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A Survey of Applications of CSCW Including Some in Educational Settings PRASUN DEWAN Department of Computer Sciences Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) is an idea that was demonstrated as early as in the 1960s by Engelbart’s pioneering work on the On-Line System (NLS) [Eng75a], which offered computer-supported conferencing. Since that time, a variety of CSCW applications have been developed at several research laboratories and universities. Education is an inherently cooperative activity involving at least one teacher and pupil.1 In this paper, we connect the two fields together by taking the reader on a tour of CSCW applications and investigating their use in education. It can be argued that these two themes are not distinct. In a broad sense, every CSCW application supports education since any group process involves teaching and learning. However, in this paper, we will use education to refer to a learning and teaching process supported by formal educational institutions such as schools and universities. Our discussion will be based more on hypothesis rather than real experience to allow us to investigate the breadth of CSCW applications, few of which have been used together for education or other purposes. See [Sci87a] for a specific CSCW application designed and used for education. See [Ell91a, Ols90a] for previous surveys on CSCW applications and [Bae93a] for a collection of papers and in-depth commentaries on CSCW applications. To make our discussion concrete, we will give several scenarios based on the example of a graduate operating systems course the author has taught. It is a lab-based course and gives students hands-on experience with designing, implementing, and experimenting with the Xinu operating system [Com84a]. Teaching assistants manage lab sections and help students with their programming assignments. The assignments are designed collaboratively by the professor and teaching assistants. Students can ask the instructors detailed questions during special office hours and short questions whenever the latter are free. Moreover, they can work in groups on some of these assignments. This collaborative task is currently carried out at a single location. In the remaining discussion, we will investigate how CSCW applications could be used to allow it to be carried out at geographically dispersed sites. We assume a new hypothetical course taught at two different universities. The course is managed by one professor, located at one of the universities, and two teaching assistants, one at each university. One of them supervises the Tuesday lab section and the other one supervises the Wednesday lab section. Each of these lab sections has students from both universities who use different physical labs located at their universities to perform their assignments. 333333333333333333333333333333333333 1

Unless, in the classroom of the future, the human teacher is completely replaced by a computer!

The motivation for such a course is straightforward: It allows the students and instructors to work together independent of distance. However, it raises several technical questions regarding the feasibility of such a course. We discuss below how CSCW applications could be used to support such a course. In particular, we discuss how they can be used to support the following processes:

d

classroom lecturing

d

designing and writing assignments

d

lab work

d

answering student questions

d

surveying and voting.

We show how these applications can be used to facilitate both intra- and inter- site cooperation. The specific CSCW applications we consider are video walls [Abe90a], media space [Har90a], the Liveboard [Elr92a], the Cognoter [Ste87a], the PREP coauthoring system [Neu90a], shared window systems [Lau90a], the FLECSE collaborative software development environment [Dew93a], the GROVE outline editor [Ell91a], the TeleConf audio conferencing system [Rie92a], shared awareness spaces [Dou92a, Man91a], the Information Lens [Mal87a], the Coordinator [Flo88a], computational mail [Bor92a], and a voting tool [Dew93a]. In our discussion, we assume that each of these applications is cost-effective and works well for the purpose for which it has been designed. This is currently a strong assumption since the area of CSCW applications is still in its infancy.

Class Room Lecturing The physically dispersed classrooms of our hypothetical course are linked by two-way audio and video connections. Each classroom has a ‘‘video wall,’’ [Abe90a] which shows the activities in the other classroom, thereby allowing the professor and students in the two class rooms to interact with each other in a media space [Har90a]. A camera at each site sends video to a large projection monitor which displays the image. The audio endpoints are speakers and microphones that cover each classroom. Experience at Xerox shows that is is possible to use current technology to establish usable video walls connecting two geographically dispersed sites. The two classrooms are also equipped with Liveboards [Elr92a] connected to each other. Liveboards are large pen-based public computer displays controlled by conventional workstations. They can be connected to each other via a network and used in a shared mode. They currently support several applications including the SlideShow and Whiteboard applications. The Slideshow application allows the lecturer to show slides stored in the computer. Standing a few feet from the Liveboard, the lecturer gestures with the cordless pen to select the next slide or a random one. The Whiteboard application allows the lecturer and students to use the cordless pen to write down or draw concepts. The two Liveboards are used in the shared mode, thereby allowing the results of the gestures to be seen at both sites.

Designing and Writing Assignments In the single-site course, the following process is usually followed to design and write assignments:

(1)

The lecturer and teaching assistants propose and evaluate various alternatives.

(2)

One of the teaching assistants writes up the assignment and gives it to the others.

(3)

The others make suggestions which are incorporated by the teaching assistant.

(4)

The instructors go through more iterations of steps (2) and (3) if necessary.

In the distributed course, the same process is followed using collaborative applications. The first phase is facilitated using Liveboards and the Cognoter application [Ste87a]. The Cognoter allows users to collaboratively brainstorm, organize, and evaluate ideas for the assignments. In the brainstorming phase, the participants propose various ideas for the assignment; in the organizing phase, they collect related ideas into possible assignments; and in the evaluation phase, they evaluate the different assignments. At the end of this activity, they select one of the possible assignments and assign a teaching assistant to write it up. In step 2, the teaching assistant uses the PREP coauthoring system [Neu90a] to write the assingment. PREP is a text editor supporting the abstraction of columns. The teaching assistant uses one of the columns for the assignment and another for justifying the various design decisions he/she made. In step 3, the others use different columns to comment on the assignment and the design decisions. At the end of this process, the history of the design is saved by these applications, which is used in designing subsequent projects.

