, but the same-time AND same-space situations is substantially different from the remote ones and the technological support should take in account this difference. Indeed, the tools to support remote collaboration try to achieve a “virtual co-location” Fig. 1. Space Time Matrix E. Tomadaki and P. Scott (Eds.): Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge Sharing, EC-TEL 2006 Workshops Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, p. 80-88, 2006. enhancing remote communication by chat, e-mail, file sharing, audio and video conferencing, etc. In f2f situations, this kinds of communications channels are unnecessary because there is no distance to fill up. For these reasons, the systems to support co-located learning could and should focus on collaboration activities rather than on reducing distances, for example, they could provide reviewability and revisability [8], that are important characteristics in particular in the learning process [11]. Our team is involved as technical partner in the European project LEAD, in Sixth framework programme priority IST [5], whose goals are to develop, implement and evaluate conceptual models, practical scenarios and associated networked-computing technologies for effective face-to-face problem-solving discussions. In this project we are focussing on design features and development solutions to produce a face-to-face (f2f) collaborative learning tool, in collaboration with others technical partner and according to the conceptual model outlined by the pedagogical partners. In this paper, we approach the problem of designing an application for face-to-face collaboration that has minimum impact on the installation and management. We present an architecture and a small proof-of-concept prototype that was designed in order to test the effectiveness of our low-cost deployment strategy. 2 Software architectures Most of the existing systems for CSCL have a client-server architecture. This model, in fact, simplifies data collection process and persistence management; furthermore, the client/server entities support the students/teacher roles, allowing to centralize in the server component the functionalities for the teacher, while the clients components offer the functionalities common to all the students. The existing systems are Web-based, since the most are designed for remote situations (a survey is presented in [6]). These systems are not always suitable for a f2f didactic context, since they require to communicate with an external server (and therefore they require an Internet connection), and many schools employ restrictive firewalls and access policies. Furthermore, the teachers could not exercise fully control on the external server and is somewhat limited by its availability and configurability. On the other hand, some of the existing systems allow to install a local server, but the installation process is often too much complex for the end users, that may not have the experiences and capabilities to install and configure a Web server. We aim to design a CSCL system explicitly applied to the f2f context, addressing the particular conditions of such context. In fact, in a co-located situation the system can use only the local area network, so it could and should do without external servers and Internet connection, in this way it can avoid many problems due to restrictive security policies, that are, often, commonplace in educational settings. An existing cooperative system providing a LAN-based approach is MeetingWorks [7]: chauffeur and participant components are local applications and every participant links up with the chauffeur automatically, but the system1 needs a shared directory to 1 We have tested only the free version of the program, that has only LAN participants. Peer-to-peer Face-to-face Collaboration 81