Collaboration tool

Abstract: Increasing globalization has created tremendous opportunities and challenges for organizations and societies. Consequently, a broad range of information technologies to better support the collaboration of diverse, and increasingly distributed, sets of participants is ever more utilized. Arguably, the success of such technology-mediated collaboration is dependent upon the quality of each individual's contributions; however, although individuals' motivations to do their best could be significantly influenced by the design of a system's human--computer interface, this area has received little attention within the context of group collaboration environments. We fill this gap by integrating research from human--computer interaction, motivation, and technology-supported group work to theoretically derive mechanisms for increasing each individual's motivation within a collective setting. Specifically, we manipulate the interface of a computer-mediated idea generation system (a widely used collaboration tool) to enhance the system's motivational affordance, i.e., the system's properties that fulfill users' motivational needs. Results from two studies demonstrate that by embedding the theoretically derived mechanisms “providing feedback” and “designing for optimal challenge” into the collaboration environment, significant performance gains were realized. The results suggest that even slight manipulations of the human--computer interface can contribute significantly to the successful design of a wide variety of group collaboration environments.

Abstract: Group work is widespread in education. The growing use of online tools supporting group work generates huge amounts of data. We aim to exploit this data to support mirroring: presenting useful high-level views of information about the group, together with desired patterns characterizing the behavior of strong groups. The goal is to enable the groups and their facilitators to see relevant aspects of the group's operation and provide feedback if these are more likely to be associated with positive or negative outcomes and indicate where the problems are. We explore how useful mirror information can be extracted via a theory-driven approach and a range of clustering and sequential pattern mining. The context is a senior software development project where students use the collaboration tool TRAC. We extract patterns distinguishing the better from the weaker groups and get insights in the success factors. The results point to the importance of leadership and group interaction, and give promising indications if they are occurring. Patterns indicating good individual practices were also identified. We found that some key measures can be mined from early data. The results are promising for advising groups at the start and early identification of effective and poor practices, in time for remediation.

Abstract: Wikis are one of many Web 2.0 components that can be used to enhance the learning process. A wiki is a web communication and collaboration tool that can be used to engage students in learning with others within a collaborative environment. This paper explains wiki usage, investigates its contribution to various learning paradigms, examines the current literature on wiki use in education, and suggests additional uses in teaching software engineering.

Abstract: Systems, methods and computer program products for providing information associated with an attachment (e.g., attachment received through an instant message system, online collaboration tool, electronic message and the like). A sidebar may allow a user to view comprehensive profile and content information associated with the attachment using an attachment information viewer. The sidebar also may allow the user to switch between a message attachment information view (e.g., to facilitate browsing of the document or attachment) and a person profile information view (e.g., to facilitate browsing of personal or public data).