Lab Work Like the classrooms, the labs are equipped with videowalls and networked Liveboards. Like the classroom Liveboards, the lab Videoboards are used by the teaching assistants to explain concepts. In addition, a shared window system [Lau90a] executing on the Liveboards is used to demonstrate various aspects of the collaboration-transparent Xinu software and solutions to the programming assignments. A shared window system allows arbitrary, collaborationtransparent, window-based programs to be shared among a set of users by replicating the windows created by these programs on the workstations of these users. As in the original course, the students use computer workstations to solve their programming assignments. Team members use FLECSE [Dew93a] to develop software together. FLECSE is an extension of a conventional software development environment that offers distributed, multiuser software development tools, thereby making it easy to support distributed project teams. For instance, students using FLECSE do not have to huddle together in front of a single workstation to debug assignments— they can instead use a FLECSE multiuser debugger from multiple, possibly distributed, workstations. The team members also use Liveboards, Cognoter, and PREP to to produce project reports. In addition, they use the GROVE outline editor [Ell91a] to collaboratively refine outlines for these reports.

Questions and Answers As in the original course, students and instructors use electronic mail and the telephone to ask and answer questions. In addition, they use TeleConf [Rie92a] to hold audio conferences with the instructors. TeleConf uses the audio capabilities of the participants’ workstations to provide computer-controlled conferencing. During office hours of the instructors, the

concurrency control method used is moderated floor control. In this mode, the requests of the students are placed in an internal queue visible to the instructor who chooses the next speaker. After a student is finished speaking, the floor always go back to the instructor, who answers the question and then chooses the next speaker. Often students wish to ask short questions outside office hours. In the original course, they typically went to the labs and instructor offices to see if the instructors were free. In the distributed course, they use a ‘‘shared awareness space’’ [Dou92a, Man91a] to ‘‘walk’’ to the distributed offices and labs. Images captured by cameras in the offices and labs of participants in this space are switched by server software executing on one of the workstations. Authorized participants can ask the server to bring up images of remote rooms on their wokstations. In our course, the students use this space to see if the instructors are present in their workplaces and free. Conversely, the space can be used by the instructors to monitor the activities of the students! Electronic mail is still the primary means for asynchronous communication between the students and instructors. In the original course, an answer to a question posed by a student was sent either specifically to that student or to all the students in the class. In this new, presumably bigger, course, Information Lens [Mal87a] is used to filter these messages. The tool supports semi-structured mail and supports automatic sorting and categorization of specific and general messages. In our course, it is used to sort messages into exam change notices, classroom change notices, Xinu bug reports, old exams, assignment solutions, requests for class absences, requests for postponement of exams, requests for placing papers/books in the library, and so on. The sorting allows the recipients to prioritize specific messages and find general messages of interest. It is often difficult for an instructor to keep track of the various conversations with the students and other instructors. In our course, the Coordinator [Flo88a] is used to solve this problem. The tool allows, for instance, the composers of requests for placing papers/books in the library to specify the date by which they would want the action completed, and automatically generates reminder messages for the addressee. The Coordinator is not a substitute for regular informal mail— it is used mainly for the more important messages.

Surveying and Voting A typical course often requires students to fill out survey forms and vote on issues. In our hypothetical course, computational mail [Bor92a] and VoteTool [Dew93a] are used to automate some of these tasks. Computational mail invokes an associated interactive program on its receipt, which can collect various kinds of information from the recipient. VoteTool allows users to both synchronously and asynchronously vote on various issues. The instructors use computational mail to send messages to the students collecting preferences regarding times of extra classes, labs, and exams. This information is used to propose a set of times and VoteTool is used vote on these times. Without these tools, a large part of class and lab time would be used to resolve these issues.

Conclusions and Future Work In this paper, we have used the example of a hypothetical distributed course to describe a wide range of CSCW applications and concretely illustrate the benefits of using them in education. In our example, we considered only a two-site course. The importance of computer support for coordination increases as the number of sites increases. Moreover, in our scenario, we

maintained the human agents used in the original course. There is considerable interest in investigating how human instructors can be replaced by tutoring software [Rad92a, Ade92a, Ste92a]. Again, the role of computer support for shared software increases when software is used for tutoring students, since such support can allow students to collaboratively learn from the software. Thus the conclusion of this paper is that CSCW has the potential for supporting education by providing mechanisms for supporting classroom lecturing, lab work, assignment design, questions and answers, and student surveys and votes. Our work is an initial step towards exploring the idea of computer-supported education. The real challenge is to make all of these CSCW applications work together in a cost-effective manner and use them in a real course. This paper provides some of the motivation for undertaking such a project.

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Prof. Hermann Maurer for suggesting this topic and inviting a paper on it for the conference and to Ronnie Martin for proofreading the paper.

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