Asynchronous Collaboration

Spatial planning typically involves multiple stakeholders. To any specific planning problem, stakeholders often bring different levels of knowledge about the components of the problem and make assumptions, reflecting their individual experiences, that yield conflicting views about desirable planning outcomes. Consequently, stakeholders need to learn about the likely outcomes that result from their stated preferences; this learning can be supported through enhanced access to information, increased public participation in spatial decision-making and support for distributed collaboration amongst planners, stakeholders and the public. This paper presents a conceptual system framework for web-based GIS that supports public participation in collaborative planning. The framework combines an information area, a Multi-Criteria Spatial Decision Support System (MC-SDSS) and an argumentation map to support distributed and asynchronous collaboration in spatial planning. After analysing the novel aspects of this framework, the paper describes its implementation, as a proof of concept, in a system for Web-based Participatory Wind Energy Planning (WePWEP). Details are provided on the specific implementation of each of WePWEP's four tiers, including technical and structural aspects. Throughout the paper, particular emphasis is placed on the need to support user learning throughout the planning process.

We propose the peer object-group design pattern as a suitable architectural solution to structure and implement synchronous groupware applications. We discuss a reliable group-communication subsystem and a distributed objects model, implemented in Java, used to realize the approach.

The world globalization process, the increasing demand for communication and information technologies create a demand for collaborative applications. Aiming at supporting communication, information exchange and collaboration among users geographically distants, many CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) systems like audio and videoconference, shared editors, shared whiteboard and CVEs (Collaborative Virtual Environments) were developed. Collaborative Virtual Environments represent an important category of CSCW systems that use 3D shared spaces in order to support collaborative activities. We find also many systems that integrate collaborative applications to satisfy specific needs of users. We present in this article the agent-based architecture of RECOLLVE, a CVE which focuses on representing a very large set of collaboration activities in a virtual scene, including their social aspects. 1

This paper is an analysis of online discussions in an Open Source Software (OSS) design community, the Python project. Developers of Python are geographically distributed and work online asynchronously. The objective of our study is to understand and to model the dynamics of the OSS design process that takes place in mailing list exchanges. We develop a method to study distant and asynchronous collaborative design activity based on an analysis of quoting practices. We analyze and visualize three aspects of the online dynamics: social, thematic temporal, and design. We show that roles emerge during discussions according to the involvement and the position of the participants in the discussions and how they influence participation in the design discussions. In our analysis of the thematic temporal dynamics of discussion, we examine how themes of discussion emerge, diverge, and are refined over time. To understand the design dynamics, we perform a content analysis of messages exchanged between developers to reveal how the online discussions reflect the ''work flow'' of the project: it provides us with a picture of the collaborative design process in the OSS community. These combined results clarify how knowledge and artefacts are elaborated in this epistemic, exploration-oriented, OSS community. Finally, we outline the need to automate of our method to extend our results. The proposed automation could have implications for both researchers and participants in OSS communities.

Providing students in an asynchronous learning network (ALN) a rich learning environment is not easy, especially in terms of promoting higher cognitive functioning such as analysis and evaluation. The use of project-based, collaborative assignments has been demonstrated to foster greater depth of learning in traditional classroom settings, but this type of assignment is very difficult to plan, develop, and execute in an ALN. This paper presents a case study describing a systemsbased framework for designing, implementing, and evaluating project-based collaborative learning experiences to be delivered via an ALN. Included in the framework is an analysis of the benefits of both collaborative and project-based learning, an examination of the challenges to incorporating project-based collaborative learning activities, and an examination of specific procedures to address those challenges.

several universities around the world, initially from South Africa and the United States and later expanding to include participants from India, Mexico, Canada, and the West Indies, participated in an historic exploration of geographically distributed collaborative learning. The project focused on the Global Graduate Seminar on Globalization and the Information Society: Information, Communication, and Development. The underlying goal of the project was to better understand the sociotechnical infrastructure required to support innovative cross-national teaching and learning pedagogical models to build human capacity for a knowledge-intensive global economy. The purpose of this paper is to review the best practices and lessons learned from the ten years of delivering the Globalization Seminar in a geographically distributed learning environment. Data for the study include participant observation, narrative student evaluations, and limited post hoc surveys of student participants. Our findings focus on three areas to support the seminar: (1) technical infrastructure; (2) social processes and pedagogy; and (3) administrative and infrastructure.

