Colab: A Platform Design for Collaborative Learning in Virtual Laboratories

Abstract

Nowadays collaborative educational platforms are producing an important impact in our society showing this influence in a huge number of researching projects. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has gained its prominence in the building of collaborative environments for educational purpose providing new ways of producing learning. So, in order to obtain an educational system which fits with the educational purposes, it is necessary to join pedagogical and technical efforts. More concretely our developments are focused on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems, in which the ground of the knowledge building is the user collaboration. In this paper we are going to deal with the design and implementation of a platform for supporting collaborative learning using tools such as whiteboard, chat, posting tools, modeling experiments tools and other tools which allows view the results from the experiments. Regarding the design of this platform it is has been used J2EE technologies for supporting the asynchronous communication and Elvin notification server like to support the synchronous communication. In this paper it will be also described how it has been developed the architecture, showing as well how the tools can exchange events delivered in the communication channel. Finally, we will show an example of collaboration inside this system, and it will be explained how the user can move in this platform as well as how users can coordinate the use of some resources.

Evaluating an Intelligent Collaborative Learning Environment for Uml

“…Many effective Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems have been developed during the last decade, such as COLER (Constantino-Gonzaléz and Suthers, 2000), LECS (Rosatelli and Self, 2004), COLLECT-UML (Baghaei and Mitrovic, 2005), DEGREE (Barros and Verdejo, 2000), HABIPRO (Vizcaíno, Contreras, Favela and Prieto, 2000), CoLeMo (Chen, Pedersen and Pettersen, 2006), FLE3 (Muukkonen, Hakkarainen andLakkala, 1999), CoLab (Martínez Carreras, Gómez-Skarmeta, Martínez Graciá andMora Gónzalez, 2004), CSCL Environment for "Six Thinking Hats" Discussion (Tamura and Furukawa, 2008), I-MINDS (Khandaker, Soh, and Jiang, (2006), CoPAS (Jondahl and Mørch, (2002), CURE (Lukosch., Hellweg and Rasel, 2006), PENCACOLAS (Blasco, Barrio, Dimitriadis, Osuna, González., Verdú and Terán, 1999), CoWeb (Rick and Guzdial, 2006) and AquaMOOSE 3D (Edwards, Elliott and Bruckman, 2001). The main purpose of these systems is to allow remote users to collaborate with each other while working in the same environment at the same time.…”

Technology Enhanced Learning

“…CSUL is advocated by pedagogical theories such as on-demand learning, hands-on or minds-on learning, and authentic learning [8,9,10,11]. CSUL system provides learners on-demand information such as advices from teachers or experts at the spot at the precise moment they want to know something.…”

Towards Interoperability in Collaborative Environments

“…One of them is the Discovery Learning [1] which is devoted to the learning through the experimentation. Framework and tools like Co-Lab [2], CoolModes [3], WISE[4] and SimQuest [5] provides different ways to allow users to perform experimentation. Some of them provide a big set of simulations that can be useful for others tools.…”