Awareness: An Enabling Feature for Mediated Interaction in Communities of Practice

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is currently using a Web-based experimentation environment to support laboratory activities in engineering education. The key service for the acceptance of the learning modalities and the appropriation of the environment by the students is a shared electronic notebook called the eJournal. This service is not only used by students to perform the required laboratory work; it is also used to sustain collaboration between students. Additionally it provides support for exchanges with other services integrated in the learning environment. By tracking the creation, the exchanges and the tagging of the digital assets stored in the eJournal database, awareness can be provided. This position paper presents how the eJournal and the associated awareness features are currently enhanced to effectively support interaction in laboratory-oriented communities of practice for members using either desktop or mobile client devices.