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are a very popular form of entertainment. The high cost of developing CVEs has limited their use in small scale or experimental domains. The 3D graphics, network communications, and audio features of CVEs pose significant challenges for developers. This paper describes very high-level language support for 3D graphics that facilitate rapid development of experimental CVEs.

While traditional stage-based models of the design process assume it starts with a design problem definition that prescribes downstream activities, another approach has been emerging, that considers co-evolution of both the problem and solution representations. This paper proposes a so-called co-evolutionary model of the design process based on four activities. A design corpus is used to illustrate the content of this contribution and to validate the relevance of the co-evolutionary paradigm. This model is eventually questioned to support the use of design tools in better accordance with the issues exposed, i.e. dynamic and cognitive aspects of the design process, together with the nature of design problem.

The design of tools for creative activities affects the creative processes and output of users. In this paper we consider how an understanding of creative interaction can inform the design of support tools in a creative domain, and where creative needs cross domain boundaries. Using observations of musical composers we analyse the theoretical approaches to understanding creativity and their use to HCI. Cycles of ideation and evaluation are suggested as atomic elements of creative interactions, with the representation of ideas a central activity for individual and collaborating composers. A model of collaborative composition was developed, along with an analysis of the representational types used in the domain. This led to the design and evaluation of a prototype Sonic Sketchpad for musical idea representation.

Hosting virtual worlds on the Internet introduces many problems not inherent in private networks. These include security, reliability, speed and differing agendas of participants. The purpose of this chapter is to review the history and present status of Internet-based virtual environments, and to discuss a number of efforts designed to meet perceived future needs. 1 Internet Protocols 1.1 The basics This section sets the context for the rest of the chapter. It is by no means a thorough journey into the world of Internet protocols. Those wishing such a presentation are referred to Stevens (1994). Several conceptually simple properties make the Internet work. Its richness comes from building new protocols and paradigms on top of this well-conceived foundation. First, for a computer (host) to participate as one of the many nodes in the worldwide network known as the Internet, it must be assigned a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address (old form) is a 32-bit number, usually presented as a "dotted-decimal notation," which includes the decimal equivalents of the four bytes comprising the address, separated by periods. The great popularity of the World Wide Web has resulted in the need for a richer set of addresses. This is being met by a new standard (IPng) that extends addresses to 128 bits, represented by 8 sixteen-bit segments, separated by colons, rather than periods. IP addresses are assigned statically to hosts that constantly reside on the Internet, or dynamically, from a collection of locally available addresses, whenever a transient host joins the Internet through some server. Communication on the Internet occurs between two hosts, using their respective IP addresses. Long messages are broken up into shorter packets, source and destination addresses are appended, and the data is effectively and efficiently routed from source to destination. Basic IP communication is then extended with a very thin layer to create UDP (the User Datagram Protocol). The only thing that UDP adds is the notion of ports and some minimal error checking. Ports are the logical channels through which peer applications communicate. A port is represented by a 16-bit address, with low-numbered (wellknown) ports being reserved for standard kinds of interactions, e.g., file transfer (21), time-of-day (13), or web services (80). Packets associated with UDP communication include the port numbers of the sender and receiver, in addition to the IP addresses of these participants as required in any IP packet. UDP is employed for very simple kinds of interactions. For example, to inquire about the time of day, a user need only send a message (any data will do) to port 13 of a designated host. The sender must establish a local port through which this communication occurs. The recipient will then send a response back to the sender, using the port through which the sender started this interchange. The response is, of course, the time of day at the recipient's site. UDP is inherently unreliable. There is no acknowledgement of the receipt of a message, unless the protocol of the service requires a return message, e.g., as in a time service. Furthermore, messages, even when received, may not be in the order in which they were sent. This latter property is a direct consequence of the fact that IP routing can be dynamic, allowing the system to effectively manage load balancing and adjust for lost links in the net. The low overhead of UDP makes it desirable for cases where speed is paramount, and where some loss or reordering of data is acceptable. Examples of this are streaming audio or video, and a global clock. In fact, streaming audio or video

