Laboratory Experiments in CSCL Activities

Abstract

Several groupware tools have been implemented within Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) research groups in order to test ideas and concepts currently being studied. It is very important to perform pilot-evaluations with these systems. The CSCW Lab is an environment for evaluating groupware within research groups. Four dimensions in assessing groupware were identified: context, collaboration, usability, and cultural impacts. In this chapter, the authors present a proposal to detail the collaboration level, specifically for CSCL domain applications. Understanding and analyzing the collaborative learning process requires a fine-grained sequential analysis of the group interaction in the context of learning goals. Several researchers in the area of cooperative work take as success criterion the quality of the group outcome. Nevertheless, recent findings are giving more importance to the quality of the “cooperation process” itself. The proposed model includes a set of guidelines to evaluate the usage of CSCL tools within a collaboration process defined along with the learning objectives. The authors have defined an experiment with a software tool instrumented to gather information that allowed them to verify the presence of a set of cooperation indicators, which in turn helped to determine the quality of the work process.