We have conducted a series of interdisciplinary studios that partner students in the School of Architecture with peers in the College of Computing Sciences, with two principal goals: to foster creativity in the development of information technology, and conversely, to support creativity through information technology. Our studio project focuses on ubiquitous social computing as a topic of interest to both communities that requires their collaboration to realize a physical implementation. There are administrative as well as cultural hurdles in conducting such a studio. To assess the impact of the pedagogical approach, we employed qualitative observations as well as quantitative survey data. Best results depend on achieving a degree of parity in studio experience across disciplines.

for their camaraderie. I wish to thank my parents, the late Adnan and Da'ad Jabi-may they rest in peace. They supported me and my brothers under very difficult circumstances and instilled in us the value of good education. I also thank my brothers Samer and Muhannad for their support and financial help. My eldest brother, Haytham, who passed away unexpectedly in 1995, was the one who encouraged me to apply for postgraduate programs in the United States and offered selfless help and guidance once I arrived. I owe much of who I am to him. Over the years my classmate and wife, Vassiliki Mangana, never gave up on me. Her patience, love and encouragement saw us through very difficult periods. I thank her for her unconditional love, honesty and steadfastness. Our two daughters, Maye and Sarah, are the real reason I never gave up on finishing this dissertation. I thank God for blessing us with them. v TABLE OF CONTENTS

We describe the design and deployment of Many Eyes, a public web site where users may upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on discussions. The goal of the site is to support collaboration around visualizations at a large scale by fostering a social style of data analysis in which visualizations not only serve as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a medium to spur discussion among users. To support this goal, the site includes novel mechanisms for end-user creation of visualizations and asynchronous collaboration around those visualizations. In addition to describing these technologies, we provide a preliminary report on the activity of our users.

This article describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us , a Web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

The popularity of distributed learning and the continued growth in the number of colleges and universities offering courses delivered entirely via asynchronous learning networks (ALN) are unquestioned. There is little agreement on what constitutes the online environment. The ALN environment is quite immature and many of its components have evolved ad hoc in the form of attempts to mirror the traditional, face-to-face setting. The problems associated with the lack of analysis, planning, and design in developing the infrastructure for an ALN are evident in the tools to support student-to-student communication in collaborative learning activities. This study addresses this rather poorly directed developmental process by answering the following research questions: 1) What criteria are applicable for a communication system to support asynchronous collaborative? 2) How can those criteria be developed and validated? 3) How can those criteria be met in a product? 4) How can that product be evaluated?

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This paper examines the progressive and pragmatic use of computers and CAAD systems in the architectural practice. With the aid of three scenarios, this paper will illustrate gainful implementation of computer aided project planning in architecture. The first scenario describes an actual situation of implementation and describes conceptual abortive developments in office organization as well as in software technology. Scenario two outlines the essential features of an integrated building design system and the efforts involved in its implementation in the architectural practice. It clearly defines preconditions for implementation and focuses on feasible concepts for the integration of different database management systems. A glance at paradigms of conceptual work currently under development will be taken. The third scenario deals with the structure and integration of innovative concepts and the responsibility the architect will bear with regard to necessary alterations in office and workgroup organization. A future-oriented building design system will be described that distinguishes itself from existing programs because of its modular, net-based structure. With reference to today's situation in architectural offices and according to realizable improvements, this article will demonstrate courses for future IT-support on the basis of an ongoing research project. The presented project is part of the special research area 524 "Materials and Constructions for the Revitalization of Existing Buildings" which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. It deals with the integration of various parties that are involved in the revitalization process of existing buildings as well as with the provision of adequate information within the planning process resting upon the survey of existing building substance. Additional concepts that might change the way an architect's work is organized will also be presented. "Case-based-reasoning" methods will make informal knowledge available, leading to a digital memory of preservable solutions.

Architectural design practice is a collective work of different levels of expertise. Collaborative design relies on seamless meshing of specialists with different levels of expertise, skills and views. Research oncollaborative design suggests various methodologies for supporting synchronous or asynchronous communicative practices of designers in reviewing and analyzing design decisions at different stages of thedesign process. However, they do not address the provision of an action platform that would enable collaborative group decision making in architectural design. There are four requirements for this platform:1) sharing of design decisions among designers, 2) sharing of design rationale among designers, 3) detecting conflicts among design decisions, and 4) sharing of designers responses to design decisions. Thispaper presents a conceptual model of an asynchronous collaborative design environment that implements methodologies for addressing these requirements.

Architectural design practice is a collective work of different levels of expertise. Collaborative design relies on seamless meshing of specialists with different levels of expertise, skills and views. Research oncollaborative design suggests various methodologies for supporting synchronous or asynchronous communicative practices of designers in reviewing and analyzing design decisions at different stages of thedesign process. However, they do not address the provision of an action platform that would enable collaborative group decision making in architectural design. There are four requirements for this platform:1) sharing of design decisions among designers, 2) sharing of design rationale among designers, 3) detecting conflicts among design decisions, and 4) sharing of designers responses to design decisions. Thispaper presents a conceptual model of an asynchronous collaborative design environment that implements methodologies for addressing these requirements.

This article focuses on the working conditions-including everything from the terms of employment to the rehearsal situation-of freelance dancers and of dancers within companies. 1 My experience both as a freelance dancer and as a rehearsal director for ballet (repertoire) companies-with more stable institutional structures and dancers on longer contracts-will serve as a point of departure. I hope to uncover some procedures and methods in these different regimes and discuss how they might bear upon the future for dance as an arts field.

To allow mobile users to continue their work while disconnected, mobile systems usually rely on optimistic replication techniques. In mobile database systems, mobile units cache subsets of the database state and allow disconnected users to perform transactions concurrently. These transactions are later integrated in the master database state. As concurrently performed transactions may conflict, it is usually impossible to determine the result of an update in the mobile unit. Moreover, this model differs from the traditional client/server model due to the fundamental fact that the user will usually not be connected to the system when the results of his transactions are finally determined-therefore, he can not immediately perform adequate alternative actions. In this paper we describe a transaction management system that takes into consideration the above-mentioned characteristics. Transactions are specified as mobile transactional programs, which allows the precise definition of operation semantics and the definition of alternative actions. Support for active user notification is also provided in the system. Finally, the system relies on a reservation mechanism to be able to guarantee the results of transactions in the mobile units.

Awareness of the activities of other users and also document evolution is an important part of collaborative authoring. We introduce the concept of an editing profile that can be used to maintain and visualise measures of the changes made across a document by different users in both synchronous and asynchronous collaborative editing. It provides a simple means of making users aware of "hot areas" and also who is or has been active in various parts of the document, as well as a quick access point into parts of the document that have been changed. The profile can be adapted to display the most relevant information based on both user preference and situation.

From 1999-2008 several universities around the world, initially from South Africa and the United States and later expanding to include participants from India, Mexico, Canada, and the West Indies, participated in an historic exploration of geographically distributed collaborative learning. The project focused on the Global Graduate Seminar on Globalization and the Information Society: Information, Communication, and Development. The underlying goal of the project was to better understand the sociotechnical infrastructure required to support innovative cross-national teaching and learning pedagogical models to build human capacity for a knowledge-intensive global economy. The purpose of this paper is to review the best practices and lessons learned from the ten years of delivering the Globalization Seminar in a geographically distributed learning environment. Data for the study include participant observation, narrative student evaluations, and limited post hoc surveys of student participants. Our findings focus on three areas to support the seminar: (1) technical infrastructure; (2) social processes and pedagogy; and (3) administrative and infrastructure.

Future advances in networking and storage will enable a wide spectrum of computer mediated structllred collahmrations among individuals, In this paper, wc present a model that can capture diverse types of structured collaborations. The model combines both efficiency and power via a hierarchy of three abstractions, at the lowest Ievcl of which arc .rtwmns for media communication modldated hy access rights of participants within collaborations. The higher two levels of abstractions are ses.slorrs, which represent collections of semantically related nuxtla streams, and coq~erenc<.r, which represent temporally related sequences of sessions. I Jsin.g these abstractions, the model supports unification of both synchronous and asynchronous collaborations, sophisticated

Future advances in networking and storage will enable a wide spectrum of computer mediated structllred collahmrations among individuals, In this paper, wc present a model that can capture diverse types of structured collaborations. The model combines both efficiency and power via a hierarchy of three abstractions, at the lowest Ievcl of which arc .rtwmns for media communication modldated hy access rights of participants within collaborations. The higher two levels of abstractions are ses.slorrs, which represent collections of semantically related nuxtla streams, and coq~erenc<.r, which represent temporally related sequences of sessions. I Jsin.g these abstractions, the model supports unification of both synchronous and asynchronous collaborations, sophisticated

An exploratory study of students' engagement in online learning and knowledge building is presented in this paper. Learning in an online community, composed of students (pre-service teachers) and experts (experienced in-service schoolteachers and academics), is the study's primary focus. Students' interaction and knowledge discourse structures, arising from individual readings of academic papers and asynchronous collaboration with peers and experts, are investigated using social network and content analysis techniques. Additionally, several new measures for exploring structural-qualitative aspects of knowledge discourse are introduced. Analysis revealed several important trends. First, students' interaction was more intensive in forums where experienced teachers participated, rather than students only. Second, students' individual discourse structures in their postings were quite deep, knowledge-focussed and elaborated; while students' replies were short, usually focussed on specific idea and contained a substantial amount of non-cognitive information. Overall, it is argued that students were engaged with the individual and collaborative knowledge building in the online learning community. Practical implications of the study results for development of courses are discussed.

SMILE, a learning environment for collaboration and design, is based on our experience with synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools in the classroom and sound principles of software and interface design. SMILE provides a more holistic approach to supporting student reasoning and activities rather than the more reductionist tool-based approach we had started with. This more holistic approach focuses on the cognitive processes involved in doing design and learning from that experience, rather than focusing on activities that students are carrying out. This new emphasis has also allowed us to identify ways of integrating scaffolding for metacognitive and reflective reasoning that were not naturally integratable into the previous framework.

Over the past 13 years, the 'World16'-group has collaborated face-to-face on various challenges that architectural design faces within VR, architecture, urban design, and its delivery to the professional industries. The focus of the collaboration is to foster pathways of academic research and developments to industries and professions. In

This paper introduces a framework for awareness support in groupware systems. Awareness gathers the knowledge on group, its activities and its overall status. Awareness support is an important feature for groupware systems. It provides a context for individuals contributions, improving those contributions and avoiding contradictory interactions among group's members. Despite its importance, awareness support is not systematic and developers must build it from scratch for each new application. The framework presented here addresses this issue. This framework, called Big Watch (BW), intends to support groupware implementers to easily past event awareness. It has been designed to develop new groupware applications and to improve existing ones. This paper presents the features and the structure of BW, and describes two applications that use it.

Globalization has had a huge impact on the organization of product development activity within the Alstom hydro power company. Today, it is common to design products in Europe, make them in southeast Asia and sell them in Africa. In this context, engineers working on the same project are separated by long distances. These new types of teams are called "distributed teams". By definition, a distributed or Geographically Dispersed Team (GDT's) "is a team whose members are separated by distance and time zones, but linked together by some form of electronic technology with limited or no physical interaction… (Sessa V., Hansen MC. et al. 2004)... These distributed teams have to be able to accomplish two goals: collaborate and share knowledge. • Collaborate, because since globalization, product development activity has been completely spread out over the globe. Central teams are dedicated to creating rules that local teams are supposed to follow. However, when designing a special machine, this division of work is not so obvious. Designers, at the local level, have to be able to understand the rules to adapt them to an ongoing project. Collaboration practices between central and local actors have to be set up. • Share knowledge, because during the past decade, the manufacturing workforce has mostly been located in Asia. Manufacturing knowledge is developing on this side of

Employers find that students are graduating from engineering programs without the necessary competence and know-how to be successful in industry, often lacking sufficient communication and collaboration skills imperative for developing new products. Modern product development, from development and design through to production, planning, and marketing is moving increasingly to the digital domain as a result of technological progress and increasing pressure to deliver more complex and more customized products in less time at the lowest cost. The engineers of tomorrow must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively and efficiently using technologies and software, such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) or Engineering (CAE), Product Data Management (PDM) or Enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. In an effort to ensure that graduating students can successfully apply what they have learned in their engineering lectures to real-world engineering problems, the Lower Saxony Institutes of Technology (NTH) has sponsored a project "Computer-aided Product Development" that involves students in distributed development design projects that mirror what they will come across in industry. Engineering students from the Leibniz University of Hannover (Institut für Produktentwicklung und Gerätebau), the Technical University of Clausthal (Institut für Maschinenwesen), and the Technical University of Braunschweig (Institut für Konstruktionstechnik) work together on semester-long projects that require them to use engineering tools that are not often taught in typical engineering classes but crucial for product development in industry, exposing current shortcomings in the engineering curriculum. The project has been run twice, once with "closed" student groups at each site, each group responsible for a sub-assembly and communicating with students at other locations with regard to sub-assembly interfaces, and a second time with students from multiple locations making up "mixed" teams. Competence weaknesses have been identified, particularly in using PDM systems, and measures to improve the curriculum long term are being integrated into lectures. This paper will provide an analysis of the first projects as well as prospects for improving engineering education through distributed development projects.

Employers find that students are graduating from engineering programs without the necessary competence and know-how to be successful in industry, often lacking sufficient communication and collaboration skills imperative for developing new products. Modern product development, from development and design through to production, planning, and marketing is moving increasingly to the digital domain as a result of technological progress and increasing pressure to deliver more complex and more customized products in less time at the lowest cost. The engineers of tomorrow must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively and efficiently using technologies and software, such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) or Engineering (CAE), Product Data Management (PDM) or Enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. In an effort to ensure that graduating students can successfully apply what they have learned in their engineering lectures to real-world engineering problems, the Lower Saxony Institutes...

We are leveraging Web‐based technology to create an online community for Life Science research. Our prototype community for cardiovascular research with live bats, called eBat, consists of local researchers as well as remote collaborators. The eBat project offers scientists and students a remote‐controlled microscope for conducting experiments, a message board and a chat system for scheduled as well as spontaneous communication, and an online peer‐reviewed manuscript repository. In this paper, we report our observations of the use of the eBat infrastructure by local researchers over a period of six months. Resident researchers quickly adopted the eBat infrastructure. eBat technology has now become an indispensable part of the local research group and is used extensively for co‐ordination, communication, and awareness. eBat complements face‐to‐face interactions well and has resulted in improved communication amongst lab members. We are currently exploring the extension of eBat techno...

SMILE, a learning environment for collaboration and design, is based on our experience with synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools in the classroom and sound principles of software and interface design. SMILE provides a more holistic approach to supporting student reasoning and activities rather than the more reductionist tool-based approach we had started with. This more holistic approach focuses on the cognitive processes involved in doing design and learning from that experience, rather than focusing on activities that students are carrying out. This new emphasis has also allowed us to identify ways of integrating scaffolding for metacognitive and reflective reasoning that were not naturally integratable into the previous framework.

In this paper, we present a web-based educational setting, referred to as SCALE (Supporting Collaboration and Adaptation in a Learning Environment), which aims to serve leaning and assessment. SCALE enables learners to (i) work on individual and collaborative activities proposed by the environment with respect to learners' knowledge level, (ii) participate actively in the assessment process in the context of self-, peer-or collaborativeassessment activities, (iii) work with educational environments, embedded or integrated in SCALE, that facilitate the elaboration of the activities and stimulate learners' active involvement, (iv) use tools that support the synchronous and asynchronous collaboration/communication and promote learners' interaction and reflection, and (v) have access to feedback components tailored to their own preferences. Also, learners have control on the navigation route through the provided activities and feedback components, personalizing in this way the learning process. The results revealed from the formative evaluation of the environment are positive and encouraging regarding the usefulness of the supported capabilities and tools.

In this paper we present the results of a comprehensive literature survey on the development of collaborative design. We reviewed 324 papers on collaborative design, taken from various sources (conferences, journals, and PhD-theses). We grouped the papers based on common themes, and in that way derived a classification of themes through the last 25 years (1983-2008). Each category is described, its development, and key publications are identified.

Building activity in Germany is moving increasingly toward combined newbuild and renovation projects. Essential for effective computer-aided planning within an existing context is not only the use of on-site computer-aided measurement tools but also an integrative cooperation between the different disciplines involved via an information and communication system. Interdisciplinary cooperation needs to be tailored to the integrative aspects in renovation and revitalisation work. Economic factors determine the viability of an architectural project, and reliable costing information is vital. Existing IT-approaches to this problem are not yet sufficiently exploited. In ongoing research at our university (collaborative research center "Materials and Structure in the Revitalisation of Buildings") methods and techniques of revitalisation are being investigated. A special branch of the collaborative research center is investigating possibilities of computer-aided building measurement and communication platforms for professional disciplines (www.uni-weimar.de/sfb). The aim is to develop a general approach to the revitalisation of buildings. This paper discusses possible application areas of AR/VR techniques in the revitalisation of buildings from the point of view of the user and are based on the real project "Cooling factory Gera". Based on the necessities of revitalisation projects, technical requirements are developed. The project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG).

Successful software development requires effective coordination among developers. In this paper, we propose Ensemble, an approach and a set of tools that aim to help developers better coordinate their work. Built on IBM Rational Team Concert, Ensemble helps developers select the right people to collaborate with, the right times to collaborate with them, and to stay coordinated with them over time.

This study demonstrates an overview of the state of teaching Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) in the Department of Architecture, Misr Academy for Engineering and Technology (MET). This course is basically designed to enable students to explore new ways of design using Computer Aided Architectural Design software. In hypothetical valuation analysis, the study examines the necessity of combining ICT with architectural courses' teaching in a collaborative design manner. In this sense, it tackles an experimental multidisciplinary approach to develop CAAD courses. It focuses on the innovation of the course by the introduction of ICT both in the contents of the course and as a means of education. To attain its goals stated above, the paper discusses the differences between teaching CAAD by using standard software and teaching the principles of CAAD. It distinguishes four-interdisciplinary system of application for collaborative design in education: social systems, professional systems, educational systems, and innovative systems. This exploration is seldom backed up from a design methodological viewpoint. The conclusion shows how the developed CAAD course, when taught in combination with ICT and collaborative design approaches may result in favorable learning outcomes.

In Educational literature, Discovery L earning appears as an approach in which the learner builds up his/her own knowledge by performing experiments within a domain and inferring/increasing rules as a result. Such a constructivist approach has been largely exploited in the design of computational artifacts with learning purposes in what is today known as Discovery Learning Environments (DLE&#39;s). In this paper we are concerned with the design and usage of particular DLE&#39;s, within which learning events occur as a consequence of contradiction detection and overcoming, during human/machine cooperative work. We firstly introduce a model of an agent capable of handling such an approach of learning, by highlighting the exchanges that the agent should promote with a human learner. The model lies on the basis of the scientific rationale, particularly the empirical approach guided by the theory-experiment confrontation. We shall then reinforce the interest of the model for the design o...

Abstract. In the last decade the design of collaborative discovery learning environments (CDLE&#x27;s) has received increasing attention. In this paper, we are concerned with the design of CDLE&#x27;s in which theory formation arises as a synergetic combination of both inductive and hypothetical-deductive approaches. The “moving engine” allowing a theory to evolve is the notion of contradiction: learning is supposed to occur as a side effect of contradiction detection and overcoming during theory formation by peers. By playing different roles, ...

Abstract. In the last decade, the design of collaborative discovery learning environments (CDLE&#x27;s) has received increasing attention. Such a design perspective brings up to the educational context the possibility of exploiting the so-called Model-Based Reasoning approach, by providing to learners the opportunity of collaborating while building models to represent observations. In this paper, we are concerned with the design of CDLE&#x27;s in which building models instantiates as a theory formation process. Such a process is provided